The title page of Keynes.D.1.9
In June 2013 King’s College held a conference to mark the centenary of the birth of A.N.L. (Tim) Munby, Librarian at King’s from 1947 to 1974. The conference was a great success, with a distinguished panel of speakers from the world of bibliography and the history of books, and over 120 registered participants. As a follow-up to the conference, and as a permanent tribute to Tim Munby, King’s College inaugurated a fund in his name—The Munby Centenary Fund. Donations to the fund support projects initiated by Munby, or related closely to his interests and achievements.
The gold tooling on the book’s spine.
The initial objective is to complete the online cataloguing of all of the books in the collection of John Maynard Keynes and generous donations have already made it possible to hire Dr Iman Javadi as ‘Munby Project Cataloguer (Rare Books)’ to begin this work. Iman joined the library team in November 2014, and has so far catalogued over 200 books.
Tim Munby began his career at King’s as the first cataloguer of Keynes’s collection, although cataloguing in those days was very different. Catalogue cards often included little more than author, title and imprint details.
Tim Munby’s original catalogue card.
Inside front pastedown showing Keynes’s bookplate.
These days catalogue records for rare books typically include a wealth of copy-specific information such as binding descriptions, provenance information and information relating to former owners and detailed physical descriptions of the book as an object. This change not only reflects changes in research interests in bibliography, but also assists librarians in collection management, and the availability of these descriptions online improves access to the collections.
The newly created online record for this item can be viewed here: MARC record (opens a .docx file)
Further updates about the project will be posted on this blog.
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