The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608
A new facsimile edition of Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.232
published January, 2007

One of the greatest treasures in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library, The Trevelyon Miscellany is a 400-year-old, hand-drawn and lettered book created by the skilled scribe and pattern maker Thomas Trevelyon. Borrowing words and images from English and European woodcuts, engravings, broadsides, almanacs, emblem books and the Bible, Trevelyon created a rich and fascinating encyclopaedia of daily life and thought in Shakespeare s England. It is a monumental work that was intended to be both studied and enjoyed, its pages turned and savoured. Familiar scenes of domesticity and husbandry are intertwined with accounts of the rulers of England, descriptions of local fairs, the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, astronomy according to Ptolemy, illustrations of the seasons, the nine muses and the seven deadly sins, Old Testament history, household proverbs, alphabets and embroidery patterns. A massive volume (18 inches / 45 centimetres tall by 11½ / 29 centimetres wide, weighing over 17 lbs / 8 kg), this monumental work is now available in a gorgeous facsimile edition, thanks to state-of-the-art conservation and high-resolution digitization. It provides an exciting and unparalleled snapshot of the passions, concerns and everyday interests of a highly talented London commoner and for this reason is of significant scholarly and general interest. This limited edition, full-size facsimile of the entire manuscript is being produced to celebrate Folger Shakespeare Library s 75th anniversary in 2007. It is printed on archival paper, Smythe sewn and bound in cloth-wrapped boards with a reinforced spine and full-colour dust jacket. In addition to the 594 pages illustrated by Trevelyon, the volume includes an introduction by Dr Heather Wolf, Curator of Manuscripts, Folger Shakespeare Library; and indexes to poetry first lines, scripture, subjects, images and sources.

Find out more about the Trevelyon MS here.

Princeton University Center for the Study of Books and Media
2007 Graduate Student Conference Schedule
All are welcome to attend

Saturday, February 10, 2007, Friend Center 004

Breakfast

9:00-9:30

Panel I: Systems of Communication

9:30-10:45:
Joanne Filippone (Fordham University)
“The Price of Books in England, 1300-1483”

Will Slauter (Princeton University)
“George Washington is Dead: Forgery and Authenticity in the Making of International News”

James Brooke-Smith (New York University)
“The Print System in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain”

Coffee Break

10:45-11:15

Panel II: Dangerous Books!

11:15-12:30:
Saladin Ahmed (Rutgers University)
“Printing the Kingdom of Darkness: ‘Wonder Books’ and Late Seventeenth-Century English Publishing”

Tracy Miller (New York University)
“Infected Pages: Public Libraries, Germ Theory, and the Book Scares of Late Victorian England”

Francine Becker (Drew University)
"Boys Behaving Badly: The British Obscenity Trials of Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn"

Lunch: (Friend Center Convocation Room)

12:30-1:45pm

Panel III: Readers and Writers as Collectors: Commonplace Books and Travel Journals

1:45-3:00:
Jonathan Hsy (University of Pennsylvania)
“Periodizing Merchants: Urban Temporality and the Compiliations of Richard Hill and John Colyns”

William Weaver (Columbia University)
“Erasmus’s De Copia and Reformation Reading Practices”

Nichole Bennett-Bealer (Drew University)
“Transatlantic Calling Card: Willa Cather’s Visit with A. E. Housman”

Coffee Break

3:00-3:30

Final Discussion

3:30 - 5:00: Nigel Smith (Princeton University) and the audience

Reception

University of Chicago Research Fellowships

The application deadline is February 15, 2007, for University of Chicago Library Special Collections short-term research fellowships for 2007-2008. Any visiting researcher residing more than 100 miles from Chicago whose project would be advanced by on-site consultation of materials in the Special Collections Research Center is eligible. Awards will be made based on an evaluation of the research proposal and the applicant's ability to complete it successfully. Priority will be given to projects that cannot be conducted without on-site access to the original materials and where University of Chicago collections are central to the research. Up to $3,000 will be awarded to help cover projected travel, living and research expenses. Applications from women, minorities, and persons with disabilities are encouraged.

