Welcome to William Corbett's bookshop! William Corbett was a bookseller in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the seventeenth century. When he died in 1626, an inventory of his shop was made, listing over a thousand books, mentioning around two hundred of them by name. This is an incredible insight into what books the Newcastle public were buying and reading at that time.

You might like to start with an overview of what's on the shelves. The best way to explore the bookshop is to look at the will and inventory, where you can see the original documents, as well as transcriptions, with links to more information about the individual books. You can also browse the books by subject in Collections, as well as learning more about printing and bookselling in seventeenth-century Newcastle.

The individual Items give the details of a particular edition of the books listed in the shop, based on data from the English Short Texts Catalogue. It isn't always possible to tell exactly which edition the inventory refers to, but the editions listed here would all have been available in 1626, and where possible they are editions where the full text is available via the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. As well, some books are still unidentified.