Morison Room, Cambridge University Library, 5:00 pm (except where noted). Tea from 4:30 pm before the lectures.

Wednesday, 16 November

Dr Nick Hopwood, ‘Icons of evolution: from alleged forgeries to textbook illustrations’

Wednesday, 7 December

Dr Jennifer Rampling, ‘The phoenix in the library: using marginal illuminations to trace alchemical manuscripts in Tudor England’

Wednesday, 21 March

Dott. Laura Nuvoloni, ‘Witnesses of the past: the Incunabula Collection at Cambridge University Library’

Wednesday, 16 May

Dr Mark Curran, Munby Fellow, ‘Beyond the forbidden best-sellers of pre-Revolutionary France’

Thursday, 14 June, 4:30 pm, Cambridge University Library

Tea, followed by the Annual General Meeting and a private view of incunabula with Ed Potten and Dott. Laura Nuvoloni

Sandars Lectures

The Sandars Reader for 2012 is Professor Michael Reeve, who will lecture on ‘Printing the Latin Classics—some episodes’ (provisional title). The lectures will be given on Monday 27 February, Tuesday 28 February, and Thursday, 1 March, at 5:00 pm in the Morison Room, Cambridge University Library.

For more information on the Society, visit its website.

Saturday events and exhibition opening receptions are free of charge to Friends. Members attending weekday evening talks pay at a special rate of £2.50 per head, to help us recover costs. Non-members are welcome at talks; the admission charge is £3.50. All talks are free to junior members of the University of Cambridge.

Wednesday 15 February 2012, at 5.30 p.m.
JOHN GARDNER

‘“Radical” is a new word since my time – it was not in the political vocabulary in 1816’
— Byron in a letter to John Cam Hobhouse, April 1820

Following the end of the war with France, street literature, in the form of pamphlets, broadsides, illustrations, pornography, pirate publications and advertising, became increasingly radical, and ephemeral. This paper will examine radicalism in this period and its literary and cultural legacy.

Free for junior members of the University of Cambridge
£2.50 for members of the Friends of Cambridge University Library
£3.50 for non-members

Events take place in the Library’s Morison Room, unless noted otherwise.

Tea will be served half an hour before the evening talks starting at 5.30 p.m.

Please see details of the Friends of Cambridge University Library’s full programme.

Date and location

Tuesday 6 March 2012
Elton-Bowring Room, the Gillespie Conference Centre,
Clare College, Cambridge (in front of CUL)

Programme

9:30 Registration

10:00 Opening Remarks: Ed Potten (Cambridge University Library)

10:10 Production: Chaired by Margaret Lane Ford (Christie’s)

• Satoko Tokunaga (Keio University), ‘Rubrication of Caxton’s Early English Books’
• Paul Needham (Scheide Library, Princeton University), ‘Ulrich Zel’s Printing’

11:20 Tea/Coffee

11:35 Collection: Chaired by Richard Linenthal (Antiquarian Bookseller)

• Eric White (Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University), ‘Gutenberg Bibles on the Move in England, 1789–1834’
• John Goldfinch (British Library), ‘British Museum Incunabula in Cambridge; Cambridge Incunabula in London’

12:50 Lunch

14:00 History: Chaired by Elisabeth Leedham-Green (Darwin College, Cambridge)

• Toshiyuki Takamiya (Keio University), ‘John Oates, Sir Geoffrey, et al.: Bibliophiles in Darwin, 1975−78’
• Lotte Hellinga (formerly British Library), ‘Six Summers at CUL in the 1960s: A Reminiscence’

15:00 Round Table Discussion: Chaired by David McKitterick (Trinity College, Cambridge)

16:00 Tea/Coffee

16:15 Book Viewing at CUL (1)

16:45 Book Viewing at CUL (2)

17:15 End of the Conference

Registration

If you would like to attend, please return your completed registration form and the registration fee (not refundable) to the conference organiser by 14 February. The full registration fee is £30 (£25 for students), which includes lunch and refreshments. For further information and enquiries please contact Dr Satoko Tokunaga.

English Faculty, St Cross Building, Oxford
Grade 8: £36,862 – £44,016 p.a. (pro rata)

There are two posts for part-time (0.5FTE) Departmental Lecturers in Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1550 – 1830) and (1830 – present day) which are offered for a period of three years from 1 October 2012.

They are intended to provide graduate teaching for the Faculty’s MSt ‘B course’ (Bibliography, Theories of Text, History of the Book, and Manuscript studies). The ‘B course’ is designed to be a broad-based introduction to bibliography and textual criticism in relation to literary texts. For most Masters’ students these are new disciplines, offering the challenge of new methods and ways of thinking about literary texts.

Individuals will be welcome to offer lectures on other English literature topics, once their B course obligations have been met, and may be asked to undertake assessing/supervision in areas relevant to their research and teaching.

Note: These are two separate posts and it is anticipated that different individuals will be appointed to each post; applications will be assessed within the field appropriate to each post. Whilst it is possible that the same individual could be appointed to both posts, it will not be possible to guarantee this and thereby guarantee a full-time appointment. Please make it clear in your application which post you are applying for, and/or if you are interested in applying for both posts.

Applications should be received by noon on 27 February 2012.

Contact Person : Katy Routh
Contact Phone : 01865 281262
Contact Email : administrator@ell.ox.ac.uk

A thousand thanks to whoever left this charming snippet of text on my car this morning… I love you too.

