Over 500 fully-digitized books printed in Europe before 1501.
The Bodleian Library houses the largest collection of western incunabula - books printed with movable metal type up to the end of 1500 - in a university library, amounting to more than 5,600 editions in 6,755 copies.
The books themselves are in the classical and vernacular languages, and cover all subjects and disciplines. They range from a copy of the Gutenberg Bible purchased in 1793, and the sumptuous ‘Strozzi copy’ of Pliny’s Natural History in Italian from the bequest of Francis Douce (one of the Library’s principal donors), and both of which have been digitized, to smaller and much-used copies of medieval devotional works and school-texts.
In addition, the Bodleian’s collections also contain several blockbooks (printed from wooden blocks, on to which the texts and illustrations have been cut). All of the blockbooks, containing biblical and grammatical texts, have now been fully digitized.