Details here

Everything from A to Z: The Edward J. Bloustein Dictionary Collection
An exhibition in the Special Collections and University Archives Gallery at Rutgers University.
Opening reception on Tuesday, February 6th

Starting in February the Libraries will celebrate the acquisition of a historic dictionary collection with the exhibition. Edward J. Bloustein, Rutgers' seventeenth president, was an avid and informed collector of dictionaries. While focusing on general English language dictionaries, he also collected more specialized works such as compendia of slang, originally published to help understand the speech of criminals; dictionaries of biography; and dictionaries of synonyms, the ancestors of today's thesauri. In 2004, his daughters Elise and Lori Bloustein donated his collection to the Rutgers University Libraries. The collection includes over 170 titles, dating from Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus Linguae Romane et Britannicae (1573) to the controversial Webster's Third International (1961).

The Edward J. Bloustein Dictionary Collection exhibition opening reception will be held on Tuesday, February 6th, beginning at 5:00 p.m., in the Scholarly Communication Center on the fourth floor of the Alexander Library. Professor Jack Lynch of the Rutgers-Newark English department will speak at the exhibition opening. Professor Lynch, an authority on Samuel Johnson, is the author of The Age of Shakespeare in the Age of Johnson, and an abridged edition of Johnson's dictionary.

Johnson famously defined a lexicographer or dictionary-maker as a "harmless drudge." In reality, lexicographers were amazingly erudite, sometimes colorful characters like Johnson himself. They often engaged in bitter personal and commercial rivalries, such as the little-known dispute between Thomas Blount and Edward Phillips in the seventeenth century, and the better known rivalries between Samuel Johnson and Nathaniel Bailey in the eighteenth, and Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester in the nineteenth centuries. This last conflict culminated in the dominance of the Merriam-Webster imprint, which continues to this day. The exhibition includes examples of various editions of all of these dictionaries, as well as beautiful engravings from the 1764 revision of Bailey's work by Joseph Nichol Scott.

The history of dictionaries reflects changes in culture and society as well as the evolution of language itself. This exhibition traces the development of these fascinating reference tools from the vocabularies of the Renaissance to the popular dictionaries of the twentieth century. Although some early foreign language works are included, the focus is on the monolingual English dictionary. These began as the "hard-word books" of the seventeenth century, which explained Latinate terms used by elites to an increasingly literate public. With the rise of Great Britain as an imperial power in the eighteenth century, the production of a major English language dictionary became a matter of national pride. Meanwhile, in the post-Revolutionary United States, American usage and culture was given expression in Noah Webster's famous American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828.

The twentieth century saw the completion of the monumental Oxford English Dictionary, one of the first published parts of which can be seen in the exhibition. Also on view are items from Rutgers University Libraries' rare book collections, including medieval and Renaissance precursors of the dictionary form, several miniature "Webster's" from the Alden Jacobs Collection, and portraits of famous lexicographers, as well as photographs generously made available by the Oxford University Press Archives.

The exhibition will be on display from February 6th through June 29th in Gallery '50 and the Special Collections and University Archives Gallery on the first floor and lower level of the Archibald S. Alexander Library at 169 College Avenue in New Brunswick. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Saturday 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. during the academic year.

To RSVP to the opening reception please contact events@rci.rutgers.edu or 732/932-7505. For more information about the exhibition, please contact curator Fernanda Perrone at hperrone@rci.rutgers.edu or 732/932-7006, x363.

exhibition website here

REVISED CALL FOR PAPERS & CONFERENCE FELLOWSHIPS

Deadline now extended to 28 February 2007 The twenty-fourth annual 'Print Networks' conference on the History of the British Book Trade will take place at the University of Chester on 24-26 July 2007. The theme for the conference is print culture in the provinces: the creation, distribution, and dissemination of word and image. Provincial-metropolitan inter-trade connections will be acceptable or on aspects of trade relations with any part of the former colonies & dominions.

A selection of the papers will be published in July 2008 as part of the Print Networks series, published by the British Library and Oak Knoll Press. Papers should be of up to 30 minutes duration. An abstract of the offered paper and a brief CV, (no longer than one side of A4 in total) of the likely contents should be submitted by 28 February 2007 to:

Dr Lisa Peters
Learning Resources
University of Chester
Parkgate Road
Chester CH1 4BJ
L.PETERS@CHESTER.AC.UK

It is understood that papers offered to the Conference will be original work and not delivered to any similar body before presentation at this Conference. Please be advised that presenting your work at conference offers no guarantee that it will be accepted for publication. Furthermore, it is part of the agreement with the publishers that papers will not be published in any similar collection for one year after their appearance in the appropriate volume; in effect they must not appear elsewhere before July 2009.

