Call for Papers
Possession and Distribution of Books: doctoral workshop
31 October 2007
Helsinki, Finland

The Nordic-Baltic-Russian Network on the History of Books, Libraries and Reading (HIBOLIRE) will arrange on October 31st 2007 a doctoral workshop in Helsinki under the theme 'Possession and Distribution of Books'. The workshop seeks to promote regional book history studies. It offers a possibility to deliver a presentation of an ongoing Ph.D. research for an international audience and receive comments from the participants and a specific commentator from the HIBOLIRE network.

The workshop is arranged in conjunction with the decennial Jubilee Seminar of the Finnish Book Historical Association on November 1st - 2nd 2007. The participants of the workshop are welcome to participate in the Jubilee Seminar as well.

Abstracts for the doctoral workshop, max. 500 words, and a short CV, should be sent via E-mail to Jyrki Hakapää [jyrki.hakapaa(at)helsinki.fi] until April 10th 2007. Notifications of acceptance will be sent in May. Eligible are all interested doctoral students, but priority is given to students from the HIBOLIRE countries and institutions represented in the network. The network can support travel costs of doctoral students coming from the member institutions. The workshop will also include the yearly meeting of the board of HIBOLIRE and a general meeting of members.

Collecting Revolution: The History and Importance of the Thomason Tracts
7-8 July 2008
British Library & University College London, London

The pamphlet collection amassed by the London bookseller George Thomason is of unparalleled importance, and has helped to ensure that the civil wars and interregnum remain central to the study of British history. Nevertheless, this is generally reflected in scholarly exploitation of the tracts, rather than in critical analysis of them. This conference seeks to explore a variety of approaches to the Thomason collection, including the man and his milieu, his role as a publisher and bookseller, his aims and methods as a collector, the fate of his collection, and its significance to subsequent generations of scholars.

Institute for Advanced Study Opportunities 2008-09

THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY is an independent private institution founded in 1930 to create a community of scholars focused on intellectual inquiry, without the obligations and distractions associated with the teaching of undergraduates. Each year scholars from around the world apply to come to the Institute to pursue their own research. Those who are chosen are offered a membership for a set period and a stipend. Members receive access to the extensive resources of the Institute including offices, access to libraries, subsidized restaurant and housing facilities, and some secretarial services.

THE SCHOOL OF HISTORICAL STUDIES supports scholarship in all fields of historical research, but is concerned principally with the history of western, near eastern and far eastern civilizations, with particular emphasis upon Greek and Roman civilization, the history of Europe (medieval, early modern, and modern), the Islamic world, East Asian studies, the history of art, the history of science, and modern international relations. The School also offers the Edward T. Cone Membership in Music Studies. Each year the School welcomes approximately forty Members. Most are working on topics in the above mentioned fields but each year the School also selects some scholars working in other areas of historical research. Members in the School are appointed for either one term (first term Sept. 22 to Dec. 19, second term Jan. 5 to April 3) or for two terms, amounting to a full academic year.

ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS include the Ph.D. (or equivalent) at the time of application and a substantial record of publication. The School takes into account the stage of the scholar’s academic career when considering the list of publications, but in general applicants should have at least several articles already published in scholarly publications in order to be considered eligible. Qualified candidates of any nationality are invited to apply. Scholars are not required to have a current institutional affiliation.

MEMBERS ARE EXPECTED to remain in residence in Princeton during term time. Members’ only other obligation is to pursue their own research. If they wish, they may also participate in seminars and meetings within the Institute, and there are ample opportunities for contacts with scholars at nearby universities.

FUNDING FOR MEMBERS comes from a variety of sources including the Institute for Advanced Study’s own endowment, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Thyssen Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The School will also welcome scholars sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies through the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowships for recently tenured professors. (Applications for that program must be submitted directly to ACLS. For information see the ACLS website at http://www.acls.org/burkguide.htm.)

INSTITUTE STIPENDS will normally be offered up to a maximum of $60,000 for the full academic year, or $30,000 for one term. A few senior scholars will be offered additional funding to help make up for losses in salary. Up to three Assistant Professors who meet additional eligibility requirements will be selected for Mellon Fellowships that will provide full year support matching their salaries and benefits at the time of application. (Detailed information about this program is on the website: http://www.hs.ias.edu/mellon.htm.) Stipends may be supplemented by other grants, including sabbatical salaries, but if the total exceeds the salary at the time of application the stipend will be reduced accordingly.

Further information and application materials may be found on the School’s web site, www.hs.ias.edu. Inquiries may be sent by email to the Administrative Officer at mzelazny@ias.edu or by post to: School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540. Completed applications must be submitted by 15 November 2007.

British Printed Images to 1700

British Printed Images to 1700 is a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council which by 2009 will make available online in fully searchable form over 12,000 printed images from early modern Britain. It represents a collaboration between Birkbeck (University of London), the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (King’s College London), the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. For further details see the project website.

