Intellectual Heritage for Everyone
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Intellectual Heritage for Everyone Our acquisitions 2015–2019 We build, curate and preserve the UK’s national collection of published, written and digital content Living Knowledge: the British Library 2015 – 2023 Between April 2015 and March 2019 each of which had a market price Expert advice to Arts Council the British Library made around of £10,000 or above. England on the export of 2,000 heritage acquisitions. Many 80 books, manuscripts, maps of the items acquired cost less than Heritage items acquired during major heritage items a hundred pounds; others are of 2015–2019 included modern literary, and music major national importance with a historical and musical archives, and collections were During 2015–2019 British Library experts price to match their significance. medieval manuscripts, maps, safeguarded for the nation provided advice to the Department for Richly diverse in their origins and stamps, discs and early printed Digital, Culture Media & Sport (DCMS) focus, each of them enhances and books including incunabula. Many via Arts Council England (ACE) on the supplements the reflection of our are already available for research in export of heritage items to be sold past and current cultural life, which the Library’s Reading Rooms and overseas. Where an export licence is the Library’s collections offer to remotely, placed on public display recommended, a surrogate copy may be the nation and audiences around and available in digital form via £10.49m requested for the collections, and these the world. the British Library’s Digitised are added to the British Library’s holdings Manuscripts pages at bl.uk/ market value of assets and made available for research. Following our strategy Living manuscripts/ or via Explore the added to the British In 2018/2019, for example: Knowledge: the British Library British Library at explore.bl.uk/. Library’s collections 2015–2023, these acquisitions add value for researchers and The total Grant in Aid spent on 867 the number of permanent export engage a wide public audience major heritage items between 2015 licence applications advised upon with stimulating insights into the and 2019 was £5.54m. However, by British Library experts culture of the nation and its role in the acquisitions attracted £4.95m the world. We acquire individual in external support from generous £2.01 £28,221,631 items and collections after careful private donors, from the National the total of external total value of items and archives assessment of their importance Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art advised upon and their price, in many cases after Fund, Friends of the National support generated for tough negotiations by the Library’s Libraries, Friends of the British every £2.25 invested 12 expert curators. Library (Collections Trust) and the number of archives and items others, together with the Acceptance of which digital and print copies The following pages feature in Lieu (AiL) scheme and the Cultural were received a selection of our significant Gifts Scheme (CGS) administered by acquisitions, major national assets, Arts Council England. The Edward Elgar Archive and autograph English translation of Erasmus’s sketches relating to Pomp and Circumstance Enchiridion militis Christiani, 1523 Edward Elgar was the most important The archive includes 220 music In 2015/2016 the Library acquired The manuscript was placed under a British composer of the early 20th manuscripts, ranging from a few the only known manuscript of a temporary Export Stop and was acquired century, and one of the first from that complete works to many individual contemporary English translation of by the Library for £242,500 with the period to be appreciated worldwide. The sketch leaves, and around 11,000 letters the Enchiridion militis Christiani, or help of funding from the National acquisition of the first of his manuscripts to and from the composer, as well as ‘handbook of the Christian soldier’, by Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF). through his daughter in the 1950s was digital images of the material. There are the great humanist scholar and reformer one of the major foundations of the also around 200 annotated proofs and Desiderius Erasmus. The Enchiridion, The manuscript (now Add MS 89149) Library’s unrivalled collection of printed scores, demonstrating Elgar’s a compendium of humanistic piety, can be viewed online at manuscripts by major British composers. changes to compositions during the was Erasmus’s most popular work and bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay. The Library’s Elgar holdings now publication process, as well as evoked widespread interest in 16th- aspx?ref=Add_MS_89149. comprise the largest collection of performance annotations and decisions century Europe. Between 1501, when Elgar primary sources anywhere, about cuts made by the composer for Erasmus wrote the Enchiridion, and having significantly increased the the recordings he supervised. Other 