News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

Abstract

Previous article FreeSociety InformationNews, Programs, Publications, and AwardsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNews2020 BSA-St. Louis Mercantile Library PrizeOn behalf of the St. Louis Mercantile Prize Committee, chaired by John Neal Hoover, the Bibliographical Society of America is proud to announce the winners of the 2020 St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize. They are (in alphabetical order):Dr. Lindsay DiCuirci, Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (University of Pennylvania Press, 2018). Dr. DiCuirci is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Specializing in early American literature and the history of the book, her research examines the politics of collecting, preserving, and reprinting colonial books and manuscripts in the nineteenth-century US. Colonial Revivals traces the labors of a cultural network of antiquarians, bibliophiles, amateur historians, and writers as they dug through the nation’s attics and private libraries to assemble early American archives and to reprint, or “revive,” their holdings. Reprinting old books, they thought, would shield them (and their ideas) from loss due to wear, fire, flood, or the overwhelming tide of oblivion. Their faith in print as an enduring vessel of preservation was, however, complicated by the state of decay in which they found many of their antiquarian treasures. The collections that this network built and the particular colonial stories they selected to tell and preserve reflect the inveterate regional, racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical landscape. These materials are also our inheritance, as researchers of the book in America. This history of antiquarian collecting and reprinting, then, is essential to our current bibliographic enterprises, especially those focused on decolonization, inclusivity, digital access, and sustainability.Dr. Derrick R. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennylvania Press, 2019). Dr. Spires is associate professor of English at Cornell University, specializing in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and black speculative fiction. The Practice of Citizenship examines the parallel development of US citizenship and early black print culture through key understudied flashpoints (the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic and outbreaks of antislavery violence in 1856), movements (black state conventions and vigilance committees), intellectuals (James McCune Smith and William J. Wilson), and forms (sketch, ballad, and convention minutes). Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper’s parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.The prize selection committee was fortunate to receive a wide array of recent bibliographical monographs, from definitive career compilations of essays, to a descriptive bibliography of American fine printing, to interdisciplinary histories of the American book on diversified and groundbreaking topics. The committee is also proud to make two honorable mentions: Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); and William S. Reese, Collectors, Booksellers, and Libraries: Essays on Americanists and the Rare Book Market (Overland Press, 2018).We are grateful to all participants in the competition to whom we send our sincere thanks to all who participated. This year saw an exceptional group of nominees, and we hope that the excellence in American bibliographical study as represented by this group continues.Election of Officers and Members of CouncilAt the 24 January 2020 annual meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America, members of the Society unanimously elected the following new officers and council members:President. Barbara A. Shailor was elected for a first term as President of the Bibliographical Society of America in 2018. She joined Yale University in 2001 as the Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; she assumed the position of Deputy Provost for the Arts in July 2003 and retired from the Yale administration in December 2012. Prior to that, she was Dean of Douglass College and Professor of Classics at Rutgers University (1996–2001), and a faculty member and administrator at Bucknell University (1975–96). Her award-winning volume The Medieval Book, published by the University of Toronto Press, is in its sixth printing; among her other many publications is the Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (3 vols.). Ms. Shailor was a Trustee of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation from 2003 to 2017, was on the Council of the Grolier Club, and is presently on the Executive Committee of the American Trust for the British Library. She was elected to the French honorary society Comité internationale de paléographie latine in 2000, to the Association internationale de bibliophilie in 2002, and as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy in 2006.Vice President. Kenneth Soehner has been a librarian at the Thomas J. Watson Library, the research library of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for twenty-five years as Arthur K. Watson Chief Librarian. He has been active in raising funds and working with colleagues to develop the depth and geographic scope of both current publications and special collections. Before the Met, he held a number of positions, including bibliographer and head of technical services at Barnard College Library, and in the mid-1990s worked part-time at the reference desk at Queens College Library. He is a Council member at the Grolier Club and serves on numerous committees there, including Chair of the Audit Committee. Mr. Soehner was recently elected a member of the Association internationale de