June 18, 2022
Johns Hopkins was just awarded a $223,000 grant from the Arcadia Fund to fully digitize and make freely accessible all 1,800 rare books and manuscripts in the Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection over the 2022-23 academic year. These will appear alongside the 100 already scanned early volumes from the Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection already hosted on the Internet Archive’s Bibliotheca Fictiva Digital Library site. This grant will also support the publication of a second, much expanded and illustrated edition of Arthur Freeman’s item level descriptive bibliography of the collection, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery, 400 BC-AD 2000 (London: Bernard Quaritch Ltd, 2014), which will include nearly 1,000 acquisitions made for the collection since its acquisition by Johns Hopkins University ten years ago. A featured and handsomely illustrated website, hosted by the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book, exploring many of the rarest and most intriguing volumes in the collection will also be launched in the coming months.