This term Cambridge University Library will be holding two masterclasses as part of the Incunabula Project.

The first masterclass, entitled “Incunabula from Bavaria – how to identify provenances and reconstruct 15th-century collections”, will be led by Bettina Wagner, of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

The German state of Bavaria was not only a region where presses were set up soon after the invention of printing in Mainz, but also the site of some major collections of printed books. Many monasteries and some private owners built up substantial libraries in the 15th century, benefitting from a dense trade network and well-established connections to Italy. However, as a result of auctions and the dissolution of monasteries in the early 19th century, many books from Bavaria were dispersed and have ended up in collections in the UK and other countries. In order to reconstruct these historical collections, painstaking work is necessary. Marks of provenance and bindings have to be documented and identified, and archival records must be analyzed. The masterclass will introduce participants to the techniques and tools used for such research and thus help to place incunabula from the ULC’s collections into the wider context of late mediaeval collection building and book usage.

The seminar will be held in the Milstein Seminar Rooms at the Library on Tuesday, 4 February at 2.30 pm.

The second masterclass, entitled “Libri sine asseribus – incunables in early bindings without wooden boards”, will be led by Nicholas Pickwoad, director of the Ligatus Research Centre at the University of the Arts, London.

The standard image of the fifteenth-century book is of a large volume with wooden boards covered in white or brown skin, tooled in blind, with metal furniture, clasps and possibly a chain shackle. This is also the book that appears in contemporary painting and sculpture and became so fixed in the popular imagination that it survived as the symbol of the bible in trade signs right through to the eighteenth century, if not beyond. There were, however, other types of binding that were used by the booktrade to give cheap, lightweight protection to books as they moved through the book trade. Whilst not necessarily intended to be temporary, few have survived today and reconstructing their history is difficult. Enough however have come down to us to allow a picture of the rich diversity of binding types used for this purpose to be created and to give an indication of how they were presented to their first owners.

This seminar will be held in the Keynes Room at the Library on Tuesday 18 February at 2.30pm .

Both seminars will last approximately 90 minutes, allowing time for questions and discussion. Attendance will be limited in order to allow
all attendees a chance to see the books concerned up close, and to participate in the discussion.

To book a place on either seminar, please email<incunabula@lib.cam.ac.uk>.

Wednesday 29 January 2014

Dr. Fei-Hsien Wang (Centre for History and Economics & Magdalene College, U. of Cambridge)

‘Hunting Pirates in Beijing: Shanghai Booksellers’ Private ‘Copyright’ Police (1930-1937)’

All seminars take place on Wednesdays (unless otherwise arranged) at 5pm in rooms 8 & 9 in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Tea will be served at the same venue at 4:45pm. All are welcome.

Cambridge University Library’s Entrance Hall cases are hosting what is believed to be the first ever exhibition of colour printmaking in Tudor England, 1485-1603. These brightly printed pictures transform our understanding of the spread of technologies of visual communication in the English Renaissance. The exhibition is curated by Dr Elizabeth Upper and presents aspects of her research as the 2012/13 Munby Fellow of Bibliography at Cambridge University Library.

The exhibition can be viewed during Library opening hours until 18 January 2014. See https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk and, for further information, https://specialcollections.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=6612#more-6612.

Writing Britain is a biannual event which aims to draw on a range of approaches and perspectives to exchange ideas about manuscript studies, material culture, multilingualism in texts and books, book history, readers, audience and scribes across the medieval period. The 2014 iteration of the Writing Britain Conference will take place in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge under the auspices of the Centre for Material Texts. Some of the topics which we are keen to explore are literary and non-literary agencies and their significance and/or relevance in the medieval period across British medieval written culture in English, French, Latin, Norse and the Celtic languages. More broadly, we are interested in other questions such as: How did local writers, compilers and readers use writing to inscribe regional identity within broader conventions or, on the other hand, impress ‘universal’ practices and constructs on local populations? What were the different markets for books? Can we characterize their developments and differences? What new or existing methodologies can be employed to localise texts and books across Britain? What is the role of the Digital Humanities in the study of medieval book culture?

Plenary speakers: Jonathan Wilcox (University of Iowa), Richard Beadle (University of Cambridge) and Simon Horobin (University of Oxford)

We welcome proposals from scholars working on any aspects of British medieval written culture up to 1500. Please visit our conference web site in order to submit an abstract (300 words or fewer) for a twenty-minute paper. Please send your abstract by 20 February 2014. Abstracts from postgraduate students are welcome and graduate rates will be provided. For further information please visit the website where contact details of the organisers will also be available.

CAMBRIDGE, 28–30 NOVEMBER 2013

http://innerasiaresearch.org/ 

The workshop will focus on the introduction of printing and will bring together the world specialists on early Tibetan printing, leading scholars on the materiality and technology of the book in Asia as well as experts in paper and pigment research.

The first part of the workshop will be dedicated to updating current knowledge on early Tibetan printing. It aims at exploring the introduction of this technology in the Tibetan context as a socio-cultural process, something that has never been done before. We will identify indicators to cast light on open questions such as whether Tibetan printing in the 15^th and 16^th century was a small scale operation or something that had broader involvement and went together with the spread of literate forms of popular religiosity, standardization of monastic curricula and the emergence of certain works as classics.

The second part of the workshop will look at the introduction of printing in Asian contexts cross-culturally, comparing and contrasting (where possible) different experiences, with an eye to recent research on the European ‘printing revolution’ and the debates surrounding it.

Limited places available, please e-mail Michela Clemente if you would like to attend.

