Symbol courtesy of the College at Leeds

Within the hanging symbol above, you’ll see an early experiment in making books transportable–a seventeenth century precursor, if you’ll, to the trendy day Kindle.

In line with the library on the College of Leeds, this “Jacobean Travelling Library” dates again to 1617. That’s when William Hakewill, an English legal professional and MP, commissioned the miniature library–a large ebook, which itself holds 50 smaller books, all “certain in limp vellum covers with colored cloth ties.” What books have been on this transportable library, intended to accompany noblemen on their trips? Naturally the classics. Theology, philosophy, classical historical past and poetry. The works of Ovid, Seneca, Cicero, Virgil, Tacitus, and Saint Augustine. Lots of the identical texts that confirmed up in The Harvard Classics (now to be had on-line) 3 centuries later.

It seems that 3 different Jacobean Travelling Libraries have been made. They now live at the British Library, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and the Toledo Museum of Artwork in Toledo, Ohio.

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