A Taste of Horton

A Taste of Horton

A selection of items from the Horton Collection of Children's Material.

The Horton Collection was created by the Aberystwyth University in Aberystwyth, Wales, located in the Thomas Parry Library Rare Books Collection and contains over 800 items showing the development of children’s literature during the two hundred years from the mid-eighteenth century to 1913. The collection is intended to be a research into juvenile literature, historical and analytical bibliography, publishing, illustration, costume and drama.

The archive is arranged in both a gallery format and an index format, which is organized into author, bookseller, engraver, general, illustrator, printer, publisher, series, and title indexes. Each book has an extensive metadata list, containing, when applicable, the book's call number, author, title, edition imprint, page size, collation, the printer, illustration details, binding information, annotations, collections, references, contents, and tracings. The images scanned from the book, only a handful of each, may be seen at a higher resolution. The archive further contains links to other children's literature archives, libraries, projects, and collections.

The gallery display is very well organized, with the books being listed in alphabetical order by title. The scans of the books are displayed on one side of the main table, and the book title, author, and illustrator are on the other. A handful of the images have some distortion from the scanning process, but the pictures overall are very clear.