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BSANZ Conference 2022 program
Conference program
Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Conference 2022 - Monday 28 to Tuesday 29 November 2022
Monday 28 November 2022
8.30 – 9.00 Registration
9.00 – 9.10Welcome to Country Dixson Room/ Online
Elder, Metropolitan Land Council
9.10 – 9.20Welcome to the State Library of NSW Dixson Room/ Online
Dr John Vallance, State Librarian
9.20 – 9.30Welcome to the BSANZ Annual Conference Dixson Room/ Online
Amanda Laugesen, President, BSANZ
9.30 – 10.30 Keynote: Prof. Michelle P. Brown Dixson Room/ Online
Open the covers of a medieval illuminated manuscript and you are passing through a portal into a colourful world of decoration and imagery. But is this just entertainment, visible consumption of wealth, or art for art's sake? What purposes might these creatures from dreams, people from a past age and the language of flora and fauna fulfil and what might they have to tell us about that age – and our own?
Michelle P. Brown, FSA is Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies, University of London (School of Advanced Study) Lay Canon, Truro Cathedral, and former Lay Canon and Chapter Member of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, Former Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts, British Library. Michelle lives near Land’s End in Cornwall. Michelle has broadcast widely, curated several major exhibitions and authored some 35 books, including Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, The Lindisfarne Gospels, The Luttrell Psalter, The Holkham Bible Picture-Book, Art of the Islands, The Lion Companion to Christian Art.
Michelle P. Brown, FSA, Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies, University of London (School of Advanced Study), michelle.brown@sas.ac.uk
10.30 – 11.00 Morning tea Dixson Room
11.00 – 12.30 Readers embellishing pages Dixson Room/ Online
This paper falls into the topic area of owners’ additions to books. It begins with a broad sweep of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century owners who wrote in their books and whose books have in part or in entirety entered an institutional repository, the University of London Library. This brief overview will indicate a range of types of annotation and assess how valuable for research the various types of annotations are, and how they have been regarded institutionally over time. The general sweep will set the context for more detailed discussion of the books of the mathematician and mathematical historian Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871). This section discusses his annotations and explores the reason for them.
Dr Karen Attar is substantively the Curator of Rare Books and University Art, Senate House Library, and a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, both of the University of London, England. She has published widely on matters of library history and book collection, including the library of Augustus De Morgan. She is currently on secondment as Senior Librarian, Rare Books, at the State Library of New South Wales.
Karen Attar, Curator of Rare Books and University Art, University of London, karen.attar@london.ac.uk
Scholars have long acknowledged that reader annotations in books can tell us much about how those books are used. While increasing scholarly attention has been paid to user marks – which are relatively common – little, if any, attention has been paid to user-created supplements to printed books – which are significantly rarer. This paper examines the semantic domains and structure of Thomas Hardy’s copy of Baedeker’s Traveller’s Manual of Conversation, asking what its content can tell us about how Hardy expected to use it, suggesting potential source(s) for the content, and asking why Hardy felt compelled to enhance his copy in this way.
Dr Emma Koch recently completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne, in which she examined phrasebooks for travellers, their history, functions, and generic form. She is currently researching what user marks can tell us about phrasebook use, with a particular emphasis on user marks in the sixteenth- and seventh-century conversation books attributed to Noël de Berlemont.
Emma Koch, Accreditation Manager, University of Melbourne, ekoch@unimelb.edu.au
Across numerous libraries in New Zealand and Australia, hundreds of copies of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries survive, in the seventeenth-century editions printed in England. This paper will present initial findings from the first survey of Antipodean archival collections of early modern playbooks. Focusing on readers’ manuscript embellishments (ownership inscriptions, marginal marks, annotations) in seventeenth-century quarto and folio copies of Ben Jonson’s plays, it will ask what the marginalia in these books can tell us about how Jonson was read and valued in both seventeenth-century England and nineteenth-century Australasia.
Gabriella Edelstein is a Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research on the relationship between collaboration and censorship in early modern drama has been supported by an S Ernest Sprott Fellowship (University of Melbourne, 2019). She undertook her PhD at the University of Sydney (2019) and has an MA in Shakespeare Studies from King’s College London (2015).
Gabriella Edelstein, Lecturer in English, University of Newcastle, gabriella.edelstein@newcastle.edu.au
Hannah August is Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. She is the author of Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2022); her work on the history of reading early modern drama has also appeared in edited collections published by Manchester University Press and Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, as well as in the journal Renaissance Drama.
