The Universal Short Title Catalogue: an analytical bibliography of all books published before 1601

The sixteenth century was the golden age of the early printed book. It was in this century that the book reached full technical maturity, and established the domination of Intellectual culture that would continue through to the modem era. The printed book is also fundamental to how we conceptualise the age: our progress-orientated view of the early modem period depends crucially on our sense of the critical role of the new technology in encapsulating the spirit of the Renaissance and Reformation. Thus the printed book is inevitably associated in the popular mind with critical intellectual developments of the age, from the rediscovery of classical texts and the creation of authentic scholarly editions to the growth of pamphlet culture and the popularization of vernacular translations of the Bible stimulated by the Reformation.

Far less attention has been devoted to other, more mundane areas of the book trade that in fact accounted for a very large part of the day to day work of Europe's printing presses. The established trade in school books and conventional devotional texts was at least as important as the more eye-catching projects of Humanists and the Protestant reformers. So too was the large market for recreational reading in poetry and prose, a market which, like the market in school books, built on a healthy demand that long pre-dated the invention of the printing press. An equally significant development was the massive exploitation of print for the everyday tasks of government: many a publishing house would depend for its livelihood on the steady demand for printed proclamations, edicts and statutes. At the other end of the scale, in terms both of intellectual content and expense, was the vastly expanded trade in technical and scientific books. This was a domain in which Latin continued to be the dominant medium, though with a significant growth of vernacular texts in such areas as medical science and topographical literature.

It is a characteristic of scholarship in technical bibliography that the parts of this complex economy have always tended to be studied separately: either with specialist studies of themes or genre (such as medical texts or dictionaries), or the study of an author, printer, or place of printing. What is proposed here is to gather together all of this information, while at the same time completing a Europe-wide survey of printing. This involves both plugging gaps in coverage (there is no survey of print culture in Spain, for example) and drawing together information on surviving copies from over 2,000 libraries world-wide.

The U-STC will be simultaneously both the most powerful analytical tool for the study of the global world of print and an Invaluable reference work for scholars interested in any author, text or genre of printed book. Building on methodology developed for a project on books published in the French language, it will offer data on around 400,000 bibliographically distinct editions published around Europe. It will thus offer a single port of access to information on books published in Italy, Germany, France, and In Europe's subsidiary, satellite markets, such as England, Spain, and Eastern Europe.

For researchers interested in a particular text or author the value of such a search tool is hard to overstate: particularly if their subject is an author whose popularity spread beyond their own native country. For scholars of the book world the complete survey of early printing envisaged here offers for the first time the prospect of a holistic understanding of one of the sixteenth century's most important and dynamic industries.