Toronto Centre for the Book

Marshall McLuhan is remembered today as a media theorist, but he was a literary scholar by training and an English professor by occupation. Attention has been paid to McLuhan’s contributions as a literary critic of modernism, and his doctoral thesis on Renaissance author Thomas Nashe has recently been published. But his lifelong relationship with eighteenth-century authors such as John Locke, Isaac Newton, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and William Blake has gone virtually unremarked.

Drawing on archival research at such venues as the Library and Archives Canada and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, this lecture will address McLuhan’s reading and writing about eighteenth-century literature, from his college years in Canada and Great Britain, to his decades as a professor and literary critic in North America, and finally, to his explosion onto the international stage after the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media.

The lecture argues that McLuhan’s reading of eighteenth-century texts shaped his (and by extension, our) views on media shift and social and cultural change, and it addresses compelling questions that this largely unacknowledged history raises. Given McLuhan’s emphasis that “the medium is the message,” how did the material form, as well as content of works such as Pope’s “epic of the printed word,” the Dunciad, influence his (McLuhan’s) thinking about the psychic and social effects of print? More broadly, if this media theorist’s understanding of the “consequences” of media shift was fundamentally shaped by his literary reading, what are the consequences for us as critics, theorists, and teachers today?

Paula McDowell specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and media and in the History of the Book. With the support of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she has published The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730 (Oxford, 1998), Elinor James: Printed Writings (Ashgate, 2005), and articles on models of the Enlightenment, the epistemology of ephemera, the eighteenth-century novel, and many other topics. Her latest book, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2017), was awarded the John Ben Snow Prize by the North American Conference on British Studies for the best book by a North American scholar on any aspect of British studies from the middle ages to the eighteenth century. It examines the oral/literate binary as a heuristic — a tool for understanding that itself has a history — and argues that the concept of “oral culture” was in fact a back formation of the explosion of print commerce. She is currently writing a book on the scholarly life and reading of professor and media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) and on the literary and humanistic origins of media studies.

 Reports of the death of books have been greatly exaggerated, but nevertheless texts are significantly changed as they move into digital forms. Textuality is radiant, and as it goes digital it becomes more and more particulate. Drawing on experiences of creating and facilitating the circulation of scholarship digitally, as well as theories of editing including éditorialisation, I will explore the potential of texts in digital space. The technologies of linked open data open up structures of textuality and intertextuality that offer ways of constructing textual universes very different from those of the materially bounded book.

Susan Brown is Professor of English at the University of Guelph, where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship, and Visiting Professor in English and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. Her research in digital humanities, Victorian literature, and women’s writing informs Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (www.ualberta.ca/orlando), an ongoing experiment in digital literary history, published online by Cambridge University Press since 2006, which she directs and co-edits. She also leads the development of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (www.cwrc.ca), a CFI-funded online repository and research environment for literary studies in Canada. CWRC is developing tools for collaborative knowledge production, interoperability, and sustainability of digital scholarly resources.

 Although politically part of Nepal, Mustang is linked by its history, culture and religious tradition to Tibet. Historical and archaeological records suggest that this remote district was in the past absolutely central—a vibrant, dynamic, culturally rich, and religiously diverse area, and part of the ancient Tibetan culture. Therefore, both Tibetan monasteries and private houses, as well as abandoned caves in the region are known as being repositories of a wide range of ancient objects including many book collections. These books have not yet been systematically studied, mapped nor even viewed from a scholarly point of view. Moreover, we know relatively little about regional differences in book and paper history across the Himalayas.

Considering these perspectives, this lecture will present the preliminary results from surveying the Bön and Buddhist manuscript collections in Mustang, Nepal, such as for example the collection of Mardzong manuscripts found in the Caves of Upper Mustang near Lo Mönthang, the Lama Tsulthrim collection in Lubrak, the Bönpo Gompa collection in Jharkot, and the Drang srong collection in Lo Mönthang. This study will show the recent progress that comprises the description, identification and dating of newly discovered books using integrated multi-disciplinary methodologies. These are based on both codicology and scientific techniques such as fibre analysis, digital microscopy, and C14 dating. Features particular to these manuscripts will be discussed in the overall context of paper- and book-making traditions in Tibet and Nepal.

