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.
Click here for previous years’ lectures
28 October 2025
The Annual General Meeting will take place at the Warburg Institute on Tuesday, 28 October 2025. No tea will be served before the meeting, but refreshments will be served afterwards.
18 November 2025
Before the meeting, the Society’s Gold Medal will be presented to Dr David Shaw.
Panel for grant recipients
Elvira Miceli, ‘Reapproaching the Liber ad honorem Augusti (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 120 II) from the Cava Archive’
This talk will present preliminary findings from research at the medieval archive of Cava de’ Tirreni, using them to reconsider the palaeography of a major late twelfth-century codex and broader trends in contemporary book production.
Christian Algar, ‘The reassembly, analysis and appraisal of John Bellingham Inglis (1780-1870): rare book collector; savant; scholar; slave owner’
This talk will discuss the identification and tracking of incunabula and early printed books collected and used by this intriguing yet neglected nineteenth-century figure and how examining the associated biographical and social circumstances is vital for an expanding book history.
Xinyi Wen, ‘Extra-illustrating early modern natural history’
This talk will examine how and why naturalists extra-illustrated their books between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.
Booking page for online attendance.
16 December 2025
Joseph Hone, ‘T. J. Wise’s Book Hospital: A Further Study in Theft and Sophistication’
In 1956 it was revealed that Thomas James Wise, a former President of the Bibliographical Society, had stolen more than two hundred leaves from the British Museum to make up ‘perfect’ early playbooks, both for his own collection and for sale to clients in Britain and America. This paper reopens the case, considering: firstly, how new evidence demonstrates the complicity of Wise’s regular binder, Riviere and Son; and, secondly, what the discarded remnants of Wise’s hospital stock reveals about his bibliographical tastes and priorities.
Booking page for online attendance.
20 January 2026
Alan Nelson, ‘The printed-book catalogues of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872): eccentric publications of an eccentric man’
Sir Thomas Phillipps’s catalogues of his vast library of printed books, published chaotically 1819-1871, have experienced a similarly chaotic afterlife.
Booking page for online attendance.
17 February 2026
Barbara Heritage, ‘Staying in print: the Brontës, 1846-1876’
Jane Eyre has never gone out of print in English. Yet not all of the Brontë sisters’ works enjoyed such a wide readership at their outset. Drawing on bibliographical evidence gathered from hundreds of original copies along with information gleaned from extant publishers’ ledgers, this talk will trace the early editions, printings, and issues of the works of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë during their first three decades in print. The presentation will discuss variant states that have recently come to light, as well as early translations of the Brontës’ novels.
Booking page for online attendance.
17 March 2026
Presidential Address
Nicolas Bell, ‘The revision of the Short-Title Catalogue’
The STC is the largest and most complex enterprise ever undertaken by the Bibliographical Society. The revised edition brought new levels of sophistication and was the fruit of a major transatlantic collaboration, initially between F. S. Ferguson in London and W. A. Jackson in Harvard. This lecture will draw on a recently discovered treasure-trove of correspondence with all of the major figures in bibliography of the mid-twentieth-century, charting the first stages of the revision of the catalogue.
Booking page for online attendance.
21 April 2026
Graham Pollard Memorial Lecture
Matthew Payne, ‘Who was Elizabeth Northe? John Lettou and London’s first printing press’
This paper will examine the circumstances surrounding the setting up of London’s first press, and the distribution of works produced by it in London in the 1480s.
Booking page for online attendance.
19 May 2026
Homee and Phiroze Randeria Lecture
Andrew Honey, ‘Graham Pollard revisited: New observations on the construction of English twelfth-century bindings at the Bodleian Library’
It is sixty-five years since Graham Pollard published his pioneering article, ‘The construction of English twelfth-century bindings’ in the 1962 issue of The Library. Drawing on observations made in the course of the Bodleian Library’s current project to catalogue the bindings of English manuscripts dated between 1066 to 1250, I will revisit Pollard’s subject, showing some of the wealth of new information still to be discovered in these complex and fascinating structures.
Booking page for online attendance.
Summer visit: details will be announced in The Library for March 2026.
Karen Limper-Herz
Hon. Secretary
Panizzi Lectures
The 2025 Panizzi Lectures on the subject of Books in the Biosphere: Print Culture in the Age of Climate Change will be delivered by Professor Isabel Hofmeyr in the Knowledge Centre of the British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, on 27 October, 30 October and 3 November 2025.
The lectures are not ticketed and seats will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. For further details, please check the British Library website.