The Cambridge University Library’s exhibition ‘Private Lives of Print: the Use and Abuse of Books, 1450-1550’ opens today, and is accompanied by a beautiful book entitled Emprynted in this Manere: Early Printed Treasures from Cambridge University Library.

As David Pearson pointed out at the launch event for the book, held in the Wren Library yesterday, studies of early printing would once have focused on the production side–identifying publishers, typefounders, woodcut artists and the like. Such matters are by no means neglected here. But both the book and the exhibition focus more on circulation and consumption than on production. They concentrate on illuminators, binders, owners and readers, and show how the books were put to use across the course of centuries.

So we’re invited to imagine Venetian bookbuyers weighing the cost of a Bible against the cost of six chickens or five geese; to witness the future Queen Katherine Parr giving her uncle a prayer book, and asking him to remember his ‘louuynge nys’ when he looks on it; to admire a doctor’s drawing of a foetus in the womb in the margins of a medical book. A student at the University of Padua spills ink on his Livy, and writes fastidiously around it, in Latin: This blot … I stupidly made on the first of December 1482′. The books are often marvels in themselves, but they really come to life in the hands of their owners.

If you can’t get to Cambridge, you can see the ‘virtual exhibition’ at https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/incunabula/