The Bibliographical Society is now able to offer recordings of its lectures (with permission of the lecturer). Visit our YouTube channel to see our latest collection of videos. When you subscribe to our YouTube channel, you place our channel in your list, making it easy to return to. Activating the “bell” icon (notifications) ensures you are notified of new uploads immediately. Subscribing also acts as a signal to YouTube’s algorithm that you want to see more of our content on your homepage, so subscribe to The Bibliographical Society today.

The following lectures for the 2025/2026 season are now available:

  • March 2026: Presidential Address: Nicolas Bell, The Revision of the Short-Title Catalog.
    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.
  • March 2026: Winter Virtual Visit – Vatican Apostolic Library.
    Founded in 1450 by Pope Nicholas V to promote Humanistic studies, the Vatican Library is one of the world’s most famous libraries. Often viewed principally as a repository of manuscripts, it preserves much more, including printed books, graphic prints, and coins and medals.

    This visit is made possible by the generous consent of his excellency Abp. Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi, Librarian and Archivist of the Holy Roman Church, and the Rev. Mauro Mantovani, SDB, the Library’s Prefect. Our host is Dr Stephen Metzger of the Manuscripts Department.

  • 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.
  • December 2025: Thomas James Wise’s Book Hospital – A Further Study in Theft & 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.
  • November 2025: Panel for Grant Recipients: Elvira Miceli, ‘Reapproaching the Liber ad honorem Augusti (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 120 II) from the Cava Archive’; Christian Algar, ‘The reassembly, analysis and appraisal of John Bellingham Inglis (1780-1870): rare book collector; savant; scholar; slave owner’; Xinyi Wen, ‘Extra-illustrating early modern natural history’.

The following lectures for the 2024/2025 season are now available:

The 2023/2024 season:

The 2022/2023 season:

  • April 2023: Adrian Seville: Board games uncataloged
    link
  • March 2023: Paul Hoftijzer: Books from Britain in the Leiden Bibliotheca Thysiana
    link
  • February 2023: Meghan Constantinou: The library of the Elliots of Minto, 1738-1938: A panoramic view
    link
  • December 2022: David Levy: A century and a quarter of Hoyle
    link
  • November 2022: Panel for Grant Recipients 2022
    link

The 2021/2022 season:

  • October 2021: AGM | Nil Palabiyik: The Mad, the Bad and the Silenced: Three Tales about Ottoman Learning and Renaissance Book Culture
    link
  • January 2022: Edwin Rose: Books, botany and empire in eighteenth-century Cambridge 1760 –1825
    link
  • February 2022: Justin Hanisch: Louis Renard’s extraordinary fishes, crayfishes, and crabs: an exploration of one of the 18th century’s most unusual colour plate books
    link
  • March 2022: Presidential address
    James Raven: Monsters, Myths and Methods: Towards a Global Biography of Erik Pontoppidan’s Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie (1752-3) The Natural History of Norway (1755)
    link
  • March 2022: Virtual Visit to the Keio University Library, Japan
    link
  • April 2022: Graham Pollard Memorial Lecture
    Cristina Dondi and Neil Harris: The Zornale of Francesco de Madiis (1484–88).
    link
  • May 2022: Homee and Phiroze Randeria Lecture
    Arthur Marks: The curious career of Nathaniel Price, a journeyman binder working in England and America.
    link

The following lectures for the 2020/2021 season are now available:

  • October 2020: Presidential Address
    Margaret Lane Ford, Bookselling and Bibliography. link
  • November 2020: Adrian Edwards: Insights into the King’s Library of George III. link
  • December 2020: David Shaw: Paper for Octavos: Innovation in Early Sixteenth-Century Book Production. link
  • January 2021: Alison Walker: The Sloane Printed Books Project. link
  • February 2021: David Pearson, Clodagh Murphy, David Shaw and Sarah Cusk, Book Owners Online. link
  • February 2021: Stephen Clarke, Horace Walpole and W.S. Lewis: A Collector Revealed. link
  • February 2021: Winter Visit: The National Library of Mexico, National Library of Anthropology and History, and Francisco de Burgoa Library. link
  • 16 March 2021: Rachel Jacobs, Waddesdon Manor: A Rothschild Collection. link
  • May 2021: Homee and Phiroze Randeria Lecture
    Mirjam Foot, New Movements in French twentieth-century binding design: the importance of patronage. link
  • July 2021: Virtual Summer Visit: The State Library of Victoria. link
  • July 2021: Virtual Summer Visit: Monash University Library Special Collections. link