From this week until the end of term, the Centre will be offering tea and biscuits every Wednesday between 4 and 5 pm, in the Solarium, Queens’ College.

The weekly CMTea will give people for members and those who would like to join to meet informally, discuss
current projects, and perhaps to dream up new ones. Please bring along any information about forthcoming events, funding opportunities, etc that might be of interest to other members. And if you’ve just come across some
brilliant book or article in the field, bring it too and spread the news.

We know that not everyone will be able to come every week, but please do put the date in your diaries and drop by at some point during the term.

Thursday 27 January, 5:30pm, SR-24, Faculty of English
Harriet Phillips: ‘Waste Paper: Early Modern Broadsides as Popular Print’; and Marie Léger-St-Jean: ‘“long for the penny number and the weekly woodcut”: Early Victorian Popular Authors and their Readers’

Thursday 24 February, 5:30pm
Managing curious collections: Stuart Stone (Radzinowicz Library): a visit to the collection of ‘banned books’ from the Home Office; Katie Birkwood (St John’s College Library), on managing the Fred Hoyle Collection of papers, books and other material texts.

(Please note that the seminar on 24 February will begin at 5.30pm in the Radzinowicz Library at the front of the Institute of Criminology on the Sidgwick Site, for a ‘show and tell’ of banned books, and will move for the second presentation and discussion to the Faculty of English.)

All welcome. For information, this term contact Sarah Cain (stc22@cam.ac.uk)

Postponed from 2010, this seminar will consider the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice of customizing books with images and texts cut from other sources, with two of the leading experts in the field:

Dr Luisa Cale (Birkbeck): ‘Reading and Cutting through the Page: William Blake and the extra-illustrated book’

Dr Lucy Peltz (National Portrait Gallery): ‘Facing the Text: the origins and rise of extra-illustration c.1770-1840’

Extra-illustrated materials from the UL’s collections will be on display.

Friday 28 January 5 pm – Morison Room – University Library

All welcome. To register for the seminar, please email Mina Gorji (mg473@cam.ac.uk).

Download a poster here.

Early Modern European History Seminar, this week:

Karen Bowen: ‘Images as records of social history: the case of representations of Dutch pedlars with paper wares’

Leslie Stephen Room, Trinity Hall, 1pm (participants are welcome to bring lunch)

Karen Bowen is co-author with Dirk Imhof of Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

The CMT is planning to offer occasional bespoke training seminars for graduate students confronting bibliographical, palaeographical, editorial or otherwise textual challenges in the course of their research.

These seminars will be held in the Wren Library in Trinity College, and will be hosted by the Wren Librarian, Professor David McKitterick.

If you think that you might benefit from such a seminar, you are invited to come to a preliminary meeting at 11am on Wednesday 3 November in SR-25 (second floor), Faculty of English, 9 West Rd.

Please email Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) if you are able to come on the 3rd.

‘Therein lies a tale’: literary manuscripts at St John’s College

As part of the University Festival of Ideas St John’s College Library will be holding an exhibition of literary manuscripts and rare books on Tuesday 26 October, with a free evening talk examining some of the items in more detail. The exhibition spans seven hundred years of English literature, including medieval manuscripts of Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost, first editions of Dickens and T.S. Eliot, a Philip Larkin holograph, and the science fiction of Douglas Adams and Fred Hoyle.

The exhibition will be held in the beautiful seventeenth-century Old Library of the College. In the evening Dr James Harmer (St John’s) will speak about a sixteenth-century manuscript of Sackvilles ‘Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham’, and Dr Ian Patterson (Queens’) will discuss ‘T.S. Eliot, the Hogarth Press, and Poetry Publishing’.

Exhibition open 10am-1pm, 2pm-4pm and 7pm-8pm in the Old Library, St John’s College

Free public talk at 6pm in the Fisher Building, St John’s College

All welcome.

to all CMT members, old, new & would-be:

You are warmly invited for C  M  TEA

in the ground-floor Social Space of the English Faculty

9 West Road, Cambridge

on Tuesday 26 October 2010, 4.30 – 6 pm

This term’s seminars in the History of Material Texts are as follows.