bibliophilie. He has taught a number of classes at Pratt Institute School of Information, including a class on Art Librarianship every year since 2000. He has an MLS from Columbia University School of Library Service, and an MA in Art History from the Department of Art History and Archeology at the same university. He has been active in the Art Libraries Society of North America at both the national and local level and served as president of ARLIS/NA in 2008–9.Secretary. John T. McQuillen has been a curator of Printed Books and Bindings at the Morgan Library and Museum since 2012. At the Morgan, he has curated exhibitions on William Caxton, Martin Luther, and J. R. R. Tolkien and published on medieval and early modern library history and book provenance, and he has a forthcoming article on the provenance and physical history of the Morgan’s three Gutenberg Bibles. Mr. McQuillen was the curatorial assistant and rare book cataloger at Bridwell Library (Dallas) in 2001–6. He received his PhD in Art History with the collaborative program for Book History and Print Culture from the University of Toronto, where he spent four years as a graduate fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and produced a descriptive catalogue of the incunabula at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. In 2013 he was named one of the BSA’s New Scholars for his work on fifteenth-century book production networks in Bavaria.Treasurer. Scott Clemons was first elected as Treasurer of the Bibliographical Society of America in 2018. He is a private collector of the Aldine Press, a collection he started as an undergraduate in the Classics Department at Princeton University. In 2015 Mr. Clemons curated an exhibition at the Grolier Club to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Aldus’s death, mounted largely with items from his own collection. He is the immediate past president of the Grolier Club, a member of the Association internationale de bibliophilie, and a past President of the Friends of the Princeton University Library. By day, Clemons is a partner at the private banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.Council Class of 2022 (a vacancy created by the move of Ken Soehner to Vice President). Mark Samuels Lasner, collector, bibliographer, and typographer, is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press. A graduate of Connecticut College, he is the author of The Bookplates of Aubrey Beardsley (Rivendale Press, 2008), A Bibliography of Enoch Soames (Rivendale Press, 1999), The Yellow Book: A Checklist and Index (Eighteen Nineties Society, 1998), A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley (Thomas G. Boss Fine Books, 1995), and William Allingham: A Bibliographical Study (Holmes Publishing Co., 1993). He has also co-authored (with Margaret D. Stetz) books such as England in the 1880s: Old Guard and Avant-Garde (University of Virginia Press, 1989), England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head (Georgetown U Press, 1990), and The Yellow Book: A Centenary Exhibition (Houghton Library, 1994). His articles and notes have appeared in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Book Collector, Browning Institute Studies, Notes and Queries, and other journals. He has organized or co-curated exhibitions held at numerous institutions, including the University of Virginia Library, Houghton Library and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Georgetown University Library, Bryn Mawr College Library, Liverpool Central Library, the Grolier Club, and the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Active in numerous bibliophile and bibliographical organizations, Mr. Samuels Lasner was the 2003 recipient of the Sir Thomas More medal from the University of San Francisco, awarded to honor the spirit of “private collecting, a public benefit.” In 2016 Mr. Samuels Lasner donated his collection of more than 9,500 rare books, manuscripts, graphics, and ephemera relating to British literature and art of the period 1850–1900 to the University of Delaware Library.Council Class of 2023. Mary Crawford has been a collector of English and American literature for the past forty years. Author collections, in first editions and primary material, include Dorothy L. Sayers, Mary Webb, Jane Austen, Isak Dinesen, J. R. R. Tolkien, Rebecca West, Madeleine L’Engle, Kate Seredy, May Sinclair, and the Brönte sisters. In 2010, she curated bi-coastal exhibitions at the Grolier Club and Stanford University Libraries related to the twentieth-century British writer Mary Webb, and she wrote Mary Webb: Neglected Genius, the two-volume book published to coincide with these exhibitions. Concurrent with the exhibition, she also led the Grolier Club annual Poetry Reading featuring Mary Webb and hosted the American premier of the dramatic reading, “My Wife Did a Bit of Scribbling.” Ms. Crawford serves on the board of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, where she is currently Treasurer and Chair of the Finance Committee. She was head of the RBS Audit Committee from 2013–18. She is a member of the Grolier Club of New York (Special Functions Committee), and the Bibliographical Society of America (Development Committee). Ms. Crawford retired as a Senior Vice President of Morgan Stanley in 2019, where she ran a financial planning team in Palo Alto, California.Council Class of 2023. Andrew Nadell is a physician and bibliophile. For some decades, the practice of medicine took much time away from book collecting, but he persisted. He began collecting during a research year at Duke University medical school, while in London reading for an MSc on “Sociology with Special Reference to Medicine in the Faculty of Economics.” The book collection “Medical Politicks” was exhibited in the Duke