Past Events

Taste and discrimination: The Cerruti Collection of decorated bindings. Very few people outside Italy will have heard of Francesco Federico Cerruti, a man of great taste and discernment with an excellent eye for quality. As well as paintings, sculptures, ceramics and other objects of art, he collected decorated bindings, ranging [...]

The preservation and recycling of ‘waste’ printed sheets in the eighteenth-century book trade. ‘Waste’ printed sheets were preserved for various reasons: commercial, idealistic, and occasionally felonious. Records of such preservation illuminate many areas of the eighteenth-century book trade, from the identification of responsibility for anonymous publications to demonstrating customer expectations. [...]

8 October 2024 The Annual General Meeting will take place at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday, 8 October 2024, at 6.00 p.m. No tea will be served before the meeting, but refreshments will be served afterwards.

What can we learn from old books by closely studying the materials from which they constructed, the visual appearance of their pages, or how they have been put together? This free one-day workshop at Newcastle University’s Robinson Library, supported by the Bibliographical Society, is intended to equip participants with the necessary [...]

Anna Lanfranchi: Italian Readers, American Books and the Second World War: Propaganda and Publishing History in the Archive. During WWII, the United States employed books to foster the Allied war effort and “disintoxicate” audiences from Fascist propaganda in liberated territories (Hench 2010). This paper considers the publishing and translation activity targeting [...]

This paper identifies and explores ‘The Wast Register booke for entring of Coppies’ that the Stationers’ Company started to keep on 7 April 1687. We will locate that document among the Company’s records, and show the ways in which it provides a new opportunity both to investigate the practices of [...]

The talk centres on printer-publisher Sarah Hodgson, who produced a Bible in Arabic in Newcastle in 1811, fighting off the Oxford dons to keep it in the north. It provides a reading of Hodgson’s autobiographical manuscripts while tracing her work’s dissemination across the Mediterranean world, reflecting on the challenges of [...]

The Bibliographical Society travels virtually to visit the library at St Catherine’s Monastery, Mt Sinai, on Thursday, 27 February, at 17.00 GMT. The virtual visit will take place on Zoom and will compromise a pre-recorded introduction to the library and its collections, followed by live discussion and Q&A. Our host [...]

David Shaw: The Stationers and the Poor Law. The Settlement Act of 1697 required that poor people wishing to move to somewhere new must obtain an indemnity certificate from their ‘settled’ parish to assure the overseers of the poor in their new location that their old parish would support them in [...]