Dr. Agnieszka Helman-Ważny (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, Germany and the Department of Books and Media History, Faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland) is a paper scientist and the author or co-author of four books and more than forty scholarly articles, including The Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill 2014) and Codicology, Paleography, and Orthography of Early Tibetan Documents: Methods and a Case Study (Universität Wien 2017, co-authored with Brandon Dotson). Her main research focuses on the history of the regional production and usage of paper and books in Tibet and Central Asia. Using interdisciplinary methods in collaboration with private collectors, museum curators, Tibetan artisans, as well as personal experience in “experimental manuscriptology,” Dr. Helman-Ważny’s work is concerned with establishing paper typologies, and applying modern technologies in the identification and dating of premodern non-western manuscripts, including the Dunhuang manuscripts.

Reading is said to be “at risk” in the 21st Century, presumably because of the digitally mediated environment amid which we browse, multitask, and, well, read. Predictions of doom follow from the decline of reading, although there’s very little consensus about what reading is, what its particular virtues are, or how best to find out. This talk won’t solve these problems. Instead it seeks to sketch the present cultural location and extent of reading. How do we—if we can hypothesize a “we”—encounter reading? More particularly how do we encounter reading in profile or in silhouette, picked out against a backdrop of not reading?

Lisa Gitelman, Professor of English and of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, is a media historian whose research concerns American print culture, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book is entitled Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents and was published by Duke in 2014. Before that, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture was published by the MIT Press in 2006. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. She has taught at the Catholic University of American and at Harvard University, and has held fellowships and awards from the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, the Leslie Center Humanities Institute, Dartmouth College, and the University of Iowa Obermann Center for Advanced Study.

More books of hours remain in modern libraries than any other kind of book from late medieval England: almost eight hundred manuscript volumes, and many thousands of printed ones. From Europe at large the number of manuscripts alone has been estimated at around ten thousand. Their survival rate suggests (though of course it does not prove) that these books were very widely read, and even that a late medieval reader would have been more likely to encounter a book of hours than any other kind of bound volume. This truism–that the book of hours was a “bestselling” volume in the late Middle Ages–has utterly failed to affect the reading and interpretation of other kinds of late-medieval texts. But any history of medieval reading practices must include a consideration of what Eamon Duffy calls “the most intimate and important book of the late Middle Ages.” And any history of late-medieval English literature–this is my further argument–must come to terms with the material histories of reading that render literary culture legible.

In this talk, I explore the importance of the material and textual genre of the hours for English literary history. Rather than offering a history of art or a history of prayer—the more common rubrics for approaching these volumes—the talk excavates the histories of literature that are manifest in this uniquely important textual archive. My study therefore explores the evidence for connections both broad and specific between books of hours and vernacular literary culture in late medieval England. As compendia of multiple texts and systems of images, books of hours reveal a rich hybridity of representation to be a central feature of late-medieval reading: reading absent texts alongside present ones, vernacular captions alongside Latin prayers, static images alongside developing narrative and—not least—pictures alongside words. Because these prayerbooks were so wildly popular, their construction of a both paratactic and simultaneous relation among multiple systems of signification informed the most common reading experience of the late Middle Ages. Their complex understanding of what it meant to read—of how a person should engage with a book—can have enormous consequences for our sense of how medieval literary culture worked.

Jessica Brantley is Professor of English at Yale University, where she has taught since 2000. Before that, she studied at Harvard University (A.B.), Cambridge University (M. Phil.), and UCLA (Ph.D.). Her interests include Old and Middle English literatures, manuscript studies, text/image relations, and the history of the book. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in all of these subjects, and she is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the English Department at Yale. Professor Brantley’s research examines the cultures of medieval reading as they are preserved in manuscripts. Her first book, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago, 2007), shows that the format of a late-medieval miscellany reveals surprising connections between the private reading of a meditative lyric and the public performance of civic drama. Other projects in process include a handbook on Medieval Manuscripts and Literary Forms, an edited volume of essays entitled Late Medieval English Alabaster: A Reassessment, and a monograph provisionally entitled The Medieval Imagetext: A Literary History of the Book of Hours.

This paper argues that historical analysis of the cost or price of medieval books is confounded by the quantity and quality of the available evidence. Medieval scholars depend on very small data sets to address this question, and even the data that are available have been stripped by time of key contextual information. In the absence of a reliable empirical approach to the question, I turn to other forms of inquiry. Some of these are grounded in the close analysis of the physical forms of the medieval codex. I am also interested in ideas about value, and about evidence itself, that I find in some of Chaucer’s writing.

