You are looking at an album pasted with fragments, mostly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English title pages. It was assembled by John Bagford in the early eighteenth century and forms one among hundreds of similar volumes in which he collected items related to the history of text technologies. Most are now at the British Library; this is MS Harley 5927.
In 1974, using index cards that became punched cards fed into an IBM System/360 Model 67 computer, Melvin Wolf published a catalogue of the fragments in Bagford’s volumes, including this one. He focused especially on the title pages that Bagford collected. We the editors of this website — Penny Bee, Lauren Kim, and Whitney Trettien — have digitized and carefully updated Wolf’s work. Using electronic databases, we were able to identify hundreds of further title pages. You can view or download that dataset.
Below is a simple visualization of that data, in relation to the material placement of fragments in Bagford's album. To explore, use the dropdown menus or date slider. Doing so will highlight, in the corresponding color, the pages pasted with those fragments printed, published, or written by that person or on that date. Clicking on the highlighted page will open a larger facsimile with attendant metadata in a separate Omeka archive.
