Someone just (very belatedly!) drew my attention to the video-map of the early modern book collections at Harvard–http://vimeo.com/46773161. It’s interesting to see the spread and growth of early printing centres, though I imagine that this version based on a single collection will soon be superseded by a more comprehensive set of images deriving from the Universal Short Title Catalogue.

What’s a bit of a mystery is why they choose to start in 1400, half a century before the advent of print. It’s hard to assign precise dates and places of publication to manuscripts, so it’s meaningless to try to shoehorn them into a map like this. Did they mean  to suggest that everything was benighted until Europe started to light up thanks to the press? Let’s hope not…