A Conference Fellowship is offered to a postgraduate scholar whose research falls within the parameters of the Conference’s brief, and who wishes to present a paper at the conference. The fellowship covers the cost of attending the conference and possibly some assistance towards costs of travel. A detailed submission of the research being undertaken accompanied by a letter of recommendation from a tutor or supervisor should be sent to Dr Lisa Peters by 28 February 2007.

The Thirteenth Annual Book Arts Lecture
An Initiative of the Friends of the Columbia University Libraries and the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Deborah Evetts, "Bookworms, Red-Rot, and Leather Dressing: A Conservator's View."
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
6:00 p.m., Third-Floor Lecture Hall of the Graduate School of Journalism.

Reception to follow: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, 6th
Floor, East, to view the exhibition "Not Just Protecting the Text:
Bookbindings from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia
University." Butler Library is located diagonally across the South Lawn
from the School of Journalism.

To RSVP, please call 212-854-4768.
For further information about the lecture or the exhibition, please contact
Jennifer B. Lee, jbl100@columbia.edu.

Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book

Tuesday, 23 January
4:30 p.m.
Alexander Library - Pane Room
Patricia Fleming (University of Toronto)
“Doing National Book History: From Ambition to Archive in Canada”

8 February 2007
Paul Nelles (Carleton University, Ottawa)
"The Invention of the Universal Library: Conrad Gesner and Renaissance Print Culture"

22 March 2007
Abby Zanger (Tufts University)
“What is a Book? Repetition and its Compulsions in Sixteenth-Century French Book Illustration”

Other confirmed speakers include Jacob Soll (Rutgers) and Olaf Simmons (Oldenburg University). More information about these talks and other events will be announced in due course.

The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland

A major new reference source, this is the first scholarly history of libraries in these islands to cover the whole period up to the present day. It aims to include libraries of all types (institutional and private), as well as the development of library buildings and furnishing, their user communities – and not least librarians and their colleagues in related areas of endeavour, the evolution of today's profession.

Volume 1, edited by Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber, runs from the beginnings to 1640 - over a millennium, from Celtic and Anglo-Saxon cultures through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the outbreak of the Civil War, and bridging the transition from manuscript to print.

Volume 2, edited by Giles Mandelbrote and Keith Manley, covers more than two centuries from 1640 to 1850, from the turmoil of the mid-17th century through the Restoration and Augustan age to the world of circulating and subscription libraries, and illustrating the wider reach of British libraries across the globe.

The final volume, edited by Alistair Black and Peter Hoare, traces the growth of public libraries after 1850, but also the blossoming of higher education and of specialist libraries of many kinds, not forgetting the arrival of the world of electronic information. This volume brings the story up to the year 2000 - with occasional references to the last six years

Full details here

Call for Papers
SHARP panel at MLA 2007, Chicago

Biography and the History of the Book

Please submit proposals (250 words) for papers that address how the methods of history of the book have affected and revised our understanding of authors' lives and the art of literary biography. How does an understanding of the form and making of books challenge our understanding of authorship, creativity, and the construction of literary lives? How do conditions of copyright and intellectual property impact upon the practice of biography and the understanding of authors’ lives? What is the significance of the historical development of biography, in its material forms, to the construction of literary history and the practice of literary criticism? Proposals should be sent by 2 March 2007 to Michael Winship at books@uts.cc.utexas.edu

Those submitting proposals should confirm that they are currently members in good standing of both MLA and SHARP.

Libellarium
A new book-history journal

Call for Papers:
We are pleased to launch the first call for papers for the newly established journal for the history of written word, books and memory institutions. The Journal, Libellarium, will be published by the University of Zadar, Croatia. For the first issue we are inviting two kinds of papers, both dealing with the history of books. The first should contribute to discussions referring to the substance of book history and its methodological issues (What is the book history today? Could it be an independent scientific discipline? What is the state of research in different countries? Etc.). The second should address a wide range of questions regarding the use of sources in book history. Contributors are encouraged to interpret the topics such as bibliographies as a source for the book history, printers’ catalogues and advertisements as a source for the book history, book dedications and forewords as a source for the book history, missionary reports as a source for the book history and so forth. We welcome papers taking an interdisciplinary approach that productively combine history, literary, and sociology with book history methodologies.