Alexandra Gillespie is a Professor at the University of Toronto in English and Medieval Studies, where she teaches medieval literature, bibliography, and manuscript studies. Her research is concerned with medieval and early modern texts and books; she is especially interested in the shift from manuscript to print, the relationship between book history, literary criticism, and literary theory, and the digitization of medieval books. Her publications include Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473-1557 (Oxford, 2006) and The Production of Books in England, 1350-1500, edited with Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge, 2011). Professor Gillespie currently serves as Chair of the Department of English and Drama, University of Toronto at Mississauga; she also directs the Old Books New Science (OBNS) Lab, which brings together undergraduate research assistants, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and technologists with interests in digital scholarship, digital text editing, computational approaches to humanities research, and medieval book history (manuscript and print).

In The History of Printing In America (1812), Isaiah Thomas briefly records the life of Primus Fowle, an African American who was enslaved by Daniel Fowle in Boston and Portsmouth. Thomas writes, “This negro was named Primus. He was an African. I well remember him; he worked at press with or without an assistant; he continued to do press work until prevented by age. He went to Portsmouth with his master, and there died, being more than ninety years of age; about fifty of which he was a pressman.” Though he “did press work,” the broadsides, newspapers, and other sheets that came off his press were marked “Daniel Fowle, Printer” or “Printed by Daniel Fowle,” never formally crediting Primus Fowle. What are the logics of both print and slavery that occlude a figure like Primus Fowle? What would it mean to account for enslaved printers within our vast archives of early American print? Senchyne argues for the importance of reading typography, accidents, breakages, and other non-alphabetic marks in recovering the presence of enslaved printers like Primus Fowle.

Jonathan Senchyne is an assistant professor of book history and print culture in the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also the director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture. He has a Ph.D. in English from Cornell. He is currently completing a book on the meaning-making dimensions of paper in early and nineteenth-century American literature entitled Intimate Paper and the Materiality of American Literature, under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press’s series on Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. With Brigitte Fielder, he is coeditor of Infrastructures of African American Print (University of Wisconsin Press). Senchyne’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Book History, Technology and Culture, Studies in Romanticism, Early African American Print Culture, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, and elsewhere. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the New York Public Library. With Martin Foys, Senchyne is co-PI on grants from CLIR and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to develop and implement DM: Digital Maxima, an open source platform for creating architectures of linked, annotated, and searchable data among digital surrogates of archival texts and media.

For some contributors to the history of the book, the subject appears bounded and specific, for others it is more indefinite, more a label than a discipline. This lecture explores how these differences relate to parent disciplines and the training of respective contributors from literary, historical, bibliographical, codicological, digital, library and conservation studies. In ways akin to the elision between ‘the history of art’ and ‘art history,’ there are in the English-speaking world subtle semantic differences between ‘the history of the book’, the ‘history of books’ and ‘book history’, but the greater challenge is whether any of these descriptors are sufficiently robust to dispel questions about originality, integrity and coherence. In contemplating future directions, the lecture will consider the approach of some of the founding practitioners, surveying the insistence upon interdisciplinarity and examining the limits to this ambition. It will probe the further complications of the ‘history of print culture’ and question whether ‘book history,’ until recently apparently practised mostly in and about the Western World, can be global in ambition.

James Raven is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge; he was previously Reader in Social and Cultural History at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries, and a member of the American Antiquarian Society, he has also held visiting appointments in the United States, France, Italy and Britain. His scholarship in social and cultural history and cultural studies was recognized with the award of LittD from the University of Cambridge in 2012. His recent publications include Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (Chicago, 2014), based on his British Library Panizzi Lectures for 2010; Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England (Boydell, 2014); and Lost Mansions: Essays on the Destruction of the Country House (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Numerous earlier books and articles examine social, economic and communications history, historical mapping, approaches to media and literary history, the spatial organisation of knowledge, historical bibliography, and colonial cultural history. He has also published on specific aspects of urban, business and popular and intellectual history, and is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. As part of a major long-term project re-examining the spatial history of Enlightenment global networks, he is completing a book on reading and commercialisation, and he is also currently completing research for an OUP history of chancing, gambling and state lotteries. He directs the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust and the Mapping the Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century London project, and is now launching a major European network project on the historical geographies of communications and social media (building on an earlier European Science Foundation workshop, ‘Knowing About Mediation’, involving participants from 14 EU countries).

