University Book-Hunting Project Turns 30

The University of St Andrews is commemorating 30 years of the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC), its global book-hunting project.

Founded in 1995 by Professor Andrew Pettegree, the USTC was launched as a modest effort to catalogue sixteenth-century French religious books and has since grown into the most comprehensive record of works printed before 1700. 

The project is now co-led by Dr Arthur der Weduwen, who joined the USTC in 2013. The USTC aims to showcase all early modern print, from recognised works of scholarship to short items often overlooked. 

“Small books matter,” Dr der Weduwen said. “[By] seeking to document every piece of early modern print, the USTC has foregrounded the documentation of the shorter, more ephemeral printed matter, across all genres (religion, news, politics, business, student dissertations) that were published in enormous quantities but were not deemed to be worthy of survival.” 

This shift in focus has had positive outcomes according to Dr der Weduwen. Around a third of the books in the USTC records survive in only a single known copy, while those books that circulated before the foundation of the project, deemed “rare,” were widely circulated and should have been correctly labelled as valuable. 

The catalogue has also shown how books travelled far more widely than once assumed. Before the USTC, der Weduwen said “bibliographical projects were national projects that studied the printed output of a country or region only in the collections of that country or region. Yet early modern books were destined to be sold across boundaries.” 

The USTC has surfaced books printed in one country but missed at the national level because the only surviving copies are held abroad.

One particularly revealing example of findings from the USTC is the reconstruction of “lost” publications from the Dutch Republic. Dr Pettegree and Dr der Weduwen have reconstructed these “using a large corpus of newspaper advertisements and printed book sales catalogues from the period, in which many editions of Protestant bestsellers were listed that no longer survive.”

“Consider the catechism of the Calvinist Gellius de Bouma,” noted Dr der Weduwen, “a Dutch minister for whom we document 52 editions on the USTC — of these, 24 are lost. Dutch editions of the Lutheran prayer books by Johann Arndt are just as striking, with 44 known editions of which fourteen are lost. These finds matter because they allow us to re-assess fundamentally the popularity of certain works in the past, and the importance that popular religious works played in sustaining the vitality of the print trade.” 

Such reconstruction relies not just on experienced scholars but on a large and ever-evolving team. The USTC has always been “a large group project,” der Weduwen emphasises. “As long as I have been involved with the project, the weekly group meetings that we run have never dipped below an attendance of around ten, and usually over [and] around 20-25 members today.”

Community ethos is central to the project’s success. The USTC has funded or supported around 30 PhD students and helped launch the careers of around twenty historians now working across Britain, Europe, and North America. Through internships and volunteering, St Andrews students can gain hands-on experience in historical research as well. 

“The project as a whole is a great believer in fostering local talent and not restricting scholarship to members of faculty, but to encourage everyone with an interest in history and a passion for collaborative work to pursue research,” said Dr der Weduwen. 

As the catalogue expands rapidly, the team plans to add three million new records in the next four years, drawing on a survey of libraries that are not or only partially represented in the USTC already. The project’s focus will remain firmly on books printed before 1700, a self-imposed limit that acknowledges both the explosion of print in the eighteenth century and the USTC’s commitment to depth over scope. The team is investing in improving existing descriptions and adding new records within their imposed time frame. 

“The longer we are around and the more comprehensive the USTC becomes, the more attention we generate,” explained Dr der Weduwen.  

Image by Mary Markis