Hans Sloane's Library Collection and the Production of Knowledge - Hardcover

Wickenden, Alice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009497391 ISBN 13: 9781009497398

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2025

Synopsis

On his death in 1753, Hans Sloane's collection of books and manuscripts was estimated at 50,000 volumes, and, combined with his collected objects, would become the founding core of the British Library and British Museum. Delving into the particular history of this remarkable collection, Alice Wickenden asks wide-reaching questions about archival practices and knowledge production, showing how books function both as and alongside objects. Hers is the first book to bring the theoretical questions and methodologies arising from material culture and book history alongside a full-length study of the founding book collection of the British Library. Each carefully-selected case study raises questions that, though seemingly playful, strike at the heart of past and present practices of collecting and knowledge production: how might books of dried plants be books? Is something a book if nobody can read it? Why collect duplicates? And how, after all, do we actually define a library?

About this title

About the Author

Alice Wickenden is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge working on a project called 'The Material and Ethical Afterlives of Named Collections'. She previously worked at the British Library on an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009497391
• ISBN 13: 9781009497398
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264