University medical library in 1977. A second exhibition on “Doctors of Medicine” was at the Grolier Club in 1996, and traveled to the Perkins Library at Duke. With his wife, the designer bookbinder, Eleanore Ramsey, he has collected books and bindings of the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, reported in the Grolier Gazette (2013). His main collection now deals more broadly with learned professions and trades, from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries. Dr. Nadell is the American national delegate and governor of the International Society for the History of Medicine, and a vice-president of the Academia Panamericana de Historia de la Medicina. He is also a longtime member of the Association internationale de bibliophilie (AIB), and of the Société royale des bibliophiles de Belgique, as well as the Grolier Club. In 2019, he was elected to the livery of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London.Council Class of 2023. Douglas S. Pfeiffer has served on Council since 2017. He is Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University. He received his PhD from Columbia University’s English and Comparative Literature Department and has taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, The Cooper Union, and The University of California, Irvine. His research centers on Renaissance humanism, early modern poetry, and history of the book. He is the author of The Force of Character: Authorial Personality and the Making of Renaissance Texts (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).Council Class of 2023. Elizabeth Ott is the Frank Borden Hanes Curator of Rare Books at Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a position she has held since 2018. Additionally, she is an adjunct lecturer at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she teaches an annual course on bibliography and rare book librarianship. She has also worked in various roles at the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and Rare Book School in Virginia. Ms. Ott completed her doctoral work at the University of Virginia. Her research interests include nineteenth-century British publishing, library history, and bibliography beyond the hand-press era. She currently serves at the Chair of the BSA Membership Working Group.William Stoneman Chaired the Nominating Committee, which also included Meghan Constantinou (The Grolier Club), Michael Ryan (The New-York Historical Society), and Heather Wolfe (The Folger Shakespeare Library). The Society thanks them for their service.The BSA Program Committee Calls for ProposalsIn accordance with our identity as an international, interdisciplinary scholarly organization that fosters the study of books and other textual artifacts in traditional and emerging formats, the Bibliographical Society of America pursues its mission by hosting public programs and collaborating with related organizations to do so. The Program Committee calls for proposals to invite collaborations between the Program Committee, BSA members, and a broader bibliographical public. The BSA aims to sponsor a calendar of varied programs each year, which can include but are not limited to lectures, workshops, conference sessions, and receptions following events which are bibliographical in nature.In all BSA events, the material text—that is, the handwritten, printed, or other textual artifact, broadly conceived—as historical evidence, and/or the theory and practice of descriptive, historical, textual, and/or critical bibliography, should be a central concern to participants and organizers.Proposals for events taking place between January and April of 2021 are due on 15 October 2020. Please visit the URL below to review application guidelines and the application form: https://bibsocamer.org/programs/bsa-programs/.BSA Community Grants ProgramThe BSA Community Grants program has been canceled for the duration of 2020. Funds for this program may be redirected to facilitate virtual programming offered to BSA members and friends at no cost. As a result the following webinars, hosted by BSA, are now available for viewing on the Society’s YouTube Channel. More may be added subsequent to this writing.❧EventsSociety EventsIn the spring of 2020, the Society and indeed the entire world made swift changes to our programs and protocals in response to the COVID-19 crisis. The Program Committee (Chair, Sonja Drimmer) and the Working Group for International Collaboration and Development (Chair, Greg Prickman) are regret that several events pleased to announce the following events planned for the spring of 2020 were cancelled. As of this writing in late of March of 2020, we remain cautiously optimistic about the following programs, which remain scheduled through the fall of 2020. As always, please check your email and the BSA website for announcements and more details.¶ On 10 June 2020 the Dr. Amanda Stuckey of Kutztown University will lead Touch to See: Disability and Bibliography, a Workshop at the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Registration required. To register, please visit www.memberplanet.com/events/bsa/touch-to-see or contact the BSA office at [email protected].¶ On 24 June 2020 the Society will sponsor the Rare Book and Manuscripts (RBMS) Conference session, “Active Learning for Paleography Instruction in Special Collections.” This session will feature a brief presentation on the history and importance of paleography instruction in enabling researchers across disciplines to access and use unpublished sources. Participants will also receive demonstrations of instructional modules, from the traditional to the complex, with an emphasis on active-learning approaches that encourage students to become invested partners in skills development. The workshop will be moderated by Sarah Powell; speakers are BSA member Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library), Julie Fisher (American Philosophical Society), and Matthew Carter (University of North Carolina, Greensboro). Registration required. For more information, and to register, please visit http://conference.rbms.info/2020/.