Thursday 14 Oct, 5.30, room SR-24 in the Faculty of English Prof. Anne Coldiron (Florida State University) Printers Without Borders: Translation and Literary Transnationalism in the Long Sixteenth Century

Thursday 11 Nov, 5.30, room SR-24 in the Faculty of English Prof. Jim Secord (HPS, University of Cambridge) Nebular Visions: Image and Text in John Pringle Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens

All are welcome. The seminar is a forum for research across disciplines and across periods, for all those interested in the history of the book, bibliography, histories and theories of reading, and the intersections between intellectual history and material culture, including the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, editing and subsequent history of texts as material objects in manuscript, print, digital media or other forms.

For information, contact this term Daniel Wakelin (dlw22@cam.ac.uk).

The first Humanitas Visiting Professor at Cambridge, Dr Mathias Döpfner (Chair and CEO, Axel Springer Media Group), will give 3 lectures (free and open to all) in Michaelmas term:

Monday 11 October, 17:00-19:00: ‘Freedom and the internet’

Palmerston Room, Fisher Building, St John’s College, Cambridge

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1469/

Tuesday 12 October, 17:00-19:00: ‘Print journalism and the digital word’

Room 3, Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, 8 Mill Lane, Cambridge

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1470/

Monday 1 November , 17:00-19:00: ‘The transformation of the media business’

LT3, Judge Business School, Trumpington St, Cambridge

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1471/

The lecture series will be followed by a part-day symposium:

Tuesday 2 November    The digital revolution and its futures: a symposium

LT3, Judge Business School, Trumpington St, Cambridge

Full details of the symposium will be available shortly on the CRASSH website

For further details about the scheme or the events above, please contact CRASSH Administrator, Catherine Hurley (ch335@cam.ac.uk).

THE 2010 PANIZZI LECTURES

London Booksites. Places of Printing and Publication before 1800.

A series of three lectures by Professor James Raven

At 18.15 in the Conference Centre, British Library, Euston Road

This series of lectures offers fresh perspectives on the early modern and eighteenth-century book trade in England. London dominated this industry, but relatively little has been known about the commercial environments in which books were published. Using a range of new illustrative and topographical evidence, James Raven will reconstruct the different communities of London printers, booksellers and their associates, reassessing working practices and the changes brought to different neighbourhoods.

James Raven FSA FRHistS is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust. His recent publications include The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850 (London and New Haven, 2007); Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Book Collections since Antiquity (London, 2004), and London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748-1811 (Columbia, SC, 2002)

Lecture One

Wednesday 27 October 2010 18.15-19.30

ANTIENT SHOPS AND CONVERSIBLE MEN

The first lecture will revisit ancient book trade sites from Westminster, St Paul’s Churchyard and London Bridge to Fleet Street and the emergent district of Little Britain at the end of the seventeenth century. Many traditional locations, including Paternoster Row, came to host new businesses and new social activities.

Lecture Two

Wednesday 3 November 2010 18.15-19.30

VERSATILITY AND THE GLOOMY STORES OF LITERATURE

The second lecture will show how the transformation in publishing capacity (from the Strand to Cornhill) relates to different sites of production and to different ways of making books public. Booksellers found new opportunities to alter shops and operations, and the working environment brought new challenges and difficulties.

Lecture Three

Wednesday 10 November 2010 18.15-19.30

INDUSTRY, FASHION, AND PETTIFOGGING DRIVELLERS

This final lecture examines changing activities in both ancient and newly built parts of London in the eighteenth century. The siting of bookshops and printing houses allowed sharing and support; and trade was boosted by nearby markets and services. Increased industry also brought fresh participants, not all of whom won approval.

Free Admission

Please note that these events are not ticketed and seats will be allocated on the night on a first come, first served basis.