Drowned books and their histories: making sense of a C17th shipwreck and its remarkable cargo

The discovery of shipwreck BZN17 off the Dutch Texel islands attracted worldwide attention due to the astonishing degree of preservation of a series of objects brought up from the wreck. This paper will focus on a number of book covers that survived immersion, asking what they can reveal of their owners and of their own histories as objects of value.