Between 1671 and 1675 the German Johann Michael Wansleben, in the service of the French king, assembled what was then the largest collection of oriental manuscripts put together by a single individual. The questions discussed in this lecture are: how did he and other collectors know what to buy and how did they proceed?
Tea will be served at 5.00 p.m. with the lecture to start at 5.30 p.m. Members are welcome to bring guests, both to meetings and to the tea beforehand.
Arnold Hunt: Thomas Lydiat and the Stationers
'We must take the pains, and they will look for the gains.' With these words the mathematician Thomas Lydiat (1572-1646) summed up his opinion of the London stationers who had printed and published his books. Lydiat's correspondence, now in the Bodleian Library, is an important but beglected source of information on the economics of publishing in early seventeenth-century London. This paper explores his conflict with the Stationers' Company for what it can reveal about author/publisher relations and the international trade in scholarly books.
Tea will be served at 5.00 p.m. with the lecture to start at 5.30 p.m. Members are welcome to bring guests, both to meetings and to the tea beforehand.
David Pearson: Bookbinding history and sacred cows: reflections on received wisdom
Book history has increasingly developed a cohesive view of the printing, selling, owning, reading and use of books, but bookbinding has struggled to find its place in the teaching and perception of the broad discipline. It is hampered by inherited perceptions of the operation of the binding trade, and what is important or knowable. This paper will examine these issues, consider the key questions we should ask of bindings, and argue for their proper integration into the book-historical pantheon.
Tea will be served at 5.00 p.m. with the lecture to start at 5.30 p.m. Members are welcome to bring guests, both to meetings and to the tea beforehand.