When nations amend their copyright laws in response to calls for international harmonization, they usually do so by expanding authors’ rights without also seeking to harmonize national public domains. Divergent laws have resulted in an uncoordinated global public domain that renders authors’ works freely available for use in some countries while subjecting them to copyright or moral-rights protection in others. The problem of the patchwork global commons, exacerbated by unpredictable literary estates and the inconsistent policies of institutional repositories, undermines the ability of researchers to access and disseminate historical and cultural materials, including unpublished works. The uncoordinated public domain shares certain features–notably, the problem of resource underuse–with what scholars of law and economics call an anticommons. A balanced solution might be to employ a system of compulsory licenses to harmonize the world’s public domains and to coordinate the legal conditions whereby the vast resources held by cultural institutions could be more fully exploited. The chief example used throughout this talk is James Joyce–specifically, the ongoing Oxford University Press project, of which Professor Spoo is a co-editor, to collect and publish some 2,000 unpublished letters written by Joyce.

Robert Spoo holds the Chapman Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Tulsa, and was recently named a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. He earned his JD from Yale, where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating, he served as law clerk for the Hon. Sonia Sotomayor of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and practised for several years in New York, Oklahoma, and San Francisco, providing litigation services and advice in the areas of copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property. As an attorney, Professor Spoo has represented authors, scholars, documentary filmmakers, record companies, and other creators and users of intellectual property. His litigation work has included serving as co-counsel, with the Stanford Center for Internet & Society and other attorneys, for Professor Carol Shloss of Stanford against the Estate of James Joyce. Prior to his legal career, Professor Spoo received his PhD in English from Princeton and taught for more than ten years in the University of Tulsa English Department, where he was also editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. He has published numerous books and articles on Joyce, Ezra Pound, and other modern literary figures. His teaching interests include copyrights and intellectual property, media and entertainment law, law and literature, and the copyright-related needs of scholars. His book Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (OUP, 2013) offers a legal and cultural history of the impact on non-US authors of protectionist and isolationist features of US copyright laws since 1790. Professor Spoo is a member of the Modernist Studies Association Task Force on Fair Use, serves as copyright advisor to many academic journals and projects, and acts as general counsel for the International James Joyce Foundation. He also serves on the National Library of Ireland advisory board, and has assisted with proposed copyright legislation for the Republic of Ireland and other copyright issues affecting Irish cultural institutions.

Robert Darnton famously worried that book history might lead to “interdisciplinarity run riot.” Perhaps instead the time has come to turn it inside out. In my 2006 Old Books & New Histories I called for mutual respect among the three core disciplines. Each scholar asks questions grounded in the field(s) of study where their intellectual formation happened. This paper aims to go beyond the existing practitioners of the “interdiscipline” we call book history to consider its encounter/engagement with other ways of understanding the world, both academic and not. The argument is that practitioners better understand their own discipline’s engagement with book culture than anyone else (hence historians of science and scientific culture; hence literary scholars and creative writing; hence historians and historiography). But what are the questions that legal scholars might ask of “the book” in all its complexity of mutability and mediatedness? Sociologists? Management experts? Nutritionists? These and other academic disciplines have research challenges that connect with the realms of book culture while remaining rooted elsewhere. Similarly such book-dependent fields of popular knowledge as diet and exercise, military history, and celebrity biography are perhaps best served by journalists, bloggers and others. But those commentators should first acquire some familiarity with the basic principles of book-historical knowledge.

Leslie Howsam is Distinguished University Professor Emerita at the University of Windsor, Senior Research Fellow at Ryerson University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She earned a PhD in modern British history from York University in 1989 and joined the faculty at Windsor in 1993. She was later founding president of the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture / Association Canadienne pour l’étude de l’histoire du livre (2004 -9) and president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (2009-13). She now serves as General Editor for the series Studies in Book and Print Culture published by the University of Toronto Press. She is a Trustee of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust and a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Her major publications include, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and in 2009 the British Library and the University of Toronto Press jointly published Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain 1850-1950. This was based on lectures delivered as part of her James P. R. Lyell Readership in Bibliography (2005-6) at the University of Oxford. Her first book was Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge University Press, 1991); perhaps her best-known is Old Books & New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book & Print Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2006).

