With the exception of the AGM, all meetings will be held at the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE, beginning at 5.30 p.m. All lectures will also be live-streamed.
For all regular meetings at the Society of Antiquaries, tea will be served at 5.00 p.m. and wine will be served after each lecture.
Members are welcome to bring guests, both to meetings and to the social gatherings before and after each meeting.
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.
19 November 2024
Panel for grant recipients
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 Italy and Italian-speaking readers to explore how archives may help us problematise the relationship between cultural diplomacy, the transnational book trade, and the response of target reading communities.
Anouska Lester: Cataloguing the Libraries of William and Silvester Petyt in Skipton and Inner Temple.
In the early eighteenth century, brothers William and Silvester Petyt donated substantial collections of books and manuscripts to Inner Temple and their hometown of Skipton in Yorkshire. This paper examines the Petyts’ contributions to their communities in London and Skipton, and what the extant eighteenth-century catalogues reveal about their collecting practices.
Silvia Pugliese: The paper production in the eighteenth century Venetian Republic through its use in large format prints and books .
In the eighteenth century several paper districts were active in the Venetian Republic, producing different qualities of paper for both the internal and foreign markets. The material examination of some examples of luxury large size books of prints, combined with archival documentation, offers the possibility to start tracing a map of the paper makers involved in the manufacture of the finest papers throughout the century.
17 December 2024
Maureen Bell and Tom Lockwood: Ordered That the Clerke henceforward shall keepe a Wast Booke….
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 Stationers and to cast new light on Restoration authors and their work.
21 January 2025
Helen Williams: Sarah Hodgson’s Arabic Bible: Gender, Empire and the History of the Book.
Further details on this paper will be posted later.
18 February 2025
Claire Bolton: Exploring a Remarkable Collection of Bindings in the Memmingen Stadtarchiv.
The Memmingen Stadtarchiv contains over 170 (perhaps 200) fifteenth-century bindings from three (perhaps four) Memmingen workshops. This talk discusses the similarities and differences between the finishing and forwarding methods between them, and over time.
18 March 2025
Kelly Minot Mccay: The Making of Shorthand Manuals in Early Modern England, 1588–1700.
This paper explores the people and production behind the swell of shorthand manuals in seventeenth-century England, demonstrating what a detailed bibliography of the printed genre has revealed about an overlooked yet widely used manuscript technology.
15 April 2025
Graham Pollard Memorial Lecture
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 case of need. The London law stationers quickly started to provide printed blank forms for this purpose, followed by printers in the provinces. The quantities of settlement certificates and related documents produced each year amounted to many tens of thousands.
20 May 2025
Homee and Phiroze Randeria Lecture
Nicholas Pickwoad: Entitled: The Choice, Purpose and Placing of Titles on Early-Modern Bookbindings.
The introduction of standardised titles on the bindings of early modern printed books is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until well into the eighteenth century they appear mostly to have been added on the instructions of the owner, whether commercial, institutional or private, sometimes a long time after the books were first bound, with a consequent wide variety of type and purpose. Where they are placed on bindings, and how many times in different places, also reflects shelving practices and national preferences, and often gives evidence of the movement of books both within and between libraries. The increasing introduction of edition bindings and printed titles in the eighteenth century indicates a profound change in the identification of books by their titles.
Summer visit
Details will be announced in The Library for March 2025.