¶ Also on 24 June 2020, the Society will co-sponsor with the Society for the History of Authership, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), the Institute for English Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and Maggs Bros. Ltd., a Feminist Bibliography Masterclass led by BSA member Sarah Werner. Registration required; please contact [email protected].¶ From 16–18 July, BSA member Dr. Aaron T. Pratt, Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, will lead a seminar, “The Long Lives of Early Printed Books.” Attendance is by application only; successful applicants were notified in March. The BSA is proud to co-sponsor this event with the Harry Ransom Center and the Bibliographical Society (UK), providing travel stipends to five attendees. For more information, please visit www.hrc.utexas.edu/long-lives-of-early-printed-books/.❧ProgramsNew Scholars ProgramThe Bibliographical Society of America each year invites three scholars in the early stages of their careers to present twenty-minute papers on their current, unpublished research in the field of bibliography as members of a panel at the annual meeting of the Society, which takes place in New York City in late January. The New Scholars Program seeks to promote the work of scholars who are new to the field of bibliography, broadly defined to include any research that deals with the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, and subsequent history of texts as material objects (print or manuscript). Papers of new scholars are published in the December issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America as part of the proceedings of the annual meeting. The 2020 BSA New Scholars are Dr. Alison Fraser (University at Buffalo, the State University of New York), Dr. Elisa Tersigni (The Folger Shakespeare Library), and Matthew Wills, (University of San Diego, California). Applications to the 2021 New Scholars Program are due on 1 September 2020. Please visit the New Scholars website for further information (https://bibsocamer.org/awards/new-scholars-program/).❧FellowshipsAnnual FellowshipsEvery year the Society offers a variety of fellowship in support of bibliographical inquiry and research in the history of the book trades and in publishing history: The Katharine Pantzer Senior Fellowship in Bibliography and the British Book Trades ($6,000) supports research in topics relating to book production and distribution in Britain during the hand-press period as well as studies of authorship, reading and collecting based on the examination of British books published in that period, with a special emphasis on descriptive bibliography. 2020 Winner: Kirk Melnikoff, “Bookselling in Early Modern England.” The BSA-ASECS Fellowship for Bibliographical Studies in the Eighteenth Century ($3,000). Recipients must be a member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the time of the award. 2020 Winner: Sarah Bramao-Ramos, “Readers of Manchu Language Books.” The BSA-Harry Ransom Center Pforzheimer Fellowship in Bibliography (two awards at $3,000 each) supports the bibliographical study of early modern books and manuscripts, 1455–1700, held in the Ransom Center’s Pforzheimer Library and in related collections of early printed books and manuscripts, including the Pforzheimer Gutenberg Bible. 2020: No winner. The BSA-Mercantile Library Fellowship in North American Bibliography ($3,000) supports scholarship in North American bibliography, including studies in the North American book trade, production and distribution of North American books, North American book illustration and design, North American collecting and connoisseurship and North American bibliographical history in general. 2020 Winner: Allison Fagan, “Editorial Intimacies, Posthumous Publishing and Toni Morrison’s edition of Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child.” The BSA-Pine Tree Foundation Fellowship in Culinary Bibliography ($3,000) supports the bibliographical study of printed and manuscript cookbooks (once commonly known as receipt books); medical recipe books that also contain culinary recipes; other types of books, manuscript, and printed material that include a substantial body of culinary recipes; treatises on and studies of gastronomy; or memoirs, diary accounts, or descriptions of food and cooking. Projects may cover any period or country. 2020 Winner: Andrea Gutierrez, “Bibliography of the First Print Cookbooks in Tamil.” The BSA-Pine Tree Foundation Fellowship in Hispanic Bibliography ($3,000) supports the bibliographical study of printed and manuscript items: 1) in the Spanish language produced during any period and in any country; or 2) in any language provided they were produced in Spain, or in its overseas dominions during the time of Spanish sovereignty; or 3) the bibliographical study of book and manuscript collections in Spain, or in its overseas dominions during the time of Spanish sovereignty; or 4) the bibliographical study of Spanish-language book and manuscript collections during any period and in any country. 2020 Winner: Daniela Samur Duque, “The Allure of Books: Bookstores and Printshops in Bogotá, 1850s–1920” The Charles J. Tanenbaum Fellowship in Cartographical Bibliography ($3000) supports projects dealing with all aspects of the history, presentation, printing, design, distribution and reception of cartographical documents from Renaissance times to the present, with a special emphasis on eighteenth-century cartography. Funded by the Pine Tree Foundation of New York. 2020 Winners: Jordana Dym and Carla Lois, “Bound Images: A History of Maps in Books.” The Katharine Pantzer Fellowship in the British Book Trades ($3,000) supports bibliographical inquiry as well as research in the history of the book trades and publishing history in Britain. 