Rare books: our historic library collection
Thank you for visiting the Hertford College rare books webpages. Access to our rare book collections will be limited during our library building project from 2023 to 2025. Please contact us on library@hertford.ox.ac.uk if you have questions about any of the items in our collections.
Hertford Library’s historic collection includes books from the 15th century onwards, including a small number incunabula – which means books printed before 1501 in Europe. The majority of our antiquarian collection dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth century and comes from the Library of Magdalen Hall, Hertford College’s predecessor. Henry Wilkinson, Magdalen Hall’s principal in the 1650s, funded the building of a library and encouraged donations of books and money to build the collection. We still have the benefactors book that recorded these gifts and can match the entries to items in the collection.
Our collection represents a wide array of academic subjects, with strong sections on geography, history and philosophy. However, we also have many theological, grammatical, linguistic, astronomical, scientific and medical works.
Our catalogue
An increasing amount of our collection is catalogued online in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and in the Oxford libraries catalogue SOLO.  At the moment we are adding detailed records with copy specific notes for our collection to the SOLO catalogue. This will allow us to manage and research the collection more effectively, and permit researchers from across the world to discover what we hold.
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- Tyndale Bible
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- Rare books handling session
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- Engraving of John Donne
Find out more
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Who can use our collection?
Our collection is open by appointment to researchers and students. To make an appointment please contact the Librarian via email or by calling 01865 279409.
We organise regular themed displays using works from the Library and our collections are used by Hertford’s own students and staff in teaching and for individual research.
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How do we care for our collection?
We have a dedicated team of volunteers from The Arts Society (previously known as NADFAS), who visit the Library each week to clean and conserve the collection. Our team carry out minor repairs and record all treatment given to books.
Thanks to our generous donors, we’re able to send a small number of items for professional conservation and repair each year.