On Friday, 13, and Saturday, 14 July 2007, a conference will be held at Birkbeck, University of London, devoted to research on the visual culture of early modern Britain with particular reference to printed images. Papers will range from engravings of the Duke of Buckingham and caricatures of Sir Roger L’Estrange to the plates in the 1684 edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the influence of illustrations in Protestant conduct books on domestic decoration. Other topics will include Hollar’s prospects of London, the depiction of animals, and the graphic work of Robert Hooke. A prototype of the interface by which images will be accessed on the project website will also be divulged, and there will be a special display of relevant prints in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. For the complete programme, see ‘Events’ on the project website.

The cost of registration, including lunch on both days, refreshments, and a wine reception on the evening of Friday, 13, is £79.50. A reduced rate is available for those attending for one day only, for students, and for those who register by 1 June 2007. There will be a display of posters on aspects of the production and consumption of printed images in early modern Britain, and offers of these are welcome. For further details and for registration, see the project website, www.bpi1700.org.uk. Alternatively, contact m.hunter@bbk.ac.uk or spigney@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk, or write to British Printed Images to 1700, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, U.K.

NEH Research Fellowship at Saint Louis University, 2007-08
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Saint Louis University

The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies invites applications for six fellowships of five weeks duration to conduct research in the collections of the Vatican Film Library or in the rare book and manuscript collections of Pius XII Memorial Library at Saint Louis University. The Vatican Film Library holds extensive portions of the Vatican Library’s medieval and Renaissance manuscripts on microfilm. In addition, it has one of the largest collections of microfilmed Jesuit historical documents from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

Eligibility:
Applicants must possess an earned doctorate or be a Ph.D.-candidate at the dissertation stage. Topics proposed for research may include any subject in areas such as paleography, codicology, illumination, text editing, history, philosophy, theology, science, literature, scriptural and patristic studies, Roman and Canon law, etc. Highest priority will be given to applicants who can identify specific materials in the collections and who possess the requisite paleographic and linguistic skills to take full advantage of them. Scholars affiliated with St. Louis University or who reside within commuting distance of St. Louis University are not eligible for these fellowships.

Details available here

Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book
Thursday, 22 March
4:30 p.m.
Alexander Library - Pane Room

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

Abstract:
This talk concerns the reuse or reiteration of images across the "corpus" of one prolific and influential early 16th century Parisian printer-bookseller, Denis Janot. Active in Paris in the first half of the 16th century, Janot's career spanned a transitional moment for the early modern book in general, and for the Parisian book more specifically, where the period of the incunable has been extended into the 1530's. He produced books in a time when the material object we recognize today as a printed book was not yet fully developed. Janot played a crucial role in the evolution of this emerging object. As a follower of Geoffroy Tory, the renowned innovator of graphic design for print, Janot was a proponent of innovations such as Roman lettering and of "modern" spelling. He was also known for his development of the illustrated title page and for pioneering the extensive use of the woodblock vignette, a fixed decorative formula that distinguished the illustration of the printed book from that of the manuscript. Janot's books are known for their use of illustration and indeed he had a store of over 900 woodcuts he both inherited and commissioned. In this talk I will trace how these images got shifted both within and among books published by Janot. For example, often, the same woodcut might shift from a romance novel to an emblem book and then a work of political theory. I will choose three or four such examples of repetition and analyze their implications for how early modern readers might have read not just individual books within Janot's popular "corpus," but across that group of books with which they would have been familiar.

The central thesis of the paper is that, followed to its logical consequences, Janot's extensive recycling of images requires us to rethink how we understand the book as an emerging object in the early years of the 16th century, unsettling our modern notion of the book object as a discrete and autonomous unit.

More info

Call for Papers
The Culture of the Publisher's Series 1700-2000
An International Conference to be held on 18 -19 October 2007 at the Institute of English Studies, University of London

In the early 18th century, British publishers began gathering books together in themed series and packaging and marketing them as distinct, recognisable groups. The effects of this phenomenon were remarkable; it has been estimated that by the mid-nineteenth century there were upward of 3,000 publishers' series in Britain alone, and the phenomenon is of course still with us today. During this 300-year period the culture of the publisher's series has opened up new possibilities for authors, publishers, distributors and readers worldwide, helped to establish a wide range of traditions from the establishment of national literary canons to the development of feminist lists, and influenced the kinds of literature we teach to the next generation of scholars

While some publishers' series have been investigated in depth, there have been few opportunities for the work of individual scholars to be placed in meaningful dialogue. This major two-day conference seeks to encourage international scholars from all disciplines to examine the culture of the publisher's series globally with a view to furthering understanding of its historical, ideological, generic and geographical reach.

We welcome offers of individual papers or paper panels from both new and established scholars. Topics may include (but are not confined to): the development of individual or linked publishers' series anywhere in the world; the relationship between series and imprint; design/aesthetics; changes in national and international copyright law; emergent readerships and genres worldwide; changes in production and transport methods; notions of literary taste; canon formation; education reform; social and political change; prefaces, introductions and editorial policies.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words and short speaker biographies to be sent electronically by March 31st, 2007 to both organisers at the following addresses

Dr Mary Hammond (m.e.hammond@open.ac.uk) and Professor John Spiers (jr.spiers@virgin.net).

