Edward Potten

 

Ed Potten has published widely on book and library history, with a particular focus on the fifteenth century. He was formerly Keeper of Printed Books at the John Rylands Library and Head of Rare Books, Joint Head of Special Collections and Associate Director, Special Collections and External Relations at Cambridge University Library. Current research projects include York Minster’s incunabula collections, the library of the medic and alchemist William Butler (1535-1618), and the interaction between printers of single-leaf wood- and metalcuts, blockbooks, and incunabula, 1440-1470. He is a member of the Council of The Bibliographical Society, and is Chair of its Libraries at Risk sub-committee. 

 

 

 

Anthony Hobson, Italian Renaissance book bindings: Their makers and owners (Edited by Ed Potten), 2021 – forthcoming

 

Emprynted in thys manere (Edited by Ed Potten and Emily Dourish), Cambridge: 2014

 

 

‘A series of uncertainties: Dating the Buxheim Saint Christopher’, in Provenances and Producers: Copy-Specific Features of Incunabula (edited by John Goldfinch, SatokoTokunaga and Takako Kato, (Brill, forthcoming in 2021)

‘‘Knowledge, like a diamond polished, more illustriously shines’: The library of Mary Booth of Dunham Massey (1704-1772), The Library, (forthcoming, 2021)

‘A mendicant pharmacopeia: Robert Edward Hart’s copy of the 1485 Gart der Gesundheit’, in ‘Association, provenance and the book’, Poetica, volumes 89 and 90 (edited by Ed Potten and Toshiyuki Takamiya) – Autumn 2018

 

‘Shelf indulgence: The fashion for literary artifice’, in The Literary Review, April 2018, pp. 30-31.

 

‘”The library whereof the librarian is deceit’: Decoration and double meaning at Mount Stewart House’ in National Trust Historic Houses & Collections (London: National Trust, published in association with Apollo Magazine, 2017)

 

‘The rest of the iceberg: Reassessing private book ownership in the nineteenth century’ in Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society volume 15(3) - volume for 2014, published 2015

 

‘Beyond bibliophilia: Contextualizing private libraries in the nineteenth century’, in Library & Information History, Vol. 31 No. 2, May 2015, 73–94

 

'The indulgence is larger than any I ever saw': A Netherlandish Crucifixion of c. 1480, in Emprynted in thys manere (Edited by Ed Potten and Emily Dourish) Cambridge: 2014

 

‘Toms, William Henry (c.1701-1765)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2014.

 

White Knights Library: Catalogue of that distinguished and celebrated library which will be sold by auction, CUP reprint of the original 1819 auction catalogue, with a new introduction by Ed Potten (2014).

 

 

Ed Potten and Toshiyuki Takamiya (eds.) Poetica – Association and Provenance: A Volume of Essays in Memory of Eric Stanley, volumes 89 and 90, Autumn 2018

 

Ed Potten and Satoko Tokunaga (eds.) Incunabula on the Move: The production, Circulation and Collection of Early Printed Books, special issue of Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society volume 15(1) - volume for 2012, published 2014, which included ‘The current state and future direction of incunable studies’ pp. 1-7 (Potten & Tokunaga)

 

 

‘‘Knowledge, like a diamond polished, more illustriously shines’: The library of Mary Booth of Dunham Massey (1704-1772)’, The Institute of English Studies History of Libraries Seminar, 4 February, 2020.

 

 ‘Dispersal and development: The building blocks of the Dorchester Library’, Seventeenth-Century Libraries: Problems & Perspectives, UCL, 6-8 June, 2019. [With Katie Birkwood]

 

‘William Young Ottley and the birth of watermark studies in Britain’ , Paper-stuff: Materiality, Technology and Invention, Cambridge University, 10-11 September 2018. [with Orietta da Rold]

 

‘A great number of usefull books’: Towards a union catalogue of seventeenth-century private libraries, Society of Renaissance Studies conference, Sheffield University, 5 July, 2018.

 

‘The history of the library in the North of England and the circulation of knowledge, 1650-1730’, Reconstructing Libraries, Queen Mary University, 20 April, 2018.