HABlog

Welcome to the blog of the Herzog August Bibliothek. This is where we regularly report on current topics concerning our research, library work and cultural programme.

A ”little Princeton” in Wolfenbüttel?

The Herzog August Bibliothek celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its fellowship programme this year –… ...

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Ein Traktat über den Salat

Ein sonderbares kleines How-To-Büchlein findet sich in den Beständen der HAB. Das zentrale Thema mag… ...

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Transferring plants from Padua to Wolfenbüttel

Libraries are extraordinary repositories of knowledge. This is common knowledge, of course, yet there are… ...

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Das Buch zum Film

Filmgeschichte in einer Bibliothek? Im Rahmen der Provenienzforschung an der Herzog August Bibliothek suchen Forschende… ...

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Royal custody?

Brothers taking their brothers prisoner, sons their mothers and fathers their children: aristocrats in the… ...

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Nathan after Auschwitz

It had to be Nathan. When theatre director Erwin Piscator returned from American exile in… ...

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Who were Olga and Heinrich Spiero?

In the course of the project ‘Assets looted by the Nazis among the Herzog August… ...

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What is the HAB repository?

The Herzog August Bibliothek’s in-house publisher has been putting out research papers, conference proceedings and… ...

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Krieg in Bildern

Clifton Meador studierte Fotografie an der Rhode Island School of Design und Buchkunst am Purchase… ...

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The summer course at the Herzog August Bibliothek

Experts and researchers from all over the world led by Professor Francisco Bethencourt gathered in… ...

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‘Those who crave to stand in the German-minded vale/ Of lilies and roses’

The Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel was recently able to acquire a collection of… ...

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Watch out for scams, or: How leftover stock is sold

Publishers are subject to one particular entrepreneurial risk. When books sell poorly, it can lead… ...

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The Schreibkalender (writing calendar) of early modern German-speaking Europe

A Schreibkalender? What is this all about? Among the many variations of printed almanacs of… ...

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Bible collections and bibles as collectibles

Collecting bibles became extremely popular in Protestant areas during the 18th century. Even contemporary commentators… ...

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‘Plus être que paraître’

In summer 2018 a member of the Schulenberg family phoned the Department of Early Printed… ...

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Theatrum mundi: Leibniz’s Ghosts

Last year the Herzog August Bibliothek acquired a very special one-of-a-kind item. The artist’s book… ...

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„The library is the nearest thing to heaven you’ll get.“

When David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, died in December 2020, Britain lost one of… ...

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I HAB a question… Do you have some children’s books too?

Our staff sometimes get asked this by their children when they find out that one… ...

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Two thousand letters

In 1892 the sisters Sophie and Lilla Vieweg bequeathed their valuable collection of more than… ...

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Locating the invisible – The hybrid edition of the German works of Martin Opitz as an example of improved visual access

Martin Opitz (1597–1639) is considered a key figure of the European Late Renaissance. The hybrid… ...

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The realities of material and space in the artist’s book

What does the material of an artist’s book tell us? The ‘material turn’ has ushered… ...

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Piety in the name of the state: Das Bekreuzigte Herz

Contemplation, prayer, song – in the early modern period devotional books provided both women and… ...

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Käfig – Cage

A shroud against forgetting: The artist’s book Käfig (Cage, 2020) by Carola Willbrand is a… ...

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Regional history, Nazi literature and Martin Buber’s translation of the Bible

The Herzog August Bibliothek’s accessions during the Nazi era. ...

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Collaborative, expandable, open

In May 2023, the journal Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften published the working paper ‘Begriffe der… ...

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Souvenir from Mount Lebanon

Every single book, and every single copy of that book, has a story to tell.… ...

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Lessing as a family man

A letter written by Lessing in his own hand – a rarity in itself –… ...

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A visit to the Gottorf cabinet of curiosities

Royal collections of rare, new and unique objects were a popular destination for travellers in… ...

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Right in the middle – not just on the sidelines

Text+ is a consortium of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). Organised in three data… ...

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‘Four friends shalt thou be …’

Autograph collection, business card, ‘door opener’, art album, friendship book – Philipp Hainhofer’s Großes Stammbuch… ...

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A raptor among the bookshelves

From the time it was founded up until the early 20th century, the Wolfenbüttel library… ...

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Sounds wonderful! A promenade concert fills the library with music

We can listen to our favourite music streamed ‘on tap’ from our mobile phones or… ...

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Tools that every digital humanist should know about

In a workshop held at the HAB, we took a closer look at a number… ...

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Not We: On the construction of whiteness

Wetrocities is an artist’s book about collective memory, whose title is a portmanteau word made… ...

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You Better Run

"A Threnody for the Dispossessed" is the title of a lament in book form by… ...

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The duchess and book ownership

How many academics or inhabitants of Lower Saxony know that in the mid- 16th century,… ...

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An ox head that speaks volumes

Watermarks are part of the fabric of everyday life – nowadays every banknote contains one,… ...

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Hidden treasures

Books bound in silk are a rarity in historical libraries. Although many of them are… ...

