A catalogue of the manuscripts preserved in the British Museum hitherto undescribed : consisting of five thousand volumes, including the collections of Sir Hans Sloane, Bart., the Rev. Thomas Birch, D.D. and about five hundred volumes bequeathed, presented, or purchased at various times
A 1782 catalogue compiled by Samuel Ayscough, printed in London for the compiler, listing manuscripts held by the British Museum for scholars and collectors of the period. The one picture is a small engraved bookplate on a blank cream page, showing a heraldic shield with a saltire cross, supporters, a crest and a motto scroll beneath, with a handwritten shelfmark below it. A designer might take from it the compact, ornamented armorial vocabulary of late eighteenth-century engraved ex libris labels.
