| Workshop in the History of Material Texts | |||
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Welcome to the website for the University of Pennsylvania's Workshop in the History of Material Texts! Here you can find announcements about upcoming events as well as a searchable database of seminars we have held since the fall of 1996. (Information about speakers and talks from the initial years of the Workshop has unfortunately been lost. If you have such information, please contact us.)
We meet each Monday on the 6th floor of Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania. We also live-stream our events via Zoom. For updates and Zoom links, please sign up for our listserv; click on Get Password under Options on the right-hand side of the page to get started.
Recordings of previous talks are available on our YouTube channel.
On November 11, 2024 at 5:15 PM, Michael Winship (University of Texas at Austin) will present: “‘The Need of a Bibliography’: Early Attempts at a Comprehensive List of American Books.”
On 19 April 1873, Selma, Alabama, bookseller William G. Boyd wrote to the editor of Publishers’ Weekly, the primary periodical of the American book trade, as follows: “In common with many others of the trade, I feel daily the want of a handy catalogue of all the books…now published and for sale in the United States. How are we to get such a catalogue?” He had an idea of how to answer that question, as did Frederick Leypoldt, PW’s editor, and Boyd’s letter set off an effort that culminated with the publication of the American Catalogue…Being a complete Catalogue…of Books in print and for sale (including reprints and importations) to July, 1876… (1880–81). This landmark volume was widely hailed and became the cornerstone of a series of publications that continues today as Books in Print, as a subscription database. The knowledge of what books have been published and are available for sale is fundamental to any functioning system of book distribution. However, the distribution of books in the United States and its history remain little understood and largely unstudied by historians of the book, who instead have tended to focus on authorship, production, and reception. As one contribution to filling this lacuna, this paper will discuss my work in progress to produce a list and study of the early attempts, dating back to the final decade of the eighteenth century, to create a comprehensive list of American books. Michael Winship is the Iris Howard Regents Professor of English II (emeritus) at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a bibliographer and historian of the book—with special expertise in publishing and book trade history in the United States before 1940—who has published extensively on American literary publishing. He edited and completed the final three volumes of Bibliography of American Literature (1955–91) and is the author of American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields (1995). He also served as an editor of and contributor to the 5-volume A History of the Book in America (2000–10). His research interests are book production, publishing, and distribution in the industrial era, as well as copyright and the international trade in books.The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts will be awarded annually to the two best essays by students in any school at Penn—one by an undergraduate, one by a graduate student—on any aspect of how texts take material form and circulate in the world. Our field covers texts of all kinds, from printed books, manuscripts, scrolls, and tablets, to e-readers, websites, hard disks, and server farms; from illuminations, woodcuts, and engravings, to GIFs and TIFFs; from title pages, flyleaf advertisements, and dealer catalogues, to listservs and email signatures. We are interested in printing and publishing histories, authorship, reception, piracy, censorship, and all themes related to the networks through which these texts circulate.
The Prize honors Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor Emeritus of English, who founded Penn's Workshop in the History of Material Texts in 1993. The seminar has been meeting every Monday evening since then, at 5:15 in the Kislak Center, Van Pelt Library. It has been one of the most influential institutions in the field and has led to numerous similar workshops around the world.
Like the Workshop itself, we encourage work that brings together the technical, material, and cultural aspects of texts. Essays will be judged by the directors of the Workshop and members of its Advisory Board, listed on the About page.
Congratulations to our Spring 2024 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Qi Liu (History of Art), “Female Piety and Power: The Appearance of Noli me tangere in Ottonian Manuscripts”
Graduate Category:
Winner: Caroline Wechsler (History and Sociology of Science), “Moving the Divine Mind, Insuring Success: Amulet Diagrams and Practical Kabbalah in a 16th-century Italian Manuscript”
See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.