In this informal talk, Natalie Davis will describe the impact of the Red Hunt in the United States in the 1950s on her own scholarship as a graduate student and beginning historian, especially its effect on her work on book history in early modern France. She will also look at some other historians similarly affected by the experience of political persecution and see what consequences it had for their historical writing. How did we cope with censorship?

Natalie Zemon Davis specializes in the social and cultural history of France, as well as other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. She has taught at Brown University, the University of Toronto, the University of California, Berkeley, and at Princeton University, where she was Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. On retiring from Princeton in 1996 she returned to Toronto, where she continues to live, as Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies. In 2010, she was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize as “one of the most creative historians writing today” whose work, in the wording of the award citation, “shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action.” In 2012, she was named Companion of the Order of Canada, the highest class within the order. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for “her insights into the study of history and her exacting eloquence in bringing the past into focus.” Davis’s books have all been translated into other languages: twenty-two in the case of The Return of Martin Guerre.

Who knew what when about the origin and development of the alphabet? Answers to this question take us into a history of bibliographical antiquities, paleographical investigation, and graphical modes of knowledge transmission. The various “histories” that emerge from this record have distinct chronological foundations that embody belief systems about the age of the earth and the human record that have changed over time. Examining the analogue evidence of textual and visual information, as well as reflecting on the meta-level of historical process, offers insights and challenges for the ways we use digital humanities tools to visualize knowledge. This talk draws on the rich inventory of printed texts, manuscript records, inscriptions and evidence of antiquities to look at various alphabet histories in light of traditional and digital tools.

Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies at UCLA. She has published and lectured widely on topics related to digital humanities and aesthetics, visual forms of knowledge production, book history and future designs, graphic design, historiography of the alphabet and writing, and contemporary art. Her recent titles include SpecLab: Projects in Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009) and the jointly authored Digital_Humanities (MIT, 2012) with Anne Burdick, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp. A collection of her essays, What Is? was published by Cuneiform Press in 2013, and Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (2014) appeared in the Harvard University Press MetaLab series. In addition to her academic work, Drucker has produced artist’s books and projects that were the subject of a retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, initiated at Columbia College in Chicago. Her artist’s books are represented in museum and library collections throughout the United States and Europe. In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Historians of American Indian history have long struggled with the question of sources. Throughout the nineteenth century, many native societies on the Great Plains had neither scripted forms of their own languages nor many members literate in English. As a result, scholars dependent on traditional documentary sources have had few options for eliciting native perspectives on dramatic changes in their societies. A turn to material culture, however, opens up the evidentiary possibilities. Plains Indians produced rock art and painted tipis, as well as visual histories and notebooks full of drawings. Tracking changes in both the content and form of this visual production allows historians to access native reflections on their changing world.

This lecture explores Kiowa Indian drawings and calendars kept in ledger notebooks. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Kiowas created hundreds, if not thousands, of drawings and paintings in notebooks that circulated between Indian communities, American missionaries, military officials, and anthropologists. Through an examination of several Kiowa artists, this lecture asks how Kiowa forms of personal expression, history keeping, and reflection on encounters with the supernatural changed as a result of the move from visual production on natural materials to ledger books.

Jennifer Graber is a historian of religion in the United States specializing in inter-religious encounter and violence. Her first book, The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America, explores the intersection of church and state during the founding of the nation’s first prisons. Her current project focuses on religious transformations in Indian and settler communities in Indian Territory over the course of the nineteenth century. Professor Graber teaches undergraduate classes on the history of religion in the United States, Native American religions, and the American West. She teaches graduate seminars on religion and violence, religion and empire, and approaches to the study of religion in the U.S.

Concerns about the piracy of news go back at least to the seventeenth century, when complaints involved counterfeit ballads hawked on the streets rather than articles reposted on the Internet. But with respect to copyright law, news publications—whatever their material form—have followed an unusual trajectory. This lecture will draw on a range of news publications (including broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines) to consider long-term shifts in attitudes toward the copying and republication of news. It will compare developments in Great Britain and the United States from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth century. At several moments during this period, new forms of publication, new conceptions of journalism, and new modes of distribution led writers and publishers to try to claim exclusive rights over journalistic texts. While some proposed a special copyright for news, others sought to create standards about what could be copied and how such copied material should be acknowledged. By studying shifting attitudes toward the ownership of news alongside changes in how writers, editors, and printers worked, this lecture will offer a historical perspective on contemporary debates about journalism and intellectual property.

