This page features a variety of rare books from our rich and diverse collection of early imprints.

“The CRRS Featured Rare Book” series is the inspiration of CRRS Fellow (2009-2010) and rare book scholar Scott Schofield (PhD English, University of Toronto), who provides in each overview details of the authorship, contents, and print history of the work, as well as a discussion of the copy’s binding, provenance and other features of note. Each entry is accompanied by a series of digitized images with notes.

John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments or The Book of Martyrs [1596]

Holinshed’s Chronicle of England, Scotland and Ireland [1577]

The Giunti Press: A Florentine Printing Family in the CRRS Collection [16th century]

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene [London, 1611]

 John Gerard’s The herball, or Generall historie of plantes [London, 1633]

Henry Savile’s Rerum Anglicarum scriptores post Bedam [London, 1596]

Richard Knolles’ Historie of the Turkes [London, 1603]

Erasmus’s and More’s translation of Lucian [Paris, 1514]

Sir Philip Sidney Knight. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia [London, 1627]

Franciscus Philelphus. Epistolae Francisci Philelfi. [Basel: Johann Amerbach, before July 1496]

Rare books from the CRRS collection have also been featured on the “Preserving the World’s Rarest Books” blog, a project of the Universal Short Title Catalogue:

(S)expurgation: Censoring images in Ovid’s Metamorphosis [1517]

That Romish Fable Framer: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani [1585]