Hans Sloane's Library Collection and the Production of Knowledge

Uses the collection which established the British Library and Museum to re-theorise how books function and how we define libraries.

Alice Wickenden uses Hans Sloane's remarkable collection – the founding core of the British Library and British Museum – to ask what a library really is. Hers is the first book to bring methodologies of material culture, book history, and bibliography alongside a full-length study of the establishment of the British Library.On his death in 1753, Hans Sloane's collection of books and manuscripts was estimated at 50,000 volumes, and, combined with his collected objects, would become the founding core of the British Library and British Museum. Delving into the particular history of this remarkable collection, Alice Wickenden asks wide-reaching questions about archival practices and knowledge production, showing how books function both as and alongside objects. Hers is the first book to bring the theoretical questions and methodologies arising from material culture and book history alongside a full-length study of the founding book collection of the British Library. Each carefully-selected case study raises questions that, though seemingly playful, strike at the heart of past and present practices of collecting and knowledge production: how might books of dried plants be books? Is something a book if nobody can read it? Why collect duplicates? And how, after all, do we actually define a library?