Rare Book School Lectures

RBS faculty member Paul Needham (Princeton Univ.) gave a public lecture on "The Catholicon Press Revisited: The Evidence of Nailheads" on 29 July 2025. You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/o4aMEB38slw?feature=shared.

Christopher N. Warren delivered the 2025 Sol M. and Mary Ann O'Brian Malkin Lecture, “What is Computational Bibliography?”, on 30 July 2025. You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/ElvNacFyoWQ?feature=shared.

Rachael DiEleuterio gave the inaugural Sue Allen Lecture for Women in Book History, on “Curious and Creative Women,” on 28 July 2025. She was joined by Daphne Sawyer, who endowed the lecture in memory of her mother, Mary Sawyer (1925–2024), and of longtime RBS faculty member Sue Allen (1918–2011). You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/2YurCWdLYIo?feature=shared. About the Talk: What do mother-and-daughter book collectors, nineteenth-century book cover designers, and an art museum librarian have in common? Rare Book School, of course! But there's more to the story. All of them are women, deeply passionate about the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publishers' book bindings. These bindings, many of which were designed by women, are stunning works of art. As the commercial book market boomed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, decorative bindings became an essential part of book production. These publishers' bindings showcased technological advancements in mass production while reflecting contemporaneous artistic movements. Book cover design was one of few creative professions open to women, whose innovations transformed the field until the more cost-effective paper dust jacket took over in the 1920s. By the 1960s, these beautiful covers had fallen out of fashion, relegated to attics and basements, and even destroyed. However, a few dedicated individuals began collecting these bindings as works of art, gradually identifying their unique design styles, designers, and histories. This presentation will focus on a few RBS alumnae who have made it their mission to preserve these remarkable bindings for posterity. About the Speaker: Rachael DiEleuterio has been Librarian and Archivist at the Delaware Art Museum since 2008, where she singlehandedly oversees the Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives. She is a Certified Archivist and has B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Delaware and an M.S.L.S. from Clarion University of Pennsylvania. She first became fascinated with decorative book bindings in 2011, when she attended Sue Allen's class at Rare Book School and hasn't stopped talking about them since.

James H. Marrow gave a public talk on “Iconographic Disjunction in the Ruskin Psalter/Hours: A Flemish Illuminated Manuscript of ca. 1470–80,” on 23 July 2025, as part of Rare Book School's 2025 Summer Lecture Series. You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/LxIPOQ6ehss?feature=shared.

This NEH-SHARP Living American History in Primary Documents Lecture by E. M. Rose was part of Rare Book School's 2025 Summer Lecture Series. You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/VaN2qqFnPto?feature=shared.

Mark McConnell, "Publishing in the Renaissance: Christophe Plantin's Business Strategy" by Rare Book School Lectures

Janine Barchas, "Jane Austen on the Cheap" by Rare Book School Lectures

Mindell Dubansky, "A Parallel History of Books and Blooks" by Rare Book School Lectures

Richard B. Sher, “New Light on the Early Publication History of Boswell's Life of Johnson," Karmiole Lecture, 10 July 2024 by Rare Book School Lectures

"Archive of the People: The Johnson Publishing Company" Lecture by LeRonn Brooks by Rare Book School Lectures

"Scholarly Editing and the Challenges of Attribution" Lecture by Stephen Karian by Rare Book School Lectures

"A Librarian Like No Other: Belle da Costa Greene and Self-Invention" Lecture by Deborah Parker by Rare Book School Lectures

"De Motu Librorum: On the Movement of Books" Lecture by G. Scott Clemons by Rare Book School Lectures

“Buying a Book in Early Modern England” Lecture by Aaron Pratt by Rare Book School Lectures

“'Yongle Dadian:' An Emperors' Encyclopedia” Lecture by Li Wei Yang by Rare Book School Lectures

“Collecting Daily Life in Early American Manuscripts” Lecture by Ashley Cataldo by Rare Book School Lectures

Kailani Polzak, "Pacific Encounters in Print," The Kress Foundation Lecture, 31 July 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Craig Welsh, "The Typesetting & Designs of the Declaration of Independence Broadsides," 26 July 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Christy S. Coleman, "A Nexus of Learning—Museums and the Importance of Public History," 24 July 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Jeffrey Makala, "Lives (& Afterlives) of Stereotype Plates," Karmiole Lecture, 12 July 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Walter O. Evans, "Why Collect?" The 2023 Kenneth W. Rendell Lecture, 14 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Barbara E. Mundy, "Books in the Contact Zone," Malkin Lecture, 12 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Leah Price, "Reader=Inessential Worker: Book History After Lockdown," 7 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

