Pastedowns in Oxford Bindings online (POxBo)

Welcome to the homepage of the online edition of Neil Ker’s catalogue of pastedowns in Oxford bindings from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century (POxBo).

The intention of these pages is to provide a searchable version of Ker’s invaluable listing of a set of manuscript fragments — those used in Oxford bindings of the early modern period — with the supplements made to it in David Pearson’s Oxford Bookbinding 1500-1640 (Oxford, 2000) and the 2004 reprint of Ker’s original work. From this page you can navigate to a range of information which we hope will be helpful to you in familiarising yourself with Ker’s work and the database.

• Rationale for POxBo
• Structure of Ker’s Pastedowns
• Ker’s preliminary material:

1. Ker’s Introduction
2. Scope and Arrangement
3. Methods of securing Endleaves

• Introductory Note to the Corrigenda and Addenda (2004 reprint)
• Explanation of the numbering used in POxBo
• Search Tips
• Next Steps
• Acknowledgements

The remit of this phase of the project has consciously confined itself to making Ker's listing and its supplements available to browse and search in digital format. A more detailed explanation of the rationale for doing this is available. It would certainly be possible to add yet further examples to this augmented listing but that is beyond the remit of this stage of the Lost Manuscripts project. If, however, you know of examples, we would like to hear from you with the aim of including them in the Lost Manuscripts’ main catalogue as one of the next steps.