Will Slauter is an associate professor of English studies at Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7 and a member of the Institut universitaire de France (IUF). He received a PhD in history from Princeton University and has taught at Columbia University, Florida State University, and Université Paris 8 (2010-2015). He studies the history of authorship and publishing, with a particular interest in newspapers, and is currently working on a book about the history of copyright in journalism. This research has been supported by residential fellowships at the New York Public Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society (NEH Fellow 2015), and the Library of Congress (Kluge Fellow 2015-2016).

This presentation argues the case for bibliography and book history as disciplines uniquely equipped to recover the signs of human presence in digital artifacts—those humanizing dings, paint scratches, and coffee rings, as it were, that ground new technologies within human timescales and experiential worlds. The past several years have seen remarkable growth in textual scholarship that does not merely apply digital tools to the study of texts, but takes digital textuality itself as the object of study. Matthew Kirschenbaum is the recognized pioneer in applying textual scholarship to born-digital texts (especially works of electronic literature), and several others in the field have begun to do the same with materials such as video games, virtual worlds, e-books, print-on-demand digital books, and even large research databases. This range of ontological exploration might suggest a field dashing off in all directions at once, but I will argue that it represents the natural extension of bibliographical thinking into areas where it’s urgently needed—just as D.F. McKenzie called for in his later work, and as Andrew Prescott has called for more recently within the digital humanities.

That extension of bibliographical thinking to born-digital materials may be natural, but it is by no means straightforward. Fredson Bowers’s metaphorical description of bibliography’s goal—to “strip the veil of print from a text” to understand its history and transmission—may resonate even more with twenty-first century bibliographers faced with a veil of code, yet lacking methods to investigate beneath the surfaces of our screens. What might an artifact like an e-book reveal about the history and social contexts of its making, or the collaborative nature of its construction? How do we locate the significant differences between the surviving versions of a digital text, and what is at stake in their preservation and representation? In a born-digital context, how do form and meaning shape each other? This talk will explore these questions and related examples within the context of my current book project, The Veil of Code, which offers a series of case studies in born-digital bibliography.

Alan Galey is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where he also teaches in the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture. His research focuses on intersections between textual scholarship and digital technologies, especially in the context of theories of the archive and the history of new media prototyping and experimentation (print, digital, and otherwise). He has published on these topics in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Literary and Linguistic Computing, College English and Archival Science, and has co-edited the book collection Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures (with Travis DeCook; Routledge, 2011). His article “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination,” published in Book History in 2012, was awarded the Fredson Bowers Prize by the Society for Textual Scholarship. He was also given the Outstanding Instructor Award by the Master of Information Student Council for 2013-2014. His first monograph book, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity, was published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press.

“Literature is my Utopia,” Helen Keller quotably declared. Today, serious readers often credit the printed book with the power to annihilate space and time. The datelined newspaper and the digital book provide foils for that rapture, so far feebly emulated by e-reading interfaces that eschew an onscreen clock. Yet placeless reading is as hard-won a technology as ubiquitous computing. Over the millennia in which written matter has become smaller, lighter, and more foldable, reading has gradually unmoored itself from dedicated, even sacred times and places. Where readers had come to texts, texts began to come to readers. More recently, the paperback’s miraculous ability to reconcile durability with disposability and portability with impermeability has made bed, bath and beyond the frontiers that every subsequent reading technology is challenged to conquer: Kindle advertisements declare the iPad’s unreadability at the beach as conclusively as a 1958 expert predicted that microfilms would replace books only once “some genius develops a way for reading them everywhere that books can be read: in the subway, in the bathtub, in a fishing skiff.” This talk traces a history of changing attitudes toward reading on the move, from 1800 to the present, and concludes by asking how new technologies of site-specific reading are challenging the book’s function as a space in which to lose yourself.

Leah Price teaches English at Harvard University. Her books include How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton UP, 2012) and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge UP, 2000). She edited Unpacking my Library: Writers and their Books (2011); Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (with Pamela Thurschwell); and (with Seth Lerer) a special issue of PMLA on The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature. She writes on old and new media for the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, San Francisco Chronicle, and Boston Globe. She is at work on a new book, Out of Print: Reading after Paper.