Hannah August, Senior Lecturer in English, Massey University, New Zealand, gabriella.edelstein@newcastle.edu.au
12.30 – 1.30 Lunch Dixson Room
1.30 – 3.00 Stream 1 - The Emmerson collection Dixson Room/ Online
The Emmerson Collection at State Library of Victoria is centred on King Charles I as image and icon, text and body. This paper explores a selection of the elegiac and monumentalising images of Charles I in the collection, focusing on the relationship between text (print, manuscript, marginalia) and image (printed, cut, copied, pasted), and on the portability of the image of the king. It traces the king's textual and visual body through Emmerson's collection as it is extracted and embellished, and considers the collection itself as a monument to the monarch.
Sarah CE Ross is Associate Professor of English at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. She is the author of Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (2015) and co-authored volumes, including Editing Early Modern Women (with Paul Salzman), Women Poets of the English Civil War (with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann) and, most recently, Early Modern Women’s Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics (with Rosalind Smith).
This paper analyses a copy of Katherine Philips’s 1667 folio that is in the Emmerson Collection, in the State Library of Victoria. Through a careful account of the provenance of the volume, the essay explores the transmission of this book, beginning with the intriguing female signature on the flyleaf. The transmission story requires close attention to ‘embellishments’ such as bookplates, as well as signatures. This analysis intersects with recent issues in Book History and in the positioning of early modern women’s writing in relation to the material turn in early modern studies.
Paul Salzman FAHA is an Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University and a Conjoint Professor at the University of Newcastle. He has published widely on early modern literature, with an emphasis on literary history, early modern women’s writing, and editing. His most recent book is Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825–1915 (Palgrave 2018).
This paper examines how early modern women writers embellished the margins of their books through illustration, in a wide range of visual forms: colouring, doodles, manicules, illustrated letters, line drawings and painting. Critical interest in early modern women’s marginalia has focused mainly upon its textual forms, unearthing a rich and expanding corpus that provides new evidence of women’s writing, reading and book use. More recently, however, attention to new kinds of marginalia (smudges, tears and stains, objects traces, and pasted material) has expanded our understanding of the forms and functions of marks in books.
Rosalind Smith is Professor of English at the Australian National University and works on gender, politics, and form in early modern women's writing. She is the author of Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621: The Politics of Absence (2005), co-editor of the collections Material Cultures of Early Modern Women's Writing (2014) and Early Modern Women and Complaint: Gender, Form, Politics (2020) and general editor, with Trisha Pender, of the Palgrave Online Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Her current research projects include an ARC Future Fellowship on early modern women’s marginalia and the ARC Linkage project underpinning this panel, which seeks to understand and contextualise the Emmerson bequest to State Library Victoria as well as to provide digital pathways for scholarly and public engagement with the collection.
1.30 – 3.00 Stream 2 - Art of embellishment Gallery Room/ Online
My conference paper will review a selection of artist’s books about Sherlock Holmes, Hopalong Cassidy and Robin Boyd, which are surrealist in style, mostly A6 in size, usually run to an edition of 20, and produced by the Black Jack Press, established in 1997 by Derham Groves. The books are printed on his Farley proofing press and handbound by him, often using recycled materials, such as the cardboard from a nearby doggie-treats factory. They are illustrated with linocuts and printed found objects. The aim of the little books is to 'embellish' the repute of Sherlock Holmes and Hopalong Cassidy and to 'tarnish' the standing of Robin Boyd.
Derham Groves, Senior Lecturer in Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, derham@unimelb.edu.au
A manuscript volume titled 'Gleanings from Australian Verse' was purchased for the Fryer Memorial Library of Australian Literature in 2009, thanks to a Sydney book dealer and money from the Cecil Hadgraft Memorial Fund. The work, commissioned by Father Edward Leo Hayes in 1940, consists of 17 of Father Hayes’ favourite Australian poems illuminated in the manner of manuscripts of the Middle Ages by Brisbane based artist Lilian Pedersen. This presentation will consider; Gleanings from Australian Verse; in the context of Fr Hayes’ broader collecting interests, reputation, and friendships with artists and writers.
Simon Farley is the Fryer Librarian at the University of Queensland’s Fryer Library. His previous appointments have included archival and curatorial roles at the Queensland State Archives and the State Library of Queensland’s John Oxley Library where he was Manager, Arts Portfolio of Queensland Literature, Music and Visual Art and Curator of Military Collections. Simon is the Vice-President of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand and editor of the Fryer Library’s journal Fryer Folios.