Swann Auction Galleries
104 East 25th Street New York, NY 10010

Nostradamus Early Printed Book Sale
April 23, 2007
Offers 16th-18th century Books from the Nostradamus Library of the late Daniel Ruzo, the finest private collection devoted to the 16th-century French astrologer and seer, followed by a general section of Early Printed Books.

More info here

The Library of Leander van Ess and American Collections of the Earliest Reformation Pamphlets
by Milton McC. Gatch
BSA Occasional Publications
Oakknoll Press, February 2007

Reformation pamphlets were among the first rare book acquisitions of American libraries. Gatch traces the remarkable history of the Leander van Ess collection purchased by the Union Theological Seminary in 1838, the first and largest collection of these religious tracts to arrive in America. He notes how they were originally obtained by van Ess, a Catholic priest, translator of the Bible, and a former Benedictine monk, who built an impressive personal collection of books and manuscripts when monastic libraries were being dispersed during the Napoleonic wars. He has also identified a significant group of pamphlets assembled at Wittenberg during the 1520s, Luther’s most creative period. Never before accurately described, the surviving pamphlets from this collection are listed here in the order of van Ess’s own catalogue, with a set of indexes to authors and printers, and with concordances to major bibliographical resources. Gatch reviews the history of Reformation pamphlet collecting in the United States from these earliest efforts up to the beginning of the twentieth century, and reflects on how these primary resources were used (or neglected) by American church historians. An extensive bibliography and a detailed index of the introductory essays are included.

This is the first of the Bibliographical Society of America Occasional Publications. The next volume in this series will be: Melissa Conway & Lisa Fagin Davis, Directory of North American Institutions Holding Pre-1600 Manuscripts.

The Medieval and Early Modern Culture of the Book
A Conference in Honor of W. Speed Hill
CUNY Graduate Center
Friday, March 9
4:00 p.m. (Skylight Room)

Keynote Speakers:

Seth Lerer, Stanford University
"From Medieval to Early Modern: Books and Readers of the 1550s"

Margreta de Grazia, University of Pennsylvania
"Common-placing Shakespeare's Sonnets"

A Companion to the History of the Book
ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose
Blackwell, forthcoming May 2007

From the early Sumerian clay tablet through to the emergence of the electronic text, this Blackwell Companion provides a continuous and coherent account of the history of the book.

More information here

TEXTE Research Fellowships

The Moore Institute for Humanities and Social Studies at the National University of Ireland [link], Galway, currently hosts an EU-funded project entitled TEXTE (Transfer of Expertise in Technologies of Editing). The project is seeking applicants for six research fellowships in the areas of textual editing, digital textuality and hypermedia construction:

Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (for 24 months each) – three posts
[closing date 1 April 2007]

Senior Research Fellowships (for 6 months each) – two posts
[closing date 1 August 2007]

For further details on all posts and application procedures, please email the project director, Sean Ryder:

Dr Sean Ryder
Department of English
National University of Ireland, Galway
Tel: +353-91-493009
Fax: +353-91-524102
email: sean.ryder@nuigalway.ie

Call for Papers
Imagining Readers, Imagining Nations, 1750-1850

This one-day conference to be held on Saturday May 5, 2007 at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada is the second in a series of focused conferences arising from the Research Cluster, "Imagining Communities, Imagining the State, 1750-1850."

Papers are invited from all disciplines on the interface between imagined readers and the "imagined communities" of nations, states, and other social formations between 1750 and 1850. "Imagined readers" can be interpreted as any form of projected or "inscribed" reader, readership (of, say, periodical reviews and magazines), "reading audience" (in the sense Jon Klancher has given to this phrase), or indeed any actual historical readers as meditated through extant reviews, letters, journals, notebooks, etc. "Nations" may be interpreted as any of those imaginary socio-political entities that coalesced during this period, or any subset or metonym of the ideas of "nation," state," "country," "dominion," "patria," "people," "custom," "tradition," "volk," or, in more recent terms, "culture," "race," "dialect" or "ethnic identity." The "interface" between these idea-clusters can take the form of a promotion of, or a resistance to, the hegemonic ideas of "nation" that have come to define post-1850 modernity, or any combination of these two extremes.

Since this conference is oriented towards the active and practical creation of a research network, we welcome presentations of work in progress, projects seeking collaborators, or papers constructed and presented in such a way as to be open to exchange and input.

Please send a one-page proposal indicating the nature of your project and your method of presentation by March 30th, 2007 to:

Robert Lapp
Department of English Literatures
Mount Allison University
Sackville, NB, E4L 1G9
rlapp@mta.ca

Forum Livres Anciens
Recently added resources include:

Guillaume Anabat [link]

Editions des Coutumes de Bretagne [link]

Impressions d'Alain Lotrian [link]

Jehan Meschinot: Les Lunettes des princes [link]