Call for Contributions: “Printing Things: Blocks, Plates and Stones 1400-1900”

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CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Title: Printing Things: Blocks, Plates, and Stones 1400-1900

Editors: Giles Bergel (Oxford), Elizabeth Savage (Institute of English Studies)
Advisory board: Sven Dupré (Utrecht), Caroline Duroselle-Melish (Folger), Maria Goldoni (‘Xilografie modenesi’), Paul Nash (Printing Historical Society), Marco Mozzo (Polo museale della Toscana) 

Deadline: 15 October 2018 via https://goo.gl/forms/eHAzaQUFklyMOmYv2
Queries: Gemma Cornetti at printingcolourproject@gmail.com

In all fields based on historical printed material, research conventionally focuses on the text, images, and other information that was printed. The objects used to produce that information (including cut woodblocks, engraved metal plates, and cast metal sorts) have been neglected. Many hundreds of thousands of these historical printing surfaces survive today. The vast majority are inaccessible to researchers because they are uncatalogued and often considered ‘uncatalogue-able’. However, as individual objects and as an untapped category of cultural heritage, these artefacts of printing offer a great deal of information that the finished prints, books, fabrics, and other printed materials do not.

As relics of historical crafts and industry, these objects fall outside the modern disciplines. This edited volume will respond to the need for a multidisciplinary introduction to what image-based fields calls ‘print matrices’ and text-based fields call ‘printing surfaces’. Following from the conference Blocks Plates Stones (London, 2017), the first facilitated discussion of the use of such objects in research, Printing Things will represent the state of research in this new and developing field. It will bring together object-based research, collection-level surveys, historical printing practices, ethical considerations of their storage and use (or non-use) today, methods for multiplying the originals (eg dabs, stereos, electros), and methodological studies. By doing so, it will offer frameworks for describing, conserving, curating, presenting and understanding these objects using new and existing paradigms. It aims to facilitate their introduction into historical research across the disciplines.

Contributions are sought from art historians, book historians, cultural historians, musicologists, science and medicine historians, typographers, and researchers in other fields based on historical printed material; material scientists and conservators; historically informed printers and printmakers; curators, cataloguers, librarians, and printing museum managers who care for these objects; and digital humanities specialists who are creating a new generation of tools for culling information from these objects. The book will focus on handpress work.


In addition to object- and collection-based case studies, theoretical perspectives might include: 

– What can print matrices/printing surfaces teach us that printed materials cannot, and vice versa?
– How should they be regarded: as artists’ tools; intermediary states of works of art; or works of art in themselves?
– Is there a value in considering woodblocks, metal plates, and litho stones together as a single category?
– What lies behind the sudden and recent increase in interest in these objects, and how can these objects inform those emerging research trends?
– How are they to be conserved, curated, presented and understood?
– Does the recent turn to object-centered cultural criticism (‘thing theory’) provide useful paradigms for their study?
– What are the ethical and critical issues around bringing them back into use as printing surfaces?
– What is their place within the systems of digital remediation and knowledge within which art and book history is increasingly practiced?

Book and Illustration at the Turn of the Century in Britain + America

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BOOKS AND ILLUSTRATION AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY IN BRITAIN AND AMERICA
A public symposium presented by the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies

Saturday, May 19, 2018 · 1:30 pm
Delaware Art Museum
2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, DE
 
Free for Museum Members or with Museum admission

In conjunction with the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies’ (FABS) Tour of Delaware and the Delaware Bibliophiles, the Delaware Art Museum will hold “Books and Illustration at the Turn of the Century in Britain and America,” a symposium with three speakers. These talks will focus on illustration and book design—a strength of the collections of the Delaware Art Museum and the University of Delaware Library. A tea reception will follow.

Please visit www.delart.org/event/books-and-illustration/ for details and registration.

Speakers:

–         “Ouida Illustrated: Commerce, Politics, and Representation in the Illustrated
Editions of Ouida’s Works”
Jesse R. Erickson, Postdoctoral Researcher in Special Collections and Digital
Humanities, University of Delaware

–        “Rediscovering an American Woman Illustrator, Alice Barber Stephens”
Martha H. Kennedy, Curator, Popular & Applied Graphic Art, Library of Congress

–        “Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market: 150 Years of Art & Illustration”
Casey Smith, Visiting Professor of English, West Chester University

This event is sponsored by the Delaware Art Museum’s Friends of the Helen Farr Sloan Library and by the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delware Library.