TEXTS AND TEXTILES

a conference organised by the Centre for Material Texts
to be held 11-12 September 2012 at Jesus College, Cambridge

The shared origin of text and textile in the Latin texere, to weave, is a critical commonplace. Many of the terms we use to describe our interactions with words are derived from this common linguistic root, and numerous other expressions associated with reading and writing are drawn from the rich vocabulary of cloth. Textiles are one of the most ubiquitous components of material culture, and they are also integral to the material history of texts. Paper was originally made from cotton rags, and in many different cultural and historical settings texts come covered, wrapped, bound, or decorated with textiles. And across the domestic, public, religious, and political spheres, textiles are often the material forms in which texts are produced, consumed, and circulated.

In the light of the CMT’s current research theme on ‘the material text in material culture’, we invite papers which consider any of the many dimensions of the relationship between texts and textiles. There are no historical, geographical, or disciplinary limitations. Areas to be addressed could include:

the shared language of texts and textiles

construction and deconstruction: to weave, spin, stitch, knit, stitch, suture, tie up or together, piece, tailor, gather, fashion, fabricate, mesh, trim, stretch, wrap, unfold, unpic
challenges and problem-solving: knots, tangles, holes; to lose the thread, iron out creases, unravel, cut, keep on tenterhooks
pieces and fragments: rags, patches, patchwork, scraps, strands, threads, rhapsodies, patterns, seams, loose ends, layers

the stuff of books

bookbindings and covers
incunabula – ‘swaddling clothes’
medieval girdle books, book chemises
paper and paper-making
cutting, sewing, and stitching in and on books
scrapbooks, albums, collages
book ribbons and bookmarks
carpet pages
textiles in illustrations, frontispieces, title pages

textile texts

needlework and words: tapestry, embroidery, samplers, quilts, hangings, carpets, banners
the needle and the pen
printed textiles
sacred/religious texts and textiles
love-tokens, keepsakes, charms, and relics
cushions, badges, handkerchiefs, flags, scarves, uniforms, livery and other textual/textile ephemera
professional and amateur work
relationships and networks of gifts, patronage, exchange
pattern books, sample books, costume books

Proposals of up to 250 words for 20-minute papers should be sent to Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) and Lucy Razzall (lmfr2@cam.ac.uk) by 30 April 2012

The new exhibition in Cambridge University Library, ‘Shelf Lives: Four Centuries of Collectors & their Books’, is a treat for anyone who wants to know more about how a great collection came together. Focusing on ten bibliomaniacs with enormously varied interests, spanning the globe and vast tracts of human inquiry, it blows the dust from some well-known treasures and a host of unknown gems. And it’s free, and open to all.

Today the UL, a copyright library, has more than 8 million items  on its shelves. The exhibition begins by taking us back to 1557, when its collection had dwindled to just 200 books, which could be itemized on just a few pages of ‘Grace Book Δ’. The first collector singled out for attention is Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, pioneering scholar of Anglo-Saxon, and rescuer of numerous important manuscripts from the ruins of the dissolved monasteries. Parker donated 100 volumes to the library shortly before his death in 1574, and several of them are on display here—including an Anglo-Saxon gospel and a book of homilies, both penned c. 1050.

A few paces to the right is a manuscript that is strikingly different and yet really the same–a text of St Matthew’s Gospel in Persian, dating from the early eighteenth century. This was acquired by George Lewis, Chaplain to the East India Company, who was based in Madras from 1692-1714. His collection came to the University Library in a wooden cabinet labelled ‘Bibliotheca Orientalis’, and along with the seventy-six manuscripts it contained a number of beguiling objects, including a magnificent pair of embroidered slippers and a set of Indian playing cards on wood and tortoiseshell. One wonders what other weird and wonderful things are hidden away on the library’s shelves…

The changes keep ringing. From India, we head to China, and the collection made by a diplomat, Sir Thomas Wade. Wade gave 4304 Chinese books to the UL in 1886; one of them displayed here is open at a delicious picture of an exhausted student, lying asleep and dreaming of passing his exams. In the dream, this involves being anointed by a dragon-headed examination god. Then Haydn, and Marion Margaret Scott’s collection of scores, portraits and curios associated with the composer. Next Montaigne, and Gilbert de Botton’s recently-acquired library, which includes copies of the Essais owned by Napoleon and Ben Jonson, as well as the copy of Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura that Montaigne annotated in his tower in the Dordogne. And so it goes on, with manuscripts of John Donne, Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke; first-world-war ephemera, including trench money printed by the Austrians in Italy; a volume embroidered for Elizabeth I; and the celebrated Book of Cerne, a prayer book written c. 820-840 AD.

Working in a library like the CUL, you get scattered glimpses of the people who brought the books together—in bookplates, names scribbled on flyleaves, or the call-numbers of the books themselves, which often point to particular collections. It’s nice to be able to put names to faces at last. More importantly, though, as more and more books become available in ‘disembodied’, digitized form, it’s increasingly crucial to recognize how much history is embodied in our libraries—in the processes that have brought them together, often through the violent destruction of earlier collections. Research libraries need the resources—financial and conceptual—to start understanding what they’ve got in new ways. That’s why an exhibition like this really matters.

The CMT is now on Facebook!

For those of you who also have a Facebook presence, please find and ‘like’ the CMT page. Currently 3,090 people ‘like’ the page for the wonderfully named CRASSH (the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, also based at the University of Cambridge) – how long before we match this?!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Centre-for-Material-Texts-University-of-Cambridge/344548338909348?sk=info

From Coleridge’s notebooks, 1802, on his second son:

‘Derwent extends the idea of door so far that he not only calls the lids of boxes doors, but even the covers of books. At a year and eight months.’

–quoted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Essential Meditations, ed. John Cornwell (2011)