The remains of John Dee’s famous library re-assembled…

“A never seen before selection from 100 surviving books once owned by the man known universally as Dr Dee will go on display in ‘Scholar, courtier, magician: The lost library of John Dee’ at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in January 2016.”

The British Museum’s crystal scrying ball will be there too. That it was once Dee’s is now apparently questioned by some academics, but it’s undoubtedly of the right age and is very similar to the sort of ball he would have used.

“From the collection of the British Museum comes a crystal ball for researching the occult and conversing with spirits”

It would be nice if the library could also be reassembled online, in the form of Web links to digitised scanned copies of all the books known to have been in Dee’s library. I’m not aware that anyone has yet done that.

I became interested in the history of Dee’s library through researching a commissioned scholarly essay in 2012, which is available in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context: a Third Collection of Essays and Notes as “What could Lovecraft and his circle have known of Doctor John Dee?”