In 1487 William Caxton printed his first two-colour book – the Sarum Missal, a Catholic version of the mass for the Legh family, owners of Lyme Park, Cheshire. It’s an astonishing book, full of detail about the period, and it’s finally been put on display at Lyme Park using Turning the Pages. Happily, it’s back in it’s original home and visitors can now explore the last surviving pre-reformation Catholic missal – virtually.
British Library: Codex Sinaiticus
In June 2009 The British Library launched Codex Sinaiticus, a digital re-unification of the oldest, most complete version of the bible in the world, dating from the 4th century. Various parts of the manuscript have been held in London, Leipzig, St Petersburg and St Catherine’s Monastery, so Turning the Pages was used to bring them together as one volume as they were written over 1600 years ago.
English Heritage
In February 2009 English Heritage launched an outstanding collection of the field notebooks and Beagle Diary of Charles Darwin, using Turning the Pages. As well as the manuscripts being available on a touchscreen, much of the transcription work is available for the first time, and the kiosk also includes evocative voiceover for both the notebooks and the diary. It’s available now at Down House, Kent and will be online at English Heritage’s website.
East Ayrshire Council
Working with this local authority, we have now made available their first edition of their Poems Chiefly In The Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns. We love this project. It’s just one book, but it is tremendously important for the area, and the recordings of the poems are sensational.
Natural History Museum
As part of the Darwin celebrations around the anniversaries of his birth and the publication of On the Origin of Species we have made available a digital version of the Origin. It’s the copy owned by Wallace, Darwin’s collaborator in that work, and has his annotations on many pages. It’s available now in the NHM Darwin exhibition and online shortly.