Since 1972, the Book Arts Press and Rare Book School have offered more than 600 public lectures on a wide variety of bibliographical topics.
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"
Lecture 509 (7 July 2008) Full title: "Alice’s Top Ten List: Rare Maps: Keeping Them Under Control, Letting Them Go Public"
Lecture 508 (18 June 2008)
Lecture 507 (16 June 2008)
Lecture 506 (9 June 2008) Full title: "John Feely Meets Samuel Dodd: The Use of Internet Databases in Studying the History of the American Book Trades"
Lecture 503 (30 July 2007)
Lecture 502 (23 July 2007) Full title: "Scissors, Prints and Paste: Frederick and Amelia Lock Make a Scrapbook at Norbury Park in 1791"
Lecture 501 (18 July 2007) Full title: "Brave New World or Mere Anarchy? Reflections on the Revolution in National Research Librarianship"
Lecture 498 (11 June 2007)