S. Max Edelson, "The Surveyor's Eye," NEH-SHARP Lecture, 5 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Mary Catherine Kinniburgh is the co-director of Granary Books, an independent publisher and archives/rare book dealer. As a scholar of postwar American poetry and an archives broker, her activities occur at the intersection of research and praxis, and her writing often focuses on the poetics of archival work. In particular, her research explores making sense of high volume in literary collections. In this talk, Kinniburgh discusses her ongoing series "Messy Archivist," which explores the interstitial qualities of working on archives through prose, poetry, and images. Published by her experimental imprint TKS Books, each "Messy Archivist" is a handmade chapbook that is often organized around a keyword, such as messy, or need. For the fourth volume and this talk, the premise is surface: what might be interpreted as an archival surface, and how does our attentiveness to the relationship between surface and depth inform our understanding of archives, especially at scale? Drawing on Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best's concept of “surface reading” in literary texts, the physics of surfing, what puts the “relief” in relief printing, and Kinniburgh's experiences working on specific archives at Granary Books, this talk will contextualize the concept of surface as a lens for the information overload that necessarily comes with archival work, and a critical approach for the toolkits of fellow scholars and archivists of twentieth century American poetry and beyond.

Rezek, Joseph - "Ideologies of the Codex in Hakluyt and Smith" - NEH-SHARP Lecture, 1 Aug 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Marcus, Hannah - "Characterizing the Elderly across Formats in Early Modern Italy" - 27 July 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

McNamee, Megan - "Significance of a Concertina-Fold Almanac" - Kress Lecture - 25 July 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Roldán Vera, Eugenia - "Book Trade in the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic" - Karmiole Lecture - 13 July 22 by Rare Book School Lectures

White, Eric - "A History of the Gutenberg Bible (continued)" - Malkin Lecture, 11 July 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Wisecup, Kelly - "Making and Reading Indigenous Archives" NEH-GBHI - 15 June 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Rogers, Beverly - "Victorian Connections: Books and Stories" Rendell Lecture - 13 June 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Wong, Dorothy - “Making Merit: East Asian Buddhist Material Culture” NEH-GBHI Lecture - 6 June 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

“Lost Archives and Paper Reuse in the Medieval Islamic World” Marina Rustow, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, and Director of the Geniza Lab, Princeton University A Rare Book School lecture, 20 July 2021

“He Lau Nā Moʻolelo: The Challenge and Promise of Hawaiian Language Textual Archives” Noelani Arista, Director, Indigenous Studies Program, and Associate Professor, Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University A Rare Book School lecture29 June 2021

"Subscription Publishing in America over Three Centuries" by Michael Winship - Rare Book School's inaugural Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Lecture on the History of the Book Trades, presented on Tuesday, 13 July 2021

Goldsby and McGill - "What is 'Black' about Black Bibliography?" - 3 August 2021 by Rare Book School Lectures

Yale, Elizabeth - "Paper-Keeping: Women, Family, Knowledge Work..." - 27 July 2021 by Rare Book School Lectures

Hidalgo, Alex - "The Book as Archive" - 15 June 2021 by Rare Book School Lectures

Robb, Megan - "Print and the Urdu Public" - 23 July 2020 by Rare Book School Lectures

Nishikawa, Kinohi – "From Poet to Publisher: Reading Gwendolyn Brooks by Design" - 16 July 2020 by Rare Book School Lectures

Ramachandran, Ayesha – "An Alternative History of the Atlas" - 2 July 2020 by Rare Book School Lectures

Trettien, Whitney - "A Hornbook for Digital Book History" - 18 June 2020 by Rare Book School Lectures

Full title: "Superheroes and Shocking Affairs, or, Adventures in Cataloging Popular Literature"

RBS-Mellon lecture by Pamela Klassen (Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto), given at Franklin & Marshall College on 25 October 2017. See https://rarebookschool.org/all-programs/events/protest-on-the-page/ for more information on this event.

RBS-Mellon lecture by Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir (Research Associate Professor, Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, University of Iceland), given at the University of Maine on 30 March 2017. See https://rarebookschool.org/all-programs/events/njals-saga/ for more information about this event.

This recording is of conference Session 2: Towards a Critical Bibliography of the Handwritten Chair: Dale Billingsley, University of Louisville “Messy Writings: Unraveling Korean Manuscript Books” Hwisang Cho, Emory University “Citational and Citationless: Reading the Development of Indian Yunani Medicine in the Margins of Arabic and Persian Manuscripts” Deborah Schlein, Princeton University “Blanks, Paperwork, Racialization” John Garcia, California State University – Northridge “Transcription of Early Modern Handwriting and the Slow Reading Movement: Notes from the Field” Heather Wolfe, Folger Shakespeare Library See https://rarebookschool.org/all-programs/events/the-futures-of-handwriting-sofcb/ for more information about this event.

Featuring "The Message & the Messengers: Artistic Illustrations of the Qur’an and the Prophets in Islamic Manuscripts" Betts Auditorium, Architecture Building, Princeton University Dr. Tehseen Thaver, Assistant Professor of Religion, Princeton University Dr. Christiane Gruber, Professor and Associate Chair, History of Art, University of Michigan See https://rarebookschool.org/all-programs/events/muslims-manuscripts-sofcb/ for more information about this event.

Lecture 513 (30 July 2008)

Lecture 512 (28 July 2008)

Lecture 510 (9 July 2008) Full title: "More Baby Books than You Can Shake a Rattle At: Building a New Collection for Research in the History of Infant Development"