Meetings will be held at the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE, beginning at 5.30 p.m.
Tea will be served at 5.00 p.m. Members are welcome to bring guests, both to meetings and to the tea beforehand.
The Society’s Annual General Meeting will be held at The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, 17 October 2017.
21 November 2017
ROGER GASKELL: Principia Xylographica: the scientific woodcut and the discovery of blocks for Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
This paper will trace the essential role of the woodcut in the history of scientific communica tion from 1472 to 1770 and will discuss the significance of the continued use of woodcut for diagrams after figurative work became dominated by engrav ing after about 1600. The study of a group of diagram blocks in Trinity Col lege, Cambridge, shows how blocks were cut, corrected, repaired and re-used. Originally identified as blocks for Roger Cotes’ Harmonia mensurarum, 1722, new research has resulted in the discovery among them of blocks cut for the 1713 Cambridge edition of Newton’s Principia, edited and seen through the press by Cotes.
19 December 2017
GILES BERGEL and IAN GADD: Entered for his Copy: Creating a Stationers’ Register Online.
This lecture will demonstrate and discuss Stationers’ Register Online, a new digital edition of the earliest years of what is now known as the Stationers’ Register. The lecture will show how SRO traces the emergence of the institution of Entrance during the Stationers’ earliest years, and improves our understanding of the operations of the book trade in England.
16 January 2018
SACHIKO KUSUKAWA: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665): Art and Science in the Early Royal Society.
One of the earliest publications licensed by the Royal Society (founded in 1660) was Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, well-known for its spectacular images of his microscopic observations. This lecture will focus on how those images were compiled and designed to promote a new vision of the natural world which was unfamiliar, well-ordered and also beautiful. Hooke’s artistic and graphic skills were critical not only in the design of the illustrations, but also in the process of observation that he described in Micrographia.
20 February 2018
ISABELLE BAUDINO: Imaging History in Eighteenth-Century Britain
This paper will consider the making of a sequence of 120 historical illustra tions created by Samuel Wale for serialised pictorial histories and analyse what this iconographic corpus can tell us about Georgian historical imagination.
20 March 2018
**Presidential Address**
KRISTIAN JENSEN: Provenance Research: Managing Cultural Property.
In recent years book historians have focused much more on provenance research. We have also seen an increasing awareness that public institutions manage cultural property of interest to groups who do not come from a book history background. This has led to significant amounts of provenance research being done in libraries around Europe, but often the two strands of provenance research do not meet. This paper will outline some of the work done on the provenance of books as part of cultural property management, and some of the issues around using it for book history research.
17 April 2018
**Graham Pollard Memorial Lecture**
ALAN NELSON: Humphrey Dyson’s Broadsides: Royal Proclamations and Miscellanea, 1500–1632.
Humphrey Dyson (1582–1633) is best known today for his collection of books, which, though dispersed, survive in many lib raries, and for his seven volumes of Elizabethan proclamations. Dyson’s printed proclamations derive not only from Elizabeth, however, but from all English monarchs from Henry VII to Charles I, including Jane, with multiple volumes not only for Elizabeth I, but for James I and Charles I. His miscellaneous broadsides, including ballads, livery company documents, and legal announcements, range from the early sixteenth century to 1632. Dyson’s collections of ‘peticions of greivances & breifes of bills exhibited to the high Court of Parliament’ from 1621 and 1624 have recently been identified in Guildhall Library. Dyson’s personal valuations of his collections and the subsequent history of his many volumes of broadsides shed interesting light on a highly specialized corner of the rare book market over several centuries.
15 May 2018
**Homee and Phiroze Randeria Lecture**
Held at the British Library
KRISTINE ROSE BEERS: Silk threads and chevron patterns: Exploring the materiality of the Islamic book.
This paper will consider the parallels between Islamic bookbindings and their European contemporaries. Particular attention will be paid to the transmission of technologies, and the evolution of a unique binding tradition.