Beckett Digital Library now available

The Library has just subscribed to Beckett Digital Library which can be accessed via the Databases A-Z List. It has also been indexed in Database by Subject for English Literature and for French Studies.

The BDL is a digital reconstruction of Samuel Beckett’s personal library, based on the volumes preserved at his apartment in Paris which currently houses 760 extant volumes and 248 virtual entries. The BDL module, being part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project,  contains scans of book covers, title pages, all pages with reading traces, flyleaves, colophons, tables of contents, indexes and inserts of various kinds. In addition to facsimiles, it also offers transcriptions of readings traces and links to Beckett’s manuscripts. The module is both browsable and full text searchable. The BDL is accompanied by a monograph (Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library, Cambridge UP, 2013) which can be found in Discovered.

Chloe Elder, MSc student in Book History and Material Culture, had this to say when she requested this resource:

“This digital library of Samuel Beckett’s personal works held in his apartment in Paris are a perfect way to explore ideas of reading traces and history of reading, relevant to the MSc in Book History and Material Culture, as well as explore the literary influences of a prominent modernist writer/playwright. The variety of languages held within Beckett’s library also provides an interesting look at comparative literature across languages. This is a recent project, at the foreground of present scholarship, and would be an immensely useful tool for students interested in literature and its scope – and the future of the printed word in a digital world.”