The New World, so called by sixteenth-century Europeans, had desirable commodities to offer. During the first century of the European invasion of the Americas, music acted as a commodity, or at least as a kind of currency to obtain commodities. This happened mainly in two ways over the course of the sixteenth century. Firstly, Europeans used musical performances and instruments, in particular small bells, to lure and trade with Amerindians. Secondly, travel accounts and displays of captured natives, both intended to generate more and more European voyages to the Americas, often featured the strange and wonderful music of Amerindians. For Europeans, these musical performances had a visceral appeal partly because they looked and sounded strangely familiar. Amerindian music reminded them of their own musical heritage from the not quite eclipsed Middle Ages, of worlds and mentalities that were rapidly fading in capitalism’s first push. All too soon, music’s longstanding cosmic and spiritual power would be relegated to a mere means for the buying and selling of commodities. And such is its place in our time.

John Haines is professor of music and medieval studies at the University of Toronto. He has published on the music of the Middle Ages and its modern reception in a variety of journals, both musicological – from Early Music History to Popular Music – and non-musicological – from Romania to Scriptorium. His books include Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (2004) and Medieval Song in Romance Languages (2010). He is a contributor, among others, to The Cambridge Companion to French Music and The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, both forthcoming. This year (2014), appeared two of his books, Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy (Routledge) and The Notory Art of Shorthand (Ars notoria notarie): A Curious Chapter in the History of Writing in the West (Louvain), as well as his edited collection of essays, Musique et littérature au Moyen Âge, for the Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes (Garnier). Most recently, he has been studying music of the Americas in the sixteenth century.

Protestantism has been the dominant influence shaping both American religious history and the history of American book culture, as the drive for widespread literary, mass book dissemination, and the public school movement were each significantly driven by the religious imperative to access the Word. The Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura energized the first large-scale publishing project in North America, John Eliot’s Algonquin Bible of 1663. From these beginnings, through the nineteenth-century Bible and tract societies, to the Christian Booksellers Association of the present, the story of Protestantism in the United States has been inseparable from the drive to control and disseminate print. Yet all along, print has also served as a site of religious conflict and a tool of religious innovation and dissent, as examples ranging from Tom Paine and the Book of Mormon to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Oprah Winfrey make clear.

This lecture will attend to this dynamic of authority, to the role of print in the interplay of establishment and dissent in American religious life. Three themes structure the analysis: the relationship between scriptural and non-scriptural forms of print; the gendered dimensions of reading, literacy, and authorship; and the nature of print as commodity, and therefore as a site where market dynamics shape religion with particular potency. Through an examination of key examples across four centuries, this talk aims to consider a basic historiographical question: how do the frameworks of book history sharpen our understanding of authority in American religious history

Matthew Hedstrom is a historian of the United States specializing in religion and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His overarching research interests are the social history of religious sensibilities and the cultural mechanisms of their production and propagation. His particular areas of teaching and research thus far have been religious liberalism, spirituality, the cultures and politics of pluralism, religion and race, and print culture. His first book, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century, employs novel sources in book history to tell the surprising story of religious liberalism’s cultural ascendancy in the twentieth century. The religious middlebrow culture of mid-century, Professor Hedstrom argues, brought psychological, mystical, and cosmopolitan forms of spirituality to broad swaths of the American middle class. He has also authored various articles, reviews, and reference works in American studies and American religious history. He is beginning work on a new book project on race and the search for religious authenticity from the Civil War through the 1960s.

False attributions of authorship, unauthorized printings, competing editions and complaints about quality were hardly unusual in early-modern printing. But these problems were virtually unheard of in relation to English legal printing after the grant of the monopoly patent in the 1550s. Nevertheless, they all appear in English legal printing from around 1630, despite the continued existence of the patent. In this paper I shall present the evidence that something changed in common-law printing around 1630 and that legal printing came to look much more like other parts of the printing trade. In doing so I hope to cast some light on changes in the nature of the law patent and in the relationship between the legal profession and legal printers.

Ian Williams is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Laws at University College London and has been a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and at the Huntington Library. Ian’s research interests are in early-modern legal history, in particular legal scholarship, including law books and the Inns of Court, and legal theory. These interests come together in work on legal reasoning, where legal theory and legal scholarship are applied in individual cases, mixing the history of ideas with histories of the book and reading.