"Legally Binding" exhibition goes online
The Rare Book Collection’s current exhibition, “Legally Binding: Fine and Historic Bindings from the Yale Law Library,” can now be viewed online in our Flickr site, in the Legally Binding album.
The album contains images of all 34 volumes displayed in the exhibition, plus three more that were cut from the physical exhibition for lack of space. The Flickr captions contain the text from the exhibition labels, as well as links to the catalog records for each book. For some of the books, the Flickr album contains images of both front and back covers, which were impossible to display in the exhibit cases.
This is an opportunity to point out two excellent online databases of historical bindings that include items from our Rare Book Collection.
- The British Armorial Bindings database is hosted by the University of Toronto, Libraries, co-sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of London, and edited by Philip Oldfield of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. It includes armorial stamps from thirteen of our rare books. To see them, click the Sources tab and select Libraries. Our books are listed in the “L” section under “Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale.”
- Bookbindings on Incunables: The Scott Husby Database at Princeton University Library contains records of over 27,000 incunables (books printed before 1501) in over forty North American research libraries. For those volumes that retain their early bindings, the database describes the bindings and provides photos or rubbings of them. Our collection is represented by records for 104 of our incunables, 39 of them with early bindings. You can locate them from the Search page by entering “YU(L)L” in the All Fields search box.
“Legally Binding: Fine and Historic Bindings from the Yale Law Library” is on display through May 24 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery on Level L2 of the Yale Law School.
In closing, I and my co-curator, Michael Laird of Michael Laird Rare Books, wish to thank the following individuals for their contributions to the exhibition.
- William E. Butler, Dickinson School of Law, Pennsylvania State University
- Scott Husby, Princeton University Library (retired)
- Shana Jackson, Lillian Goldman Law Library
- Ryan Martins, Yale Law School
- Pamela Rentz, Lillian Goldman Law Library
- Yuksel Serindag, Lillian Goldman Law Library
- Eric White, Princeton University Library
- Benjamin Yousey-Hindes
– MIKE WIDENER, Rare Book Librarian