Simon Farley, Fryer Librarian, University of Queensland, s.farley@library.uq.edu.au, 0433 682 004
Bookplates are commonly considered to be labels reproduced in multiple copies to enable them to be pasted into the volumes of a library or section of a library. However, persistent searching can identify rare examples where a design has been drawn or painted into a book. These exist as unique works. This form of embellishment has been referred to as a manuscript bookplate or manuscript ex libris. As part of a project to develop a framework for describing, categorising and explaining the uses and legacies of bookplates in all their forms, I propose to present images of and give context to a range of manuscript bookplates.
Mark Ferson is a public health physician in Sydney who is semi-retired and so can devote at least some of his leisure to the pursuit and study of bookplates. In 2003 Mark was awarded a Master of Art Theory for a thesis on ‘A History of Bookplate Collecting in Australia’, and in 2006 founded the New Australian Bookplate Society, of which he is president and editor of its newsletter. He is also Honorary Secretary of the Book Collectors’ Society of Australia.
Mark Ferson, m.ferson@unsw.edu.au
3.00 – 3.30 Afternoon tea Dixson Room
3.30 – 5.00 Embracing embellishment Dixson Room/ Online
For over 40 years, George Robertson sat at the helm of Australia's most influential book publisher: Angus and Robertson. From the 1890s to the 1920s, his was a record of constant innovation in book production, as he attempted to overcome problems with a nascent market, limited production facilities and distribution hurdles for Australian books. One of the ways that ‘GR’ sought to meet these challenges was to embellish the titles he published. This paper will look at some of the innovative ways that Robertson sought to promote his books. I will trace how GR’s embellishments evolved over the decades in response to the changing market for Australian books.
While completing a doctorate in Australian literature at Sydney University, Neil James worked in various literature-related roles. He was the first NSW Literature Officer at the Ministry for the Arts, a researcher for the SBS Book show, a freelancewriter and editor, and Associate Publisher at Halstead Press. Neil’s four books include Writers on Writing (1999), The Complete Sentimental Bloke (2001), Writing at Work (2007) and Modern Manglish (2011). He has published over 100 essays, articles and reviews in publications as diverse as the Daily Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement. He has presented papers at SHARP and ASAL conferences. Since 2003, Neil has been Executive Director of the Plain English Foundation, which combines corporate editing and training with a community program promoting ethical public language. In 2018, Neil won the Nancy Keesing Fellowship at the State Library of NSW to write a history of Angus and Robertson publishing (1888–1989). This includes a comprehensive bibliography of more than 7,000 titles.
Neil James, Executive Director, Plain English Foundation, neil.james@plainenglishfoundation.com
The war memoir has proven to be an enduring and popular genre within commercial publishing. With the development of the memoir boom in recent decades, the war memoir has become an even more important means by which war can be understood and consumed. Beyond the content of a memoir, various paratextual features play an important role in generating additional meaning for a text. For military memoirs, these paratextual elements can be critical in communicating particular understandings of war for the reader. I will consider a selection of recently published memoirs by Australian veterans of war, focusing on an analysis of their paratextual features.
Amanda Laugesen is a historian and lexicographer, and is currently Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the ANU. She is chief editor of The Australian National Dictionary: Australian Words and Their Origins, and is also the author of a number of books and articles in Australian and US History. Her most recent book is Rooted: An Australian History of Bad Language (2020). She has long-standing research interests in publishing history and the social and cultural history of war.
Amanda Laugesen, Director, Australian National Dictionary Centre, Australian National University, amanda.laugesen@anu.edu.au
A passionate promoter of Australian literature, Miles Franklin understood the power of marketing. This paper looks at Franklin’s own style of self-promotion which, like all good sales strategies, had multiple components. From haranguing those in the publishing industry, though to generating literary mysteries with the use of pseudonyms and her work engaging in public debate around the idea of the novel, Franklin was relentless when it came to generating publicity. This exploration of how she saw herself, and how she wanted to be seen, opens an important line of inquiry into a woman who was charming, complex and occasionally controversial.
