The Bibliographical Society in conjunction with the University of Toronto is pleased to announce the publication of an important new online reference work for book history. The British Armorial Bindings Database (click on link to access the site), begun by John Morris and continued by the Fisher Library's Philip Oldfield, was officially launched this week in London, and is now freely available on the web.

This catalogue which attempts to record all known British armorial bookbinding stamps used by personal owners to mark and decorate their books, reproduces over 3,300 stamps used between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, associated with nearly two thousand individual owners. It brings to fruition almost half a century of endeavour.

Intended primarily as a tool to facilitate the identification of heraldic stamps, the database may be searched from many angles. Stamps may be searched by heraldic devices, such as arms, crest, mottoes etc. Owners can be found under their family name, their titular name, rank in the peerage, and by gender. The 12,000 odd books which provide the sources for the stamps, from libraries around the world, may be sorted by author and title, and individual libraries can be searched for their holdings of armorial bindings. The database will be useful to rare book librarians, book historians, book dealers, students of heraldry, genealogists, and anyone with an interest in questions of provenance and the identification of coats of arms.

The database has been created and hosted at the University of Toronto and is made available as a free public resource through the sponsorship of the Bibliographical Society.

Below are examples of some of the stamps in the database.

British Armorial Bindings Database Officially Launched