The Contemporaries Research Group is hosting a panel discussion on the state of literary fiction today and its response to the digital revolution on Thursday 14th November 6.30pm in the ENGLISH FACULTY G06/7. Everyone is welcome.

The book trade has always never stood still, has always evolved to survive and thrive, maybe now more than ever.  The transition to digital is very much on-going and is changing the way readers access and consume literature.

But will these changes be good for literary fiction, will they encourage more people to try more challenging fiction or will the temptations of an easier, cheaper read – or of Pinterest/Instagram/Snapchat/blogs/Netflix/Spotify  etc – mean that literary fiction becomes a more minor sport than it has been recently?

A panel featuring Rachel Calder, literary agent and proprietor of the Sayle Literary Agency, Jill Dawson, award-winning author of The Great Lover and Fred and Edie, Carole Welsh, Publishing Director of Sceptre, and Kasia Boddy, academic and book reviewer, will discuss questions of format and pricing of books, choice and control on social media and
online communities, technology, disruption and engagement to try to assess how well literary fiction might fare in the new digital world.

Join in the conversation at http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/contemporary/

During the summer holidays Cambridge University Library will be holding three masterclasses as part of the Incunabula Project.

With the help of treasures from the incunabula collection in the University Library, Professor Lilian Armstrong, Doctor Falk Eisermann, and Professor William Sherman will respectively illustrate the development of Venetian book ornamentation in the late 15th and early 16th century, the centrality of the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke Database to bibliographical research and/or cataloguing projects, and the significance of contemporary readers’ interventions and additions to their books.

The three classes will take place in the afternoon of Tuesday 25th June, Thursday 4th July, and Thursday 11th July respectively.

The first masterclass, on Tuesday 25th June, is entitled “Hand Illumination on Venetian Incunabula in Cambridge University Library”, and will be led by Lilian Armstrong, Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Art at Wellesley College, Emerita, a leading authority in the History of Italian illumination. Her research concentrates in particular on book decoration in Venice in the second half of the 15th century, following the invention of printing with movable type. The seminar will be held in the Keynes Room from 2.30pm to around 4pm. This is a repeat of the class originally held on 4 June.

The second class will be led by Doctor Falk Eisermann, Head of the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (Union Catalogue of Incunabula) at the Berlin State Library. Doctor Eisermann’s seminar, entitled ”The Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW) database: structure, contents, retrieval strategies”, will illustrate how the GW can be fruitfully researched and used by bibliographers and cataloguers of incunable material. The seminar will take place in the Milstein Room on Thursday 4th July between 2.30pm and 4pm.

The last class of the series, entitled “The Reader’s Eye: Between Annotation and Illustration”, will be held on Thursday 11th July by William Sherman, Professor of Renaissance/Early Modern Studies in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Professor Shermann will investigate readers’ marginalia as a visual as well as a verbal phenomenon and how their correlation to the book or a particular passage of its text. This class will be held in the Keynes Room from 4pm to around 5.30pm.

Attendance will be limited in order to allow all attendees a chance to see the books under discussion up close, and to participate in the discussion.

To book your place, please email <incunabula@lib.cam.ac.uk>.

On Tuesday 4 June 2013, Cambridge University Library will be holding its 9th masterclass as part of the Incunabula Project.

The masterclass, entitled “Hand Illumination on Venetian Incunabula in Cambridge University Library”, will be led by Lilian Armstrong, Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Art at Wellesley College, Emerita, and a leading authority in the History of Italian Illumination. Her research concentrates in particular on book decoration in Venice in the second half of the 15th century, following the invention of printing with movable type.

With the help of treasures from the incunabula collection in the University Library, Professor Armostrong will illustrate the development of Venetian book ornamentation and its transition from hand painted decoration to woodcut illustration in the late 15th and early 16th century.

The seminar will be held in the Keynes Room at the Library. It will start at 2.30pm and will last approximately 90 minutes, allowing time for questions and discussion. Attendance will be limited in order to allow all attendees a chance to see the books under discussion up close, and to participate in the discussion.

To book your place, please email <incunabula@lib.cam.ac.uk> For more information, please visit <https://inc.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/> <http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/incunabula_project.html>

Floreat Bibliomania – Great Collectors and their Grand Designs

A centenary conference in memory of A.N.L. (Tim) Munby, 1913-1974

King’s College, Cambridge, 28-29 June 2013

Tim Munby pioneered the historical study of British book collecting and the use of sale catalogues within bibliographical research. He was Fellow and Librarian of King’s College, Cambridge, from 1947 to 1974, Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford 1962-63, a Founding Trustee of the British Library, President of the Bibliographical Society and co-founder of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society.

King’s College, Cambridge will hold a conference on 28-29 June 2013 to mark the centenary of Munby’s birth. The event will include papers by distinguished speakers, several exhibits, a private tour of the Founder’s Library at the Fitzwilliam Museum and a celebratory dinner.

For details and a booking form, please visit www.kingsmembers.org/munby2013

CMT GRAND DAY OUT 2013

The AHRC-funded exhibition ‘The Brownlows in Italy: Books and Continental Travel’, curated by Abigail Brundin and Dunstan Roberts as part of the CMT National Trust Libraries project, runs at Belton House in Lincolnshire until 3 November 2013.

So that CMT members can enjoy a private view of the house and the exhibition, we are organizing a day-trip to Belton on *Monday 10 June*. Minibuses will leave from Chesterton Road at 8.30, returning to Cambridge by 5.

The visit is free, but pre-booking is required and places are limited. Please drop a line to Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003) and Abigail Brundin (asb17@cam.ac.uk) if you would like to come.

For more information about the house and the project, see > http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/belton-house/ and http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=2925. A poster for the exhibition can be downloaded here.