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.

„Plus être que paraître“

Im Sommer 2018 erhielt die Abteilung Alte Drucke einen Anruf – ein Mitglied der Familie… ...

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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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