State Library of NSW: Australasian Rare Books Summer School – Course and Lecture of Interest

The 11th Australasian Rare Books Summer School (1-5 February, 2016), will be running three intensive five-day courses, a two-day short course, and a number of public lectures presented by leading experts.

For full details of all courses on offer at the Australasian Rare Books Summer School, including fees and how to apply, please visit: http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/events/docs/4608_PLE_RareBooks_SummerSchool2016_A4web.pdf

The following course and public lecture, may of interest to members:

The Book in the Renaissance

Date: 1-5 February, 2016
Time: 9 am – 5 pm daily
Venue: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

This course is a comprehensive introduction to the history of the book in early modern Europe, from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth. Drawing on the State Library’s collections, students will learn to ‘read’ a Renaissance book, both as a physical object and as a carrier of cultural values. We will examine how these books were produced, how they were distributed, and how they were used by those who bought and read them. Topics include:

  • the transition from manuscript to printed book
  • the mechanics of early printing
  • famous scholar-printers
  • editing and correcting
  • woodcuts and engravings
  • typeface and its meaning
  • the popular print
  • bindings
  • the Renaissance book trade
  • censorship
  • the formation of libraries, both individual and institutional
  • marginalia as clues to reading practices and information management
  • researching a Renaissance book, using both print and online sources

The course is intended for special collections librarians, collectors, booksellers, and scholars and graduate students in any field of Renaissance studies.

COURSE TUTOR
Dr Craig Kallendorf, Professor of English and Classics, Texas A&M University, has taught book history at the undergraduate and graduate levels for 30 years. He is the author or editor of 20 books and almost 150 articles and reference entries, with a focus on the relationship of the book as physical object to the content it carries.


“Books As Carriers of Relationships”, Dr Craig Kallendorf (Texas A&M University)
Date: Thursday, 4 February, 2016
Time: 6 pm – 7 pm
Venue: Metcalfe Auditorium, Macquarie Street building, State Library of NSW

We tend to think of books as carriers of ideas, but books were made by people for people.

This talk will identify some of the relationships involved in creating books in the Renaissance — between author and publisher, among author, publisher, and editor, and between publisher and distributor — before settling on two kinds of relationships that were especially important in this period.

Classic texts provided the foundation of education in the Renaissance, with schoolmasters mediating between the authors of their textbooks and the students who read them. Evidence of this approach
to reading can been seen in the margins of books from the era.

Not all books were circulated freely in the Renaissance, and the relationships between clerical censors and the writers, publishers, distributors, and readers of books will also be discussed.

The talk will focus on books as objects that carry the evidence of these relationships, with some closing thoughts on the dangers that digitisation poses for recovering this kind of information.