All potential contributors are kindly requested to send an abstracts with a title (500 words maximum) by 1 February 2007 to zvelagic@ffos.hr. The final versions of papers are expected by 5 April 2007.

All contributions should be submitted in English and not exceed 8000 words in length (including notes). Please use Chicago Manual of Style, Author-Date System, available at http://www.libs.uga.edu/ref/chicago.html. Before publication all contributions will be reviewed by two independent referees. The English of the submitted manuscripts should be of a suitable quality for publishing. Please do not hesitate to request further information if needed, and address all correspondence to Zoran Velagić zvelagic@ffos.hr.

Printing Historical Society
2007 Annual General Meeting
St Bride Library
Tuesday, 27 March 2007, 5:00

At 5:30 Tony Edwards, Professor of Textual Studies at DeMonfort University, will speak on “Directions in the study of English incunables.”

All are welcome to the lecture.

Newly Re-Edited
The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth
ed. by Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight
Oxford University Press
Forthcoming, March 2007

Brings together new research on the progresses, entertainments, and pageants of Queen Elizabeth I; encompasses contributions from history, English literature, antiquarian studies, history of art, theatre studies, and history of the book; fully illustrated; includes a select bibliography of secondary material

More than any other English monarch before or since, Queen Elizabeth I used her annual progresses to shape her royal persona and to bolster her popularity and authority. During the spring and summer, accompanied by her court, Elizabeth toured southern England, the Midlands, and parts of the West Country, staying with private and civic hosts, and at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The progresses provided hosts with unique opportunities to impress and influence the Queen, and became occasions for magnificent and ingenious entertainments and pageants, drawing on the skills of architects, artists, and craftsmen, as well as dramatic performances, formal orations, poetic recitations, parades, masques, dances, and bear baiting.

The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I is an interdisciplinary essay collection, drawing together new and innovative work by experts in literary studies, history, theatre and performance studies, art history, and antiquarian studies. As such, it will make a unique and timely contribution to research on the culture and history of Elizabethan England. Chapters include examinations of some of the principal Elizabethan progress entertainments, including the coronation pageant Veritas temporis filia (1559), Kenilworth (1575), Norwich (1578), Cowdray (1591), Bisham (1592), and Harefield (1602), while other chapters consider the themes raised by these events, including the ritual of gift-giving; the conduct of government whilst on progress; the significance of the visual arts in the entertainments; regional identity and militarism; elite and learned women as hosts; the circulation and publication of entertainment and pageant texts; the afterlife of the Elizabethan progresses, including their reappropriation in Caroline England and the documenting of Elizabeth's reign by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antiquarians such as John Nichols, who went on to compile the monumental The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth (1788-1823).

For table of contents click here
For information on the John Nichols Project click here

Call for Papers
Textual Variation: Theological and Social Tendencies?
The 5th Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament
Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing
University of Birmingham
April 16-19, 2007

Proposals are invited for papers of 30 or 45 minutes, as well as workshops on research in progress. Send proposals to H.A.G.Houghton@bham.ac.uk

Dante's Monarchia
A new digital edition by Prue Shaw now available [here]

This digital edition of Dante's Monarchia contains Prue Shaw's acclaimed edited text and translation of Dante's remarkable treatise on political theory. Shaw's text is supported by full transcripts of the text of all twenty manuscripts and of the 1559 editio princeps, together with digital images of all pages, many of them newly made in high-resolution full colour. A full word-by-word collation shows all variants at every word, viewable in either the original manuscript spelling or in the standardised form found in the edited text. Variant search and variant map features offer new ways of exploring the textual tradition. Extensive editorial commentaries analyse the relations among the surviving texts, presenting the editorial rationale which guided the choice of readings contained in the edited text. Throughout, the publication interface provides access to every word in every version, to the variants on every word, and to tools and commentaries permitting exploration of the different versions.