Enfilade

Атлас российской, состоящей из девятнадцати специальных карт представляющих Всероссийскую империю… / Atlas rossiiskoi, sostoiashchei iz deviatnadtsati spetsial’nykh kart predstavliaiushchikh Vserossiiskuiu imperiiu… / (Atlas of Russia, consisting of nineteen special maps representing the All-Russian Empire), 1745. Link»

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Thanks to Margaret Samu for noting this new digital collection. The examples of particular titles are her selections, underscoring the range of books included. –CH

As noted several days ago at H-SHERA (Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture). . .

The Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois has just announced the publication of a new digital collection: Russian Books of the 18th Century, which is now freely available on Internet Archive.

This collection is an ongoing project to make all of the books listed in Svodnyi katalog russkoi knigi grazhdanskoi pechati XVIII veka digitally available. It is designed to be used in tandem with the catalog: each item is cross-referenced with its entry number and transliterated title for easy access. We hope this will be a more convenient option for finding 18th-century Russian books than its microform predecessor. There are currently over 400 items uploaded, with our eventual goal being to have the full contents of the catalog online. Digitized books have been curated from the Russian National Electronic Library (RusNEB).

From the Internet Archive. . .

Russian Books of the 18th Century is a newly available collection of books printed in Russia from 1725 to 1801 based on the Union Catalogue of Russian 18th-Century Civil Typeface Books (Svodnyi katalog russkoi knigi grazhdanskoi pechati XVIII veka). Most titles were curated from the impressive digitization project, Natsional’naia Elektronnaia Biblioteka, operated by the Russian State Library in Moscow. This collection is curated by the Slavic Reference Service (SRS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is open to all researchers. Items are cross-referenced with Svodnyi katalog entry numbers and ALA-romanized titles. Descriptions contain a truncated version of the item’s listing in Svodnyi katalog. Users can use the ‘Search this collection’ function to search by entry number, title, and author in Latin or Cyrillic letters.

The ‘civil type’ refers to the new, simplified typeface introduced by Peter the Great in 1708, intended for secular publications, replacing the earlier Church Slavonic. Some titles are original Russian works, others are texts translated from European languages, while still others appear in bilingual editions, such as this Allegorical Imagery of Fireworks in Honor of Her Imperial Highness Elizaveta Petrovna in Russian and German.

Other notable books:

• The Life and Deeds of Marcus Aurelius (1740), link»

• A 1745 atlas with maps, link»

• The Adventures of Chevalier de ***. A True Story, by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, marquis d’Argens (1772), link»

• Theoretical and Practical Arithmetics, by D. S. Anichkov (1775), link»