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From a private book collection to a library

It was in 1843 that the Wolfenbüttel librarian Karl Philipp Christian Schönemann, writing in the… ...

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The books and the sea

In the early modern era, the special significance of the seas was reflected in books,… ...

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HABby Birthday!

We’re nearly there, the big day is approaching fast: on 5 April 2022 the Herzog… ...

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I HAB a question…

Who decides which books make it into the library? ...

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Rich pickings

This is a very special kind of long-term undertaking: the in-depth cataloguing of medieval manuscripts… ...

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Lessons learned

Wolfenbüttel and Oxford have set new standards for photographic technology and presentation with this joint… ...

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‘His head was strangely unhinged and filled with thousands of ideas.’

Ludwig Rudolph von Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1671–1735) wrote a diary in which he made detailed notes about… ...

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‘A process of permanent change’

196 pages, eight years, five artists and a one-of-a-kind artist’s book: the story of how… ...

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What does a professional photographer do at the HAB?

Michaela Weber has been employed in the HAB’s photographic workshop for more than 35 years… ...

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‘Shoes! Mask! Keys!’

The Covid-19 restrictions proved challenging for the 108 research fellows working at the HAB during… ...

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Limp bindings: Simple stitching, challenging restoration

In the HAB’s restoration workshop the fragile manuscripts of the Humanist Johannes Caselius (1533–1613) have… ...

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Aby Warburg and the library dragon

The HAB archive contains 26 letters and postcards written by Aby Warburg (1866–1929), the great… ...

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‘An exciting day, and not just for professional reasons’

Because of Covid restrictions the HAB was unable to open its doors for Girls’ Day… ...

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A professor at the Ritterakademie

The theologist and mathematician Leonhard Christoph Sturm (1669–1719) came to Wolfenbüttel in 1694 and stayed… ...

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Wege der Ameise

The new artist’s book Wege der Ameise (Paths of the Ant) by Kai Pfankuch uses… ...

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The convicted book thief

In his Wolfenbüttel ‘Liberey-Ordnung’ (library rules) of 1572, Herzog Julius von Braunschweig-Lüneburg stipulated that no-one… ...

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Books as witnesses

One of the core tasks of museums, archives and libraries is to conduct research into… ...

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Identity and transformation

The corporate design is the first thing readers of a website or book notice and… ...

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A selected treasure

During the early modern period, the Wolfenbüttel library was one of the largest in the… ...

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Made by women

Like the Latin text, the colourful book ornamentation decorating the manuscripts from the High Medieval… ...

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An aide-mémoire

A collection of 35 copperplate portraits recently acquired by the Herzog August Bibliothek is testament… ...

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The curriculum at an early modern university

University studies in the early modern period were subject to particular processes of evaluation, just… ...

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‘The Wild Man of Wolfenbüttel’

‘This is the wild man so fell / of whose exploits ye have sooth heard… ...

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Our hearts leap with joy!

Religious feelings can make our hearts beat faster, stir our blood or even drive us… ...

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Philipp Hainhofer’s Großes Stammbuch

For people today, a Stammbuch is a book that tells us of our family lineage. ...

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Books as reservoirs of biodiversity

The Herzog August Bibliothek also holds books that allow nature to speak for itself. These… ...

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Growth, losses and circulation

One fundamental characteristic of all collections is their embeddedness in economic processes. As one of… ...

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Milestones on the path to project realisation

A mid-term review of the Polonsky Foundation digitisation project ‘Manuscripts from German-Speaking Lands’ ...

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Infection

Diseases have presented challenges throughout human history. In the early modern era scholars attempted to… ...

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A rediscovery in the Herzog August Bibliothek

When a printing press was imported from Europe in 1590, the Jesuits in Japan were… ...

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A visit to the Wissembourg scriptorium with Dr Christine Jakobi-Mirwald

After studying history of art and French and Italian philology, Christine Jakobi-Mirwald wrote a PhD… ...

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Lutheran and Catholic enactments of saintliness

February 2020 saw the publication of the sixth volume of Frühneuzeitliche Märtyrerdramen: Kritische Edition von… ...

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Let everything be of use

The year 2018 also saw the conclusion of a long-term project that had played a… ...

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Permeability and contact

The workshop’s title – The Wolfenbüttel People’s Library – immediately reveals its central focus: an… ...

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Marbach, Weimar and Wolfenbüttel – Embarking on the next phase together

For many years, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (German Literature Archive) Marbach, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and… ...

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IIIF: International interfaces for digitised cultural assets

IIIF (pronounced ‘Triple-I-F’) stands for the International Image Interoperability Framework: a technical standard designed to… ...

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The insides of books and protective wings

What criteria does an object have to meet in order to count as a book?… ...

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Manuscripts from German-speaking lands

The digitisation project ‘Manuscripts from the German-speaking lands’ began at the HAB in December 2018… ...

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Interview with Marshall Weber – awardee of the Artists’ Book Prize 2019

We visited the New York artist in his studio at the Federal Academy for Cultural… ...

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