Rachel Franks holds PhDs in Australian crime fiction from Central Queensland University and true crime texts from the University of Sydney. A qualified educator and librarian, her extensive work on crime fiction, true crime, popular culture and information science has been presented at numerous conferences as well as on radio and television. An award-winning writer, her research can be found in a wide variety of books, journals, magazines and online resources. She is the author of An Uncommon Hangman: The Life and Deaths of Robert ‘Nosey Bob’ Howard (NewSouth, 2022).
Rachel Franks, Coordinator, Scholarship, State Library of New South Wales, rachel.franks@sl.nsw.gov.au
5.00 – 5.45 BSANZ AGM
Tuesday 29 November 2022
9.00 – 9.30 Registration
9.30 – 10.30 Keynote: Peter Lyssiotis Dixson Room/ Online
Open the covers of a medieval illuminated manuscript and you are passing through a portal into a colourful world of decoration and imagery. But is this just entertainment, visible consumption of wealth, or art for art's sake? What purposes might these creatures from dreams, people from a past age and the language of flora and fauna fulfil and what might they have to tell us about that age – and our own?
Peter Lyssiotis doubles up as a writer, maker of films, photographs, photomontages, prints and books. His most recent book works have been collaborations with Caren Florence, George Matoulas and Nicholas Pounder. His work is in public collections here and in Europe, the US and Russia and the private collection: Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem. He is currently working on a book with Simon Farley and a mixed media exhibition around the theme of peace & war with Monica Oppen.
Peter Lyssiotis, peter.lyssiotis@gmail.com
10.30 – 11.00 Morning tea Dixson Room
11.00 – 12.30 Stream 1 - Embellished words Dixson Room/ Online
The Book of Common Prayer has guided the corporate and personal worship of Anglicans ever since it was first published in 1549. Since then, it has been re-published, revised and re-worked for different provinces of the Anglican Communion. This paper will examine the decorative features of selected Prayer Books in the Moore Theological College Library’s collection, including the comparatively plain 1549 edition, the woodcut-laden 1662 edition and an 1864 edition full of chromolithograph flourishes. It will situate these works in the history of printing and illustrative techniques, and reflect on how their historical context has influenced their style and design.
Erin Mollenhauer is the Team Leader, Library and Archives, at the Donald Robinson Library, Moore Theological College, Sydney and has worked there since 2012. She is responsible for the rare book collection and the Samuel Marsden Archives, a collecting archive focusing on Anglicanism and evangelical Christianity. Erin holds a Master of Information Studies (Librarianship) from Charles Sturt University, and a Graduate Diploma of Archives and Records Management from Curtin University.
Erin Mollenhauer, erin.mollenhauer@moore.edu.au
The decorative borders that embellish and frame the pages of a medieval illustrated book are often overlooked. An examination of borders in the Rothchild Prayer Book, held in the Kerry Stokes Collection, illustrates the importance of approaching all aspects of a page. The analysis will show the embellishment of these borders functions to unify the compositional elements on a page, anchor them to its surface, and unite the design across the book between pages, as well as performing an important role in connecting the reader to the text, signifying the hierarchy of sections, aiding memorisation, and enhancing devotional practices.
Fiona is a University of Melbourne Master of Art Curatorship student. Her passion for medieval manuscripts began at the British Library Treasures exhibit which led, eventually, to completing a BA in Art History and Classical Languages (Latin) at the University of Queensland. While there she founded the Medieval and Early Modern Society (UQ MEMS) and convened a Paleography Group. Transferring to the University of Melbourne, Fiona completed a Graduate Diploma in Arts and diversified into studying East Asian Art. She has presented at BSANZ conferences on Korean 'Chaekgeori' screens (2019) and Toriyama Sekien’s 'Night Parade of 100 Demons' (2020).
Fiona McConnell, fmcconnell@student.unimelb.edu.au
In 1832 a colonial calligraphist met with scepticism: The Sydney Gazette observed: 'a calligraphist' (lately arrived) 'professes to teach the art of writing in six lessons, arithmetic in six, stenography in four, algebra in twelve and watercolour drawing in six'. By 1860 we get glimpses of the documents themselves: 'an elaborately illuminated address, presented to G. F. Verdon, Esq., by the inhabitants of Williamstown' is mentioned. Illuminated addresses became fashionable, composed and decorated for retiring officials, royalty, community leaders and for sea captains from grateful passengers. The artist-calligraphers handiwork was exhibited in shop widows. And illuminated addresses became associated with public meetings, loyal toasts, elaborate after-dinner-speeches and purses of gold.