2020 Winner: Kate Nesbit, “Listening to Books: Reading Aloud and the Novel, 1800–1935.” The Reese Fellowship for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas ($3,000). The fellowship may be awarded to any scholar, whether academic or independent, whose project explores the history of print culture in the Western Hemisphere. 2020 Winner: Nazera Wright, “Early African American Women Writers and their Libraries.” The BSA-Rare Book School Fellowship. 2019 Winner: Joshua Kruchten (New York University). BSA Short-term Fellowships ($3,000). The Society also offers a number of unnamed, short-term fellowships supporting bibliographical research as described above. 2020 Winners: Alexander Jacobson, “Tamizdat as Masquerade”; John McQuillen, “The 15th -Century Blockbook in America: A Descriptive Census”; Yelizaveta Strakhov, “Representation of Translation by Scribes in Manuscripts of John Lydgate’s and Benedict Burgh’s Secrees of Olde Philosoffres.”Details of the program are located at http://bibsocamer.org/awards/fellowships/, or can be had by contacting Hope Mayo, Chair of the Fellowship Committee, [email protected].❧Triennial AwardsWilliam L. Mitchell PrizeThe Bibliographical Society of America invites submissions for its seventh William L. Mitchell Prize for Bibliography or Documentary Work on Early British Periodicals or Newspapers. The deadline for the 2021 competition is 15 October 2020, and will consider works published after 31 December 2017. The winner of the William L. Mitchell Prize will receive a cash award of $1,000 and a year’s membership in the Society.The Mitchell Prize for research on British serials was endowed to honor William L. Mitchell, former librarian at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas, where he was curator of the Richmond P. and Marjorie N. Bond Collection of 18th-Century British Newspapers and Periodicals and of the Edmund Curll Collection. It was conceived and mainly endowed by Mitchell’s colleague at the Kenneth Spencer Library, Alexandra Mason. The Prize serves as an encouragement to scholars engaged in bibliographical scholarship on eighteenth-century periodicals published in English or in any language but within the British Isles and its colonies and former colonies.Submissions for the Mitchell Prize may concentrate on any periodicals or newspapers printed before 1800 in English-speaking countries, but should involve research into primary sources of historical evidence, such as the analysis of the physical objects, whether for establishing a text or understanding the history of the production, distribution, collecting, or reading of serial publications. For examples of the kind of scholarship falling within the Prize’s survey, please see the descriptions of previous winners.Eligible scholarship may take the form of a book or article, a Master’s thesis or PhD dissertation defended and approved, or research results distributed in another manner, such as on a website or a CD-ROM. Eligible scholarship must have been published or, if a dissertation or thesis, approved during the year of the deadline or the three previous calendar years. If a publication has an incorrect nominal date disqualifying it for submission but an actual date of publication within the prize period, it may be nominated with a letter by the publisher or editor testifying to the actual date of publication. Unpublished dissertations and theses must be accompanied by a letter from their authors’ directors attesting to their having been approved.For further information on the Mitchell Prize and to learn how to apply, see the Society website at http://bibsocamer.org/awards/william-l-mitchell-prize/.Justin G. Schiller PrizeEndowed by Justin G. Schiller, a dealer in antiquarian children’s books and past member of the BSA Council, the Schiller Prize for Bibliographical Work on Pre-20th-Century Children’s Books is intended to encourage scholarship in the bibliography of historical children’s books. It brings a cash award of $3,000 and a year’s membership in the Society.Works put into nomination, which must be in English, may concentrate on any children’s book printed before the year 1901 in any country or any language. Submissions should involve research into bibliography and printing history broadly conceived and should focus on the physical book as historical evidence for studying topics such as the history of book production, publication, distribution, collecting, or reading. Studies of the printing, publishing, and allied trades, as these relate to children’s books, are also welcome. Eligible scholarship may take the form of a published book or article, a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation that has been defended and approved, or research results distributed in another manner, such as on a website or a CD-ROM.Deadlines for the 2022 competition will be announced in spring 2021, and will consider works (including theses, articles, books, and electronic resources) published after 31 December 2018. For further information on the Schiller Prize and to learn how to apply, see the Society’s website at http://bibsocamer.org/awards/justin-g-shiller-prize/.St. Louis Mercantile Library PrizeFunded by the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, this prize encourages scholarship in the bibliography of American history and literature. Awarded every three years, the prize brings a cash award of $2,000 and a year’s membership in the Society. The 2020 winner was announced at the Society’