The main collection ranges in time from the earliest of our mediaeval manuscripts, giving an account of a council in Rheims 991, down through the centuries to 1850, with Erasmus, Bacon, MacAingil, Suárez, Boyle, Voltaire, Hannah More and so many others sitting on the shelves in printed editions that appeared in their own lifetimes, together with a full panoply of writings by their contemporaries shelved nearby.
One of the great treasures of the library is Saint Augustine's De Civitate Dei, The City of God, printed in Mainz in 1473 by Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim. Johann Gutenberg invented printing there, for western civilization, using moveable type. He had begun printing in the mid-1450s with backing from Johannes Fust and assisted by Peter Schoeffer. Gutenberg proved financially inept and Fust took over the business, with Schoeffer. Fust died of the plague while selling his books in Paris in 1466, whereupon Schoeffer married Fust's daughter and the businesss flourished until Schoeffer died in 1503.
On heavy, creamy paper, this large folio volume of 728 pages is printed in strikingly black ink with red ink used for two heraldic shields - the device conceived by Fust and Schoeffer. De Civitate Dei was a popular text and likely to sell well, which was important. Two Mainz clerks had set up a press on the outskirts of Rome, later in the city itself and had printed three different editions of the work between 1467 and 1470. Schoeffer's edition of 1473 includes commentary by two 14th-century theologians, Thomas Waleys and Nicholas Trivet. Amongst the earliest to be printed, some of the books Schoeffer produced still rank as the finest ever made.
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