Dennis Bryans, Golden Point Press, gpp@goldenpointpress.com.au
11.00 – 12.30 Stream 2 - Reading, listing and collecting the embellished Dixson Room/ Online
Since the mid-nineteenth century, tens of thousands of publications of novels, novellas and short stories have appeared in Australian newspapers. Digitised by the National Library of Australia and made accessible via Trove, a large proportion of these are discoverable online. The Read All About It project extends this indexing work into the twentieth century, with the additional affordance of a Collaborative Digital Editing platform to support both scholars and amateurs. This paper reports on the status of the project, and considers the practical and theoretical implications that amateur editions of serialised fiction might have for Australian literary history.
Katherine Bode is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and professor of literary and textual studies at the Australian National University.
Roger Osborne is Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at James Cook University, Cairns. His most recent book is The Life of Such is Life: A Cultural History of an Australian Classic (2022). His edition of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is currently in production with Cambridge University Press.
Roger Osborne, roger.osborne@jcu.edu.au
Writing for the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, AW Pollard commented that ‘few collectors’ were ‘educated enough to prefer copies in the condition in which the ravages of time have left them’. Pollard was clearly proselytising, and it is telling that he chose to do so in such scathing terms to such a general audience. In his 1927 book The Elements of Book Collecting, Iolo Williams displayed more confidence that any serious collector would privilege authenticity over completeness: ‘the reader has been warned not only against imperfect, but also against made-up, copies … One form of imperfection … is the replacing of missing leaves of very rare books by facsimiles’.
Ian Morrison is the Heritage Librarian at Libraries Tasmania. This paper is a report on a research project funded by the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust (UK) and the State Library and Archives Trust (Tasmania).
Ian Morrison, ian.morrison@education.tas.gov.au
JA Ferguson’s Bibliography of Australia is the definitive bibliographic reference for Australian publications published before 1900. In 2020 the Library begun work on a project to answer the simple question of what titles listed in Ferguson does the Library hold. The answer not so simple. While often catalogue records indicated whether a title was in Ferguson, the citation was not always standardised and not all titles had citations. This paper will tell the story of how the Library went about the project, how it reached its findings, and what it plans to do with the results.
Brendan Somes works at the State Library of New South Wales. His work involves collecting strategy, policy and guidelines, coordinating selection of material for digitisation and some collecting.
Brendan Somes, brendan.somes@sl.nsw.gov.au
12.30 – 1.30 Lunch Dixson Room
1.30 – 3.00 Stream 1 - Scholarly editing Dixson Room/ Online
What is it to edit documents (in this case, letters) rather than literary works? Indeed, what is an edition of letters as opposed to an edition of a work? Fragments of a life? Documented testimony for resolving literary disputes? Uncensored information source? How does the editor trade off the competing demands of the historical document against the needs of the reader to understand it? To what extent do those needs have to be anticipated through both textual and paratextual manoeuvres: explanatory notes, textual apparatus, maps, chronological timeline, introduction, etc.? And what is the role of a supplementary online resource for such an edition?
Paul Eggert was formerly Svaglic Chair in textual studies at Loyola University Chicago. He is Professor Emeritus there and at the University of New South Wales. He edited works by DH Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and various Australian authors before writing a trilogy of linked monographs: Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature (Cambridge, 2009), Biography of a Book (PennState and Sydney, 2013) and The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (Cambridge, 2019). Prior to writing those books, he served during 1993–2007 as general editor of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature.
Paul Eggert, pauleggert7@gmail.com
Reviewing the explanatory notes in the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts editions Susanna Strickland Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1988), Catharine Parr Strickland Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada (1997), and her Canadian Crusoes A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains (1986), I have been asking myself questions to do with their revision when new information becomes available; supplementing them, especially in the light of the 'woke' interest, at least in Canada, in equity, indigeneity and diversity; and even publishing them in some form on the internet. As well as describing what we did and why we did it, these questions are the when and where of the title.
Mary Jane Edwards, PhD, the General Editor of the completed CEECT project at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, holds the title of Distinguished Research Professor there. As well as being CEECT’s General Editor, she edited its scholarly edition of Frances Moore Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1985) and of William Kirby’s Le Chien d’or, The Golden Dog, A Legend of Quebec (2012). In 2019 Richard Bentley and the British Empire: Imperial and Colonial Publishing Connections, which she edited, and to which she and several other members of BSANZ contributed, was published by EER Publishers and the Ancora Press, Monash University.