1536, when he died, the original Latin amount of material over recent years. papers illuminate Elgar’s biography and text appeared in more than fifty printed In 2016/2017 the Library purchased range from his own writings, diaries and editions. Between 1533 and 1545 there nine folios of autograph sketches descriptions of pieces through to official were thirteen editions printed in English, relating to a sixth Pomp and documents and dealings with publishers. the first being published by Wynkyn de Circumstance March by Elgar at the This part of the collection also includes Worde for John Bydell. cost of £38,000. In 2018/2019 the works by Alice Elgar, the wife of the major donation of the Edward Elgar composer and also an author and poet The manuscript is dated to 1523, pre- Archive from the Elgar Foundation in her own right. dating the first printed edition of the to the Library raised the profile of its text by ten years, and is also the earliest Elgar collection even further. The archive was the subject of a public known translation into English of any of concert and study day held at the Erasmus’s works. It has been suggested Library in November 2019. that the manuscript may represent a ‘lost’ translation of the Enchiridion by the religious reformer William Tyndale (d.1536). Two 16th-century accounts testify that Tyndale translated Erasmus’s Enchiridion into English in the early 1520s. To date, there has been no secure evidence that it survived and scholars have long debated whether the 1533 printed edition was of Tyndale’s translation. A preliminary comparison of the text of the manuscript with those of ten different 16th-century printed editions reveals that the manuscript preserves a hitherto unknown English translation of the Enchiridion. The Mostyn Psalter The Glagolitic Breviary The Mostyn Psalter is a late 13th- The Mostyn Psalter-Hours belongs to a The Library holds the largest collection This volume was acquired at auction century manuscript Psalter-Hours group of highly significant manuscripts of incunabula editions (books printed in 2018/2019 for £101,400 with the produced in London and is a significant produced in the last quarter of the with moveable type before 1501) in support of the Friends of the British addition to the largest collection of 13th century in the ambit of Edward I’s the world and regularly adds to it. This Library (Collections Trust) and funding medieval English Psalters in the world. court (r. 1272–1307). The manuscript’s Glagolitic Breviary was acquired as an from the Library’s Grant in Aid budget. The text includes a calendar, decorated original patron is unknown, but its high example of a rare printing type cut with twenty small miniatures of the quality illumination and fine script specifically for this work and hitherto The Breviarium Romanum glagoliticum labours of the months, and a Psalter indicate that it was made for an unrepresented in the Library’s collections. has been catalogued and is now with eight large historiated initials. important individual. This first owner IA.21702. Canticles, a Litany, Collects and Hours may have been a bishop, as an image This Breviarium Romanum glagoliticum of the Virgin with suffrages to saints of a bishop appears in the illustration was printed in Venice in 1493 and is the and the Office of the Dead follow. for Psalm 101, where a donor portrait third incunabulum printed in Glagolitic The manuscript remains largely might be expected. type for the Croatian community in Italy. uncropped and preserves its original, It is the first production of Blaž Baromi´c, impressive size. The manuscript was acquired by the who established the first printing press in Library by private sale and after a major Croatia in 1494. Baromi´c was a priest, a fundraising campaign in 2017/2018 canon, a jurist and the scribe of at least for £775,000. Funding came from the one Glagolitic Breviary in 1460. He may Friends of the National Libraries, the have been sent to Venice specifically to Friends of the British Library (Collections learn the art of printing books. Trust), the Art Fund, the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) The Library’s copy is one of only six and the Library’s Grant in Aid budget. known copies of this edition to survive today. It is in contemporary condition The manuscript (now Add MS 89250) and shows many signs of having can be viewed online at been in contemporary Croatian hands bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay. and heavily used. Its original binding aspx?ref=Add_MS_89250. contains fragments from Glagolitic manuscripts. The arms of the City of Nuremberg on the upper cover were added later. The Granville Archive The Boosey & Hawkes Archive The Granville Archive comprises the include some important material relating The business archive of the British work undertaken by the publishers in papers of several generations of the to the American War of Independence music publisher Boosey & Hawkes promoting their works in the concert Leveson-Gower family, including the and to the French Revolution.