 

APS Collaboration Grant Application Extension

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The deadline to apply for an Association of Print Scholars Collaboration Grant has been extended to April 15, 2018.

The APS Collaboration Grant funds public programs and projects that foster collaboration between members of the print community and/or encourage dialogue between the print community and the general public. The grant carries a maximum award of $1,000. More information can be found on their website.

Blake Awakes: Reinvention, Revival and Rylands Collections

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Blake Awakes: Reinvention, Revival and Rylands Collections, 1 May, 1-5pm

The Christie Room, The John Rylands Library, Manchester
This workshop will explore some of the ways in which the artistic vision of William Blake has been reimagined and reinvented in British art and culture, with a special focus on material held at the John Rylands Library.
Hosted by the John Rylands Research Institute, the event builds on previous Blake projects at the John Rylands Library, including the exhibition Burning Bright: William Blake and the Art and Craft of the Book, which explored Blake’s own work as a commercial engraver, and his legacy in the world of the book in the century after his death.
This workshop spotlights other themes relating to Blake and his legacy in material held at the John Rylands Library as part of continuing efforts to unlock Blakean materials in the collections. Topics include Blake himself as a re-inventor in his designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1795-97); reinventing Blake’s Songs in editions of the poems held in Rylands collections; and Blake and counter-culture, represented in modern literary archives held at the Library.
The event is free to attend, and open to all. Booking is essential as places are limited.
This event is funded by the John Rylands Research Institute.
Programme
1-1.15: Introduction (Christie Room)
1.15-2.15: 3 x 15 minute papers + discussion (Christie Room)
  • Lusia Calé (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Disbound, Encircled, Unrolled: Physical and Metaphorical Materialities of the Book in Blake’s Night Thoughts’
  • Colin Trodd (University of Manchester), ‘Codifying Vision:James Smetham’s Monuments to William Blake’
  • Sarah Haggarty (University of Cambridge), ‘Blake’s namby-pamby? Responses in the Rylands Library to the childlikeness of Songs’
2.15-3.30: Collections Session (Bible Room) / Tea and Coffee Break (Christie Room)
The group will be split in half for refreshments and the collections session; the two groups will swap between the activities at 2.50. A virtual tour of William Blake’s Cottage and other materials will be available to view during the break.
3.30-4.45: 3 x 15 minute papers + discussion (Christie Room)
  • David Hopkins (University of Glasgow), ‘The Impact of Machines’: Blake, British Surrealism and the Machine’
  • Douglas Field (Blake & Counter-Culture), ‘Transatlantic Visions: William Blake, Allen Ginsberg and Michael Horovitz’
  • Jason Whittaker (University of Lincoln), ‘Here be Tygers: from composite art to sequential art’
4.45-5: Closing discussion (Christie Room)
 

 

CfP: Character to Caricature, 1660-1850

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Hogarth - Characters and Caricaturas

William Hogarth, Characters and Caricaturas (1743)

Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character (1998) emphasises the cultural capital of figures who are larger than life. ‘Character to Caricature’ aims to build upon Lynch’s transmedia conception to explore the wider narratological and satirical implications of character in the eighteenth century. This conference brings together those working on different conceptualisations of character in the period to ask questions such as: Why were character types so popular in the period? How did the ‘types’ transfer across genres and mediums of print? What can the differing ‘types’ and their interactions with one another tell us about attitudes in the period? We invite papers which look at any aspect of this topic, including: the creation of ‘stock-figures’ such as fops, nabobs, mollies, the Scot and the English John Bull; the use of characters types in dictating and shaping acceptable modes of conduct; the relationship between linguistic configurations of character and visual depictions of caricature; and the significance of character types in relation to the social and political climate of the period.

We invite abstracts of no more than 250 words, for 20 minute papers. We welcome proposals for panels as well as ideas for alternative format sessions.

