A great effort was made from 1766 to 1787 to accomplish a catalogue of
the Oriental MSS. which were a notable feature of the Library, thanks
to the Laud, Marshall, Pococke, Huntington, Marsh and Hunt collections.
The Catalogue of 1787, containing the Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Ethiopic,
Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Coptic MSS., was the work of Johann Uri,
a Hungarian, who resided at Oxford for this purpose, and died there in
1796. The Arabic catalogue was continued by a second part undertaken by
Alexander Nicoll and E. B. Pusey, and issued in 1835. Other parts have
been continued by volumes in the Quarto series.
[Sidenote: Modern Expansion.]
In 1789 the first, modern extension of the Library began. How it managed
to contain the accessions of the eighteenth century within the compass
of the Old Reading Room, Arts End and Selden End, which it possessed in
1640, it is difficult to imagine; but no doubt much uncatalogued matter
was stacked in the Picture Gallery and adjacent rooms. At last the
pressure became so great that the books simply burst into the Anatomy
School, thenceforward known as the Auctarium, on the first floor of
the Schools Quadrangle. The gradual annexation of the whole of the
Quadrangle, 1789-1882, is too much a matter of detail to be narrated
here.[18] The whole of the first floor was annexed by 1835, and the loan
of the Radcliffe Camera, in 1860, greatly eased the situation. The first
ground floor-room acquired was the Logic School in 1845. The progress of
bibliography can be traced in the large purchases made in 1789 at the
Pinelli sale and in 1780 at the Crevenna sale, in Florence and Amsterdam
respectively. The books bought were chiefly Editiones Principes and other
early printed books, and £1550 was borrowed from the Colleges for the
purpose, all faithfully repaid by 1795. The Mazarine Bible, a copy of
which fetched £5800 in 1911, was bought for £100 in 1793.
[Sidenote: The Nineteenth Century, and Dr. Bandinel. Gough and Douce.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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