Along the many Greek manuscripts recently digitized by the British Library and made freely available online is one very nice Eighteenth Century notebook full of sketches and transcriptions of Greek and Latin inscriptions made by Joseph Ames (described as “bibliographer and antiquary” in the catalogue). Many of these inscriptions seem to have been on display in the English countryside, and are presumably well-known. (All page scans may be seen here.)
We’ve long been thinking about how to publish epigraphic notebooks of this kind (the example of Deering’s sketches from Aphrodisias was one suggestion for how to go about this). The fact that museums and libraries are starting to make these manuscripts available as-is–without additional commentary or scholarship–is already valuable.
