Seminars take place on Thursdays within term at 5:30 in S-R24 in the Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge.

For more information, contact Daniel Wakelin, Faculty of English (dlw22@cam.ac.uk) or Sarah Cain, Corpus Christi College (stc22@cam.ac.uk).

5 May Professor James Raven (University of Essex): The Sites of Printing and Bookselling in London in the Eighteenth Century

19 May Reading group on recent work on paratexts and the history of the book. Texts for discussion (below) are online via the Faculty Library’s CamTools site: please email Sarah Cain (stc22@cam.ac.uk) for further details or hard copy.
– William Sherman, ‘On the Threshold: Architecture, Paratext, and Early Print Culture’, in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Baron/Lindquist/Shevlin (Amherst, 2007), 67-81; and
– Franco Moretti, ‘Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740-1850)’, and Katie Trumpener, ‘Critical Response I: Paratext and Genre System: A Response to Franco Moretti’, Critical Inquiry, 36 (2009), 134-74.

Postdoctoral Fellow in the History and Future of the Book (2011-12, renewable)

The Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, funded by a Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), seeks a post-doctoral fellow in the History and Future of the Book, with expertise in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. This position is based in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. The successful candidate is anticipated to work closely with team members at U Toronto, Acadia U, U Saskatchewan, U Victoria, U Western Ontario, and beyond. The postdoctoral fellow’s work will bridge between digital humanities and the history of books and reading, collaborating with INKE’s Textual Studies team, consulting with project stakeholders and potential stakeholders, and liaising with other INKE researchers located in North America and the UK. The fellow will be expected to teach a light course load in the Faculty of Information and the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture, to be remunerated in addition to the fellowship’s salary.

The original ad may be found here: http://www.ischool.utoronto.ca/alumni-careers/work-at-the-ischool

to Dan Wakelin, who is leaving Cambridge to take up the Jeremy Griffiths Professorship of Medieval English Palaeography at Oxford. Dan has been a convenor of the History of the Book/HMT seminar for many years, and has been a key player in the CMT from the start. We will miss him greatly, but hope that this will be the start of many a collaboration.

“…of things which they were not in quest of”: digital serendipity and digital design

In the simplest terms, the Bodleian Libraries’ Electronic Enlightenment Project digitizes letters, largely of the 18th century. More intriguingly, it uses what we call “scholarly technology” to reconstruct what may be the world’s first global, social network – stretching from the early 17th to the early 19th centuries! And in that process, rediscovers conversations and correspondents previously lost, or only available to the most erudite researcher. In this presentation, we will introduce our concept and application of “scholarly technology”, and consider how the design and development of this kind of digital resource can result in a system so culturally dense as to positively encourage serendipitous discoveries.

SPEAKERS: Dr Robert V. McNamee, Director

Mark Rogerson, Technical Editor

Electronic Enlightenment Project, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

DATE: 5 May, 2011. 5.15-6.30pm. Helmore 201, East Road, Anglia Ruskin University

The Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute (Anglia Ruskin University) and the Centre for Material Texts (University of Cambridge) present:

THE BOOK PUBLISHING HISTORIES SEMINAR SERIES

Seminar 1: Renaissance Texts and Publishing

Monday 23rd May 2011 5-6.45pm, Morison Room, Cambridge University Library

Professor Jane Taylor (Durham University) on matters of taste in sixteenth-century publishing

and

Professor Eugene Giddens (Anglia Ruskin University) on preparing digital editions of early modern literature

For more information please contact Dr Leah Tether: leah.tether@anglia.ac.uk

Elegies for that soon-to-be-defunct artefact, the book, frequently wax lyrical about its most evanescent quality: the smell of the pages. Robert Darnton, in The Case for Books, refers to a survey of French students in which 43% of respondents said that the lack of scent put them off electronic books; he also reports that one French online publisher distributes a sticker that gives off a ‘fusty, bookish smell’, to ease the transition to the new medium. You can buy ‘a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer’ (see http://smellofbooks.com/) for the same purpose. Or you can join around 100 other people mulling on the mystique of the bookish aroma at LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/topic/10361).