Mary Jane Edwards, mary_jane_edwards@yahoo.com
In completing a scholarly edition of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, I have been responsible for establishing a new text, but also for assembling a significant amount of paratext. This paper will engage with the practical and theoretical implications of adding a new edition to a long list of editions, but it will do so by examining the limitations of both print and digital forms in producing a reading experience that directs reader’s attention to points within the complex system of the work we know as Nostromo.
Roger Osborne is Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at James Cook University, Cairns. His most recent book is The Life of Such is Life: A Cultural History of an Australian Classic (2022). His edition of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is currently in production with Cambridge University Press.
Roger Osborne, Senior Lecturer in English and Writing, James Cook University, roger.osborne@jcu.edu.au
1.30 – 3.00 Stream 2 - Early embellishments Gallery Room/ Online
In 1660, Charles II received John Ogilby’s folio Homer, luxuriously bound in red morocco leather, ruled in gilt and stamped with the royal cipher. By the eighteenth century, London manufacturers were flooding the market with locally produced imitations, bringing so-called morocco to an even vaster audience. Combining spectacular morocco bindings from the State Library of Victoria and printed and manuscript trade records, I explore how morocco’s diplomatic, economic and cultural history informs analysis of morocco bindings today. Did bookbinders, booksellers and customers associate morocco with the Maghreb, or did it just mean ‘quality’? How can we distinguish between imported and imitated versions? And how far did this material penetrate British society?
Nat Cutter is an early career historian based at the University of Melbourne, researching diplomatic, economic and cultural relations between early modern Britain and the Maghreb. He is interested in media, cross-religious dialogue, material culture, correspondence, marginalia, provenance, book history and piracy, as well as digital humanities, and currently teaches in history and works on three Australian Research Council projects. In 2021–22, he won the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize, an ASECS-Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, a Huntington Library Short-Term Fellowship, and an ANZAMEMS Early Career Fellowship.
Nat Cutter, Teaching Associate and ARC Research Coordinator, University of Melbourne, nat.cutter@unimelb.edu.au, Twitter @NatCutter
Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings is a poetic epic written by one of the greatest Iranian poets, Abolqasem Ferdowsi (940–1025 CE). Shahnameh includes 55,000 couplets (two-line verses) and is one of the longest classic poems in history and the greatest epic of Persian literature. It also has unique aesthetic and literary values, making it a magnificent source of inspiration for the Persian language and culture. During the past ten centuries, Shahnameh has informed and inspired various artworks ranging from painting and miniature to calligraphy, rugs, sculpture, cinema, music, etc. This paper focuses on book embellishment and illustration and reviews a sample of illustrations.
Dr Yazdan Mansourian received his PhD in Information Science from The University of Sheffield (2003 to 2006). The title of his thesis was "Information Visibility on the Web and Conceptions of Success and Failure in Web Searching". Yazdan has a BSc degree in Agricultural Engineering (1991-1995) from Guilan University and an MA degree in LIS from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (1998-2001). During January 2007 to June 2017 he was faculty member at Kharazmi University (Tehran, Iran). From 2011 to 2016 he was Director of the Central Library at Kharazmi University and was also Head of the LIS Department during that time.
Yazdan Mansourian, PhD, AALIA, Lecturer in Information Studies, School of Information and Communication Studies, Charles Sturt University, ymansourian@csu.edu.au
Readers embellish books by leaving marginalia and these traces can tell us much about how contemporaries engaged with a text. In an analysis of 57 examples of three fifteenth- and sixteenth-century medical texts on the conduct of physicians, many were found to have reader’s marks. Unfortunately written comments were often absent, brief or banal, but interpretation of the readers’ interests does not rely on legible comments. Comparison of the density of readers’ marks in complete texts from the same period and on the same subject was used to contrast the overall level of reader engagement.
Richard Tait is working on his second PhD, the first being in comparative physiology from the University of Paris in 1986. Richard’s current project is researching the professional practice of physicians in sixteen-century northern Italy. This uses analyses of incunabulae and archival sources to determine what physicians, governments and patients thought constituted a good physician. This is a focus project within a broader interest in the social history of medicine, and the intellectual history of the Renaissance. Richard works within the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University, Australia.
