Fall 2009

Andie Tucher, Associate Professor, Director of the Communications Ph.D. Program, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
“True to Life”
September 16, 2009 (Wednesday)
He has dirty fingernails, he smells of beer, you have no idea who he is, and he’s asking you questions that he wants to quote in “the paper”! The being known as the American “reporter” was invented in the nineteenth century as journalism underwent a  radical transformation from a mostly partisan argument to a  generally independent and commercially valuable information system.  I will discuss the development of the most elemental task of journalism: How did reporters work to build credibility, and how and why did readers decide to believe them -- or not? What were the strategies, styles, techniques, and understandings that two parties of strangers otherwise known as reporters and readers used to build descriptions of the world about which both would agree: this seems true to life?

Charles E. Robinson,Professor of English, University of Delaware
“Eleven Texts of Frankenstein: From the Hypothetical Ur-Text and “Original” Draft to the Published Editions of 1818 and 1823 and 1831”
October 29, 2009(Thursday)
The “fluid” text of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein reveals in each of its incarnations new secrets about the text we now read in the 21st century.  Robinson will explore the stemma or genealogy of the text that he established both in The Frankenstein Notebooks (2 vols., Garland, 1996) and, more recently, in The Original Frankenstein (Bodleian Library Publications, 2008; Random House, A Vintage Book, 2009).  He will explain the extent of Percy Shelley’s editorial interventions in Mary Shelley’s “Original” Draft, describe the effects of the Shelleys’ original structure of Frankenstein as a 2-volume novel in 33 chapters, and seek the audience’s help in addressing a still unanswered question about the lineation and pagination of the Fair Copy as it relates to the first edition of 1818.

Claudia Funke, Curator of Books, Avery Library, Columbia University
“The Creation of a Photographic Book in 1866: P. B. Wight’s National Academy of Design”
November 10, 2009 (Tuesday)
P. B. Wight’s “National Academy of Design: Photographs of the New Building” was one of the first American architectural books to be illustrated with original photographs. Its publisher was none other than S. P. Avery, one of America’s first great art dealers, as well as the co-founder of Columbia’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. In this talk, Claudia Funke, Curator of Rare Books at Avery, will explore the fascinating and rich circumstances of this unusual publication, including contemporaneous photographic commerce and book publishing; aesthetic theory and artistic practice of the time; and the careers of S. P. Avery, architect Wight, and the book’s little-known photographer. Central to her talk will be a close examination of the book itself—a beautiful production that had no immediate successors—and the often-vertiginous relationship between original artworks, reproductions, and authorial responsibility in the 1860s.

Alice Boone, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
“Candide in the Preserving Machine”
December 2, 2009 (Wednesday)
Since its initial publication in 1759, Voltaire’s Candide has been criticized, imitated, excerpted into shorter set-pieces, inspired renunciations and sequels, illustrated more than a hundred times by artists both anonymous and famous, sung as musical theater and comic opera, and canonized as a national treasure and an outstanding contribution to world literature. This talk will explore how book history, with its interest in iterations of publication and what has been called the sociology of texts, can expose the unintended, sometimes unpredictable effects of canonization—namely, that what some would call the novel’s timelessness also turns it into a catalyst for its adaptation and change.

Thierry Rigogne, History Department, Fordham University
“Writing About Coffee, Reading In Cafés: Literature and Coffeehouses in Early Modern France”
February 10, 2010 (Wednesday)
Well before Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Parisian cafés have shared a strong affinity with literature. In the seventeenth century, it was books, from travel accounts to medical treatises, that introduced the French to what was then a new, exotic, Oriental beverage. Writers immediately patronized the first coffeehouses, where they could discuss literature and much else, while regular patrons went to cafés to read newspapers or pamphlets. In this talk, Thierry Rigogne will explore the connections between cafés and literature in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, a time during which they shaped each other’s development and created the figure of the literary café.

Spring 2009

Alan Stewart, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
“Observations upon libels: Francis Bacon’s manuscript writings on print”
February 10, 2009
In 1589 and again in 1592, Francis Bacon wrote lengthy discussions of recent printed books: the first on the Martin Marprelate pamphlets and the response to them, the second on a Catholic attack on a recent anti-Catholic proclamation by the queen.  In each, Bacon was drawing attention to current print controversies--but he himself circulated his tracts only in manuscript.   This paper explores the ongoing and edgy relationship between the media of manuscript and print in the late sixteenth century, and suggests we have to look beyond the so-called “stigma of print” to explain the complex dynamics of writing in manuscript.

Michael Winship, Professor of English, University of Texas, Austin
“Book Distribution and Book Stores in the United States, 1850 to 1950”
March 19, 2009
In 1931, O. H. Cheney characterized book distribution – the movement of books from publisher to buyer – as the “tragedy of the book industry” in the United States and suggested that the industry, unless changes were made, was “threatened with destruction.”  Yet, the basic system for the national distribution of trade books in the United States did survive, and in fact proved to have remarkable longevity, continuing more or less intact from its inception during the first half of the 19th century into the final decades of the 20th.  This paper, based largely on unpublished research, explores the trade-book distribution system of that period, emphasizing the role of the independent book stores as the central agent site for book purchasing.  The talk will especially focus on book store directories that, from 1859, documented the spread of book stores as the nation expanded, as well as the nature of book stores – how they acquired and arranged their stock – in order to understand how that system functioned, as well as its successes and failures.

Eric Holzenberg, Roger Gaskell, and Ed Maggs
Panel discussion on Booksellers, Bibliophiles, and Scholarship
Special Session at the Grolier Club,
March 31, 2009, 6 pm
In conjunction with the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, this special session features a panel discussion with Roger Gaskell (Roger Gaskell Rare Books), Eric Holzenberg (Director, the Grolier Club), and Edward Maggs (Maggs Bros. Rare Books) on "Booksellers, Bibliophiles, and Scholarship," discussing the role of collectors and the antiquarian book trade in the development of institutional libraries and in the support of scholarship in general. 6 pm. Co-sponsored by the Grolier Club.

David Kastan, George M. Bodman Professor of English, Yale University
“Naughty Printed Books”
April 13, 2009
The Book History Colloquium is please to welcome David Kastan back to Butler Library.  His topic will deal with censorship in Early Modern England.

Patrick Singy, Society of Fellows, Columbia University
“Writing, Reading and Popularizing Samuel Auguste Tissot’s Avis au peuple sur sa santé (1761)”
April 21, 2009

Samuel Auguste Tissot’s Avis au peuple sur sa santé, first publishedin 1761, was one of the biggest medical best-sellers of the eighteenth century and was reprinted many times. Because of this success, historians have seen in this book the quintessential example of the popularization of medicine.  In this talk, Patrick Singy will present his analysis of successive editions of Avis au peuple and the vast archive of correspondence between Tissot and his patients, arguing that the popularization of medicine was in fact a process that involved both the author and his readers. 

See also Book History Colloquium 2008