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  3. Hans Sloane's Library Collection and the Production of Knowledge
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  • Publisher:
    Cambridge University Press
    Publication date:
    November 2025
    December 2025
    ISBN:
    9781009497404
    9781009497398
    DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009497404
    Dimensions:
    (229 x 152 mm)
    Weight & Pages:
    264 Pages
    Dimensions:
    Weight & Pages:
    • Subjects:
    Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
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    Subjects:
    Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
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    Book description

    On his death in 1753, Hans Sloane's collection of books and manuscripts was estimated at 50,000 volumes, and, combined with his collected objects, would become the founding core of the British Library and British Museum. Delving into the particular history of this remarkable collection, Alice Wickenden asks wide-reaching questions about archival practices and knowledge production, showing how books function both as and alongside objects. Hers is the first book to bring the theoretical questions and methodologies arising from material culture and book history alongside a full-length study of the founding book collection of the British Library. Each carefully-selected case study raises questions that, though seemingly playful, strike at the heart of past and present practices of collecting and knowledge production: how might books of dried plants be books? Is something a book if nobody can read it? Why collect duplicates? And how, after all, do we actually define a library?

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