Richard Tait, Graduate researcher, Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Monash University, Richard.Tait@monash.edu
3.00 – 3.30 Afternoon tea Dixson Room
3.30 – 5.00 Types of embellishment Dixson Room/ Online
The Wayzgoose Press (1985–2021) was a fiercely independent, reclusive entity operating from the depths of Katoomba in the NSW Blue Mountains, and its output was extraordinary by anyone’s standards. By the time its proprietors, Mike Hudson and Jadwiga Jarvis, had ‘retired’ from undertaking large-scale productions around 2012, they had produced 20 fine press books and over 40 printed broadsides. They became famous for their prickly, defensive approach to their legacy, which is openly documented in their self-published monograph, The Wayzgoose Affair (2007). This paper will provide an introduction to the rich pickings of the Wayzgoose Press, as a sample of what could be mined by future researchers.
Caren Florance is an artist, writer and academic. She is the executor for the Wayzgoose Press estate. She has presented and published a number of papers about artist book activity and history and is an international peer reviewer for the UK journal The Blue Notebook (University of West England). Her personal practice centres upon modes of printing from digital zines to fine press letterpress and is deeply collaborative. Her work is often published under the name Ampersand Duck and is collected by libraries across Australia and overseas.
Caren Florance, caren.florance@canberra.edu.au, Instagram @ampersandduck, https://carenflorance.com
Birmingham’s John Baskerville (1706–1775) was one of the most acclaimed typefounders and printers in British history. He had an unusual approach to book making. He designed a specific binding with a Birmingham workshop and used a unique floral roll as part of this. The Library holds three folio Bibles dating from 1769, two printed by Baskerville himself, and one by a rival, Nicholas Boden. In an exciting discovery, it is clear that the Bible printed by Boden was bound in Baskerville’s workshop. This paper will compare these 1769 folio Bibles, and discuss the controversy in the context of the Library’s collections and Baskerville holdings.
Dr Susannah Helman is Rare Books and Music Curator at the National Library of Australia. She has worked at the National Library of Australia since 2009, until 2021 in the Exhibitions Section. She curated or co-curated exhibitions including Handwritten (2011), Mapping our World (2013–2014), The Sell (2016–2017), Cook and the Pacific (2018–2019) and On Stage (2022). She has a PhD in History from the University of Queensland.
Dr Susannah Helman, Rare Books and Music Curator, Curatorial and Collection Research, National Library of Australia, shelman@nla.gov.au, 02 6262 1475
Aurelie Martin is working as a conservation officer at the National Library of Australia. She completed an MA in Book Conservation in 2010 (Paris) and has an MA in Medieval History (Paris 7 – Denis Diderot). She is co editor-in-chief of the Journal of Paper Conservation (IADA) and just submitted her PhD on the bindings found on John Baskerville’s editions.
Aurelie Martin, Conservation Officer, Collection Care, National Library of Australia, aumartin@nla.gov.au, 02 6262 1426
The Kelmscott Chaucer (1896) is widely acknowledged to be the crowning achievement of William Morris’s famed Kelmscott Press. The copy held in the State Library of New South Wales features a beautiful custom embellishment: in 1921, it was re-bound in tooled kangaroo hide. We interpret this re-binding as an ambiguous act of 'Australianisation'. What we call the 'Kangaroo Kelmscott' reveals the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement on Sydney’s book culture, elucidating the Australian reception of Victorian medievalism. In the urban environment of Sydney, we ask, how might nostalgia for rural Australia have interacted with nostalgia both for Victorian England and for an idealised version of medieval England?
Veronica Alfanois a Lecturer in the Discipline of Literature at Macquarie University. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on Victorian poetry, with particular interests in gender, genre, memory, and media studies. Her first book is The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman. With Andrew Stauffer, she edited the essay collection Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies; with Lee O’Brien, she edited a special issue of Victorian Poetry on the topic 'Gender and Genre'. Her current project focuses on neologisms in Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins. She leads the Poetry Caucus of the North American Victorian Studies Association.
Veronica Alfanois, veronica.alfano@mq.edu.au
Louise D’Arcens is Professor in the Discipline of Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her publications include the books Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840–1910 (2011), Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages (2014) and the edited volumes The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (2016), International Medievalism and Popular Culture (2014), and Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars (2004). She is currently writing 'World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Global Textual Cultures'. She has also published chapters on medievalism, and articles in journals including Representations, Screening the Past, Studies in Medievalism and Post medieval.
Louise D’Arcens, louise.darcens@mq.edu.au
5.00 – 5.15 Wrap up
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