Antiquarian and Rare books
The Library has a small but impressive collection of approximately 5,000 rare and antiquarian books relating to natural history primarily covering the 19th century. Highlights of the collection include several copies of Robert Plot’s A Natural History of Oxfordshire, an unusually bound copy of Hoefanagel’s Archetypa Studica, and a beautiful full-colour edition of Maria Sybilla Merian’s Insects of Suriname.
Insect of Suriname, by the German-born naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717)
