Owners of Incunabula is a satellite database of Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI). Here, editors creating MEI records record biographical information on former and present owners of incunabula and other early printed books, both personal and institutional (and including binders, illuminators, booksellers, etc.).
Each entry, or collection, is defined by chronological and geographical markers (either by specific location or by area) which allow the collection to represent a step in the movement of books.
Due to the rich and complex history of book collections throughout the centuries, where ideology, politics, economic issues, and state administration policies played a major part, we find that collections are generally scattered in dozens of locations in Europe and the US. The more incunabula are identified to belong to a collection listed in this database, the more we are able to reconstruct the consistency of such collections. Simply put, Owners of Incunabula allows us to virtually reconstruct thousands of book collections now dispersed.
Questions concerning the content of the database are answered by Cristina Dondi (c.dondi@cerl.org).