Seminarie 'Unfinished business: incomplete bindings made for the booktrade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century' (Antwerp Chapters 3)

De onderzoeksgroep Boek, Bibliotheek en Informatie van de Universiteit Antwerpen en het Museum Plantin-Moretus organiseren een boekhistorisch onderzoeksseminarie door Professor Nicholas Pickwoad met als titel 'Unfinished business: incomplete bindings made for the booktrade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century'. Het vindt plaats op vrijdag 2 december 2011, in het Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerpen.

Over de spreker

Professor Nicholas Pickwoad has a doctorate from Oxford University in English Literature. He trained in bookbinding and book conservation with Roger Powell, and ran his own workshop from 1977 to 1989. He has been Adviser on book conservation to the National Trust of Great Britain since 1978, and was editor of the Paper Conservator. He taught book conservation at Columbia University Library School in New York from 1989 to 1992 and was Chief Conservator in the Harvard University Library from 1992 to 1995. He is now project leader of the St Catherine’s Monastery Library Project based at the University of the Arts, London and is director of the Ligatus Research Centre, which is dedicated to the history of bookbinding. He gave the 2008 Panizzi Lectures at the British Library, was awarded the 2009 Plowden medal for Conservation and is a Fellow of the IIC and of the Society of Antiquaries and a Council Member of the Bibliographical Society of Great Britain. He also teaches courses in the UK, Europe and America on the history of European bookbinding in the era of the hand printing press, and has published widely on the subject.

Dit (Engelstalige) onderzoeksseminarie is het derde in de internationale reeks onder de titel The Antwerp Chapters.

Abstract

From the end of the 15th century booksellers, acting both as publishers and as retailers of books printed by others, used a variety of strategies to protect their books as they were moved from printer to customer. The varieties of inexpensive parchment- or paper-covered bindings used for this purpose are relatively well-known, but the booktrade also made use of unfinished bindings that held the text leaves together, thus reducing the risk of loose sheets going astray, but adding little additional weight to the textblock, and thus minimising transport costs. These bindings also provided a permanent structure, both with and without boards, that could be completed to the final customer’s specifications. The evidence for this practice is hard to find, as such bindings were never intended to remain in their first, incomplete, state, but enough survive to suggest that the practice was in widespread use for the first three centuries of the trade in printed books. The library of the Plantin Moretus Museum has a substantial collection of such books that will form the focus of a wider exploration of such books found in libraries across Europe and the U.S.A.

Doelpubliek

Het onderzoeksseminarie richt zich tot iedereen met een actieve belangstelling voor de geschiedenis van het gedrukte boek: historici, kunsthistorici, literatuurhistorici, boekwetenschappers, bibliothecarissen, doctoraatsstudenten... Wie deelneemt leest twee artikelen die vooraf bezorgd zullen worden, en participeert actief aan de discussie.

De voertaal voor de hele dag is het Engels.