For Richard Lanham, ‘our cultural vitals are isomorphic with the codex book. Its very feel and heft and look and smell are talismanic’. A friend of mine once complained that modern writers overuse the word ‘heft’–presumably because, in its simplicity and unfamiliarity, it carries some of the physical weight that it describes. And I’ve always felt that the book-smell argument was a rather desperate, last-ditch defence of the book. Surely we can do better than that!

But now the final nail is being hammered into the coffin of my cynicism, as the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld announces a new perfume, ‘Paper Passion’, based on the smell of the book, and sold encased in a hollowed-out hardback. The genuine bibliophile will be able to wear the scent of the codex on their person, and the nostalgia that clings to paper, dust and glue will be sublimated into the stuff of love.

Those guys at Amazon had better be very afraid…

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/karl-lagerfeld-to-create-fragrance-that-smells-of-books-2270503.html

CMT members – and particularly followers of our fledgling ‘Illegibles’ section – may be interested to learn something of the technique of multi-spectral digital imaging.  It has been employed in the study of a substantial number of ancient manuscript texts, such as the Archimedes Palimpsest, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Herculaneum Papyri, and the Petra Church Scrolls, and was recently the subject of a retrospective in the journal Antiquity.  The technology was also featured on the Monday edition of Radio 4’s I.T. programme, ‘Click On’, in connection with the David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project. 

The project’s website provides before and after images of one of Livingstone’s letters, plus a transcription and commentary, as well as background information about both the explorer and the imaging techniques.  Livingstone’s letter from Bambarre (Kabambare, eastern Congo), dates from 5^th February 1871 (see image above), and besides revealing the desperate situation in which Livingstone found himself towards the end of his career, it provides a window into a fascinating material textual moment.  Having run out of both paper and ink, Livingstone resorted to using old copies of the Standard newspaper and the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society as a writing support, and some local clothing pigment as substitute ink.  Neither worked particularly well: the paper is now very worn and fragile, the manuscript text often unclear due to fading or bleed-through.  The text of Livingstone’s Nyangwe Diary is almost entirely illegible in natural light (see images below).  These palimpsests hint at the material privations through which Livingstone lived, and the text of Livingstone’s letter is a response to the first contact he had had with the outside world for several years.  Thanks to spectral imaging, we can now read those spectral words.

The city of Bologna has more graffiti than any other city in Italy. When I was there last week I noticed just how much writing on the walls there is: as well as graffiti, Bologna’s streets and buildings are covered with a multitude of posters, fliers, banners, and flags…

I was reminded of  Juliet Fleming’s fabulous discussion of Elizabethan wall-writing in Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (2001), where she emphasises that ‘defacement’ can operate ‘as a principle of textual production’, and that graffiti can be understood as something which ‘appears within an intellectual economy that values the utterance of common-places, and tolerates the appearance of writing as a thing among things’ (p. 51).

1 July 2011
Corsham Court Centre, Bath Spa University (deadline: unspecified, but ‘still open’)

Bath Spa University’s newly formed Book, Text and Place (1500-1750) Research Centre is pleased to announce its inaugural conference, ‘Book Encounters, 1500-1750’. In keeping with the Centre’s focus on early modern literary
culture, place, and the history of the book broadly defined, this conference invites exploration into early modern encounters with the book. The central theme of the conference will be the role that the book as material vehicle
played in the transmission of ideas. Possible topics of study include

• literary circles
• knowledge communities
• book ownership
• marks in books
• the destruction of books
• letterwriting
• scribal publication
• the intersection of book and manuscript cultures
• private and public libraries

The aim of this conference is to consider a wide variety of encounters with the book: not only from different cultural and geographical sites of production, circulation and reception but also from various periods within early
modernity. Different disciplinary perspectives are particularly encouraged. Proposals for papers (20-25 mins) are still welcome. Please send queries to Chris Ivic (c.ivic@bathspa.ac.uk).

Information on the Book, Text and Place (1500-1750) Research Centre is available at www.bathspa.ac.uk/schools/humanities-and-cultural-industries/research/book-text-and-place/

Plenary speakers:

David Pearson, Director, Libraries, Archives & Guildhall Art Gallery

Mark Towsey, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of
Liverpool

Can anyone read this? Just the signature, not the rest!