Please email abstracts, along with a short bio to characterconference18@gmail.com by 18.05.2018

Illustration Studies Seminar – 8 December

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On Thursday, 8 December, Mary Shannon (Roehampton), Julia Thomas (Cardiff) and Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) will discuss their recent work on nineteenth-century illustration as part of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar series at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London.

Mary Shannon – ‘Illustration on London’s “Artists Street” 1800-1820’

Julia Thomas – ‘Reading Victorian illustration: word, image, digital’

Luisa Calè – ‘A Dream of Thiralatha: promiscuous book gatherings, and the wanderings of Blake’s separate plates’

The seminar begins at 17:30 and ends at 19:30, and will be held in Room G7, ground floor, Senate House. To book a (free) place, visit the IES website.

Collaborative PhD: The Archives of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, 1710-1760

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The University of Leicester and Spalding Gentlemen’s Society invite applications for an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA), ‘Antiquarianism, Science and Networks of Knowledge: The Archives of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, 1710-1760’.

Funded by the AHRC’s Midlands3Cities (M3C) programme, the project operates as a collaboration between the University of Leicester and the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, Britain’s oldest provincial learned society and second-oldest museum. The successful applicant will be able to formulate a topic within the project’s broad remit based on their areas of interest and/or professional experience, and will enjoy opportunities for training in conservation, cataloguing, exhibition design, curatorship and collections management. The project also provides regular opportunities for public engagement.
Students with interests in book history, print culture, library and archive studies, and cultural history are especially encouraged to apply. The terms of the CDA allow the successful applicant to extend their funding for an additional 0.5 years to curate an exhibition of materials from the archive, much of which has never been studied or made available to the general public.
Throughout the PhD the student will be jointly supervised by Dr Kate Loveman (Leicester) and Dr Dustin Frazier Wood (SGS Librarian), with additional supervisory support from Professor Roey Sweet (Leicester) and Julia Knight (Ayscoughfee Hall).
Full details, including information on how to apply, are available on the M3C website. Deadline for applications is 15 January 2018.

 

19th-Century Women Writers on the Old Masters

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Knowing ‘as much art as the cat’: 19th-Century Women Writers on the Old Masters

The Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies will host a major conference examining the role of English-speaking women as disseminators of knowledge about Old Master paintings and historic painting techniques during the Victorian era on Friday, 10 November at 10am in the Sainsbury Wing Lecture Theatre, National Gallery.

Aims and Scope:
John Ruskin infamously dismissed the art historian Anna Jameson as knowing ‘as much of art as the cat’. However, in recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in women like Jameson as influential interpreters of the visual arts and as writers of art history during the formative years of the discipline. This conference, which capitalises and expands upon this interest, will look afresh at the role of English-speaking women as disseminators of knowledge about Old Master paintings and historic painting techniques during the Victorian era.
While the National Gallery’s first Director, Charles Eastlake, and his male colleagues produced scholarly publications, including museum catalogues, aimed at professionals and connoisseurs, women in his circle and in the following generations typically had a wider reach. They could – and did – speak to specialists, but many chose to disseminate information in more creative and demotic ways. Mary Merrifield, for instance, wrote on historic painting techniques and also published articles about women’s fashion, in which she used the Old Masters as a sartorial guide, illustrating her points with pictures from the National Gallery’s collection.
Among the research questions the conference speakers will engage with are: What was the contribution of British women writers to the emerging discipline of art history, including canon formation, formal criticism and history of techniques and other genres such as exhibition guides and translations? Is there anything distinctive about women’s approach to these fields? A second set of issues we will address concerns women’s networks and relationships – between sexes, between generations, and with professional counterparts abroad  – as well as exploring women writers’ institutional affiliations. Finally, we hope to see new insights emerging at the conference about the reception of women writers’ published work in art history, not least in relation to its reach and audiences and its critical fortune.

London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar

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The Autumn programme of the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar features two sessions of interest to scholars of illustration:

 

3rd November: Historical Fiction

Dr Brian H Murray (King’s College London) and Prof. Rosemary Mitchell (Leeds Trinity)

 

8th December: Nineteenth-Century Illustration

Prof. Julia Thomas (Cardiff) and Dr Mary Shannon (Roehampton)

 

Information, including details of how to book, are available on the Institute of English Studies website.