|
President’s Report Spring 2023
As I write my final report as President for the Bibliographical Society of Canada, I want to remind our members of our primary goal: the scholarly study of the history, description, and transmission of texts in all media and formats, with a primary emphasis on Canada. I am encouraged by the passion of our members to use this goal to address under-examined areas of scholarship, particularly around the texts of minoritized communities in Canada, and to bridge the fields of bibliography and book history with disciplines developing theory and methods around the study of electronic, audiovisual, and other media texts. The results have led a generation of scholars to consider how the material production and dissemination of texts can impact the daily activities of our global society. As we continue to forge these knowledges, we must consider the impact our scholarship and curation will have on the communities represented in the text and the Peoples who constructed the text.
To that end, this year’s conference program “Book: Re-Imagined and Re-Born” continues this trend in the Society’s conferences to actively respond to societal changes in the practice of bibliography, book history, and special collections curation. The seven panel sessions include a range of perspectives from the scholarly, professional, and publishing world, providing fresh insights on the history of the book and print in Canada and beyond using analytical and historical bibliography approaches. I am encouraged to see our members’ scholarship continue to take on this work and demonstrate why bibliography and book studies is relevant to the history and future of recorded cultures.
I am delighted to announce this year’s awards and fellowships to support the diverse and interdisciplinary scholarship of our members. The Fellowship Committee has awarded the Marie Tremaine Fellowship to Sarah Pelletier, who will investigate how pressmen and compositor’s concerns and conflicts regarding technology, gender, race, and class circulated in typographical trade journals in Canada and the United States from 1850 to 1914. The Fellowship Committee has also awarded the Bernard Amtmann Fellowship to Manuel Medrano, who will examine a khipu — a knotted-string recording device used as an alternative to writing in the South American Inka Empire (c. 1400–1532 CE) – to trace the khipu’s provenance and test the bounds of Western analytical bibliography by adopting its terminology in a technical and material description of the khipu.
The Awards Committee has awarded the Emerging Scholar Prize to Megan Butchart, who will present on how South Today challenged hegemonic white supremacist paradigms and informed a politics of accessibility and community networking. The Graduate Student Merit Awards have been awarded to Rachel Burlock for her research on settler-colonial histories from a rural settlement in Manitoba, and to Ayla Morland for her research on the collection and reading practices of Canadian physicist Ursula Franklin, known for her writings on the political and social effects of technology. The Conference Program Committee has also awarded the Greta Golick Award for the Study of Book Culture to Stephen Webb for his research on databasing and visualizing deformations within Lord Byron’s personal library.
I am tremendously grateful for the support I have received from our Council members and wider membership in my final year as President. I am thankful to Karen Smith for her continued counsel as Past-President, Svetlana Kochkina for coordinating our upcoming conference at York University, Sarah Lake and Billy Johnson for coordinating our communications to the membership and wider public, and Tom Vincent and Andrew Stewart for making sure we continue to be a sustainable society to support bibliography and book studies in Canada.
I would also like to thank a few of our outgoing councillors and welcome a few additions who have already begun their roles to ensure the Society continues to have an active and robust community. Our Secretary Andrew Stewart has stepped down after several years of excellent service and has been replaced by Mary Kandiuk, who will assist in continuing to build our membership. Our Bulletin Editor Ellen Forget has also stepped down after steering our newsletter for the past couple of years and will be replaced by our former councillor Susan Cameron, who has agreed to step into the role following the publication of this current issue. I would also like to welcome Winston Pei, who has joined our Publications Committee as the Layout Editor, a new position to assist in making our Papers articles web accessible as we transition away from print publication.
I would especially like to thank Ruth Panofsky, Sarah Severson, Rachel Harris, Philippe Rioux, and Winston Pei for their work on the Publications Committee in rebooting the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada this past year. As many members will have noticed, the Papers have not published an issue for almost two years due to the impacts of the pandemic on recruiting members to critical roles in the publication process. I am pleased to announce that later this spring we anticipate the complete release of volumes 59 (2022) and 60 (2023) due to their herculean efforts. Some articles and book reviews from these issues are currently on our Journal’s open access platform through our online-first policy where we release publications as they complete the peer-review and publication layout process. It is critical that we continue to publish timely research in bibliography and book history as soon as it becomes available.
Please stay safe and take care, spend time with your loved ones, and enjoy this year’s conference programming and AGM. I look forward to seeing many of you in person at York University in May.
Chris J. Young
President
Back to top
|
|
|
A Positive Outcome to Pandemic Browse Time
In August 2020 while casually reading up on Douglas Cockerell, noted British fine bookbinder, a Massachusetts book designer and printer, happened upon the link into a digital exhibit on the Dalhousie University Cockerell bindings. One of the titles depicted caught his eye. A number of years before he had purchased a Cockerell binding of the same title from an English online store. While he quite enjoyed owning a unique Cockerell binding , he realized that it complemented our Dalhousie collection perfectly and reached out to me. His initial email went into my junk mail file and his follow-up call to my office phone was during a period of Covid lock-down. When we finally connected two months later, I was delighted that the opportunity to acquire the volume was still available. Custom Cockerell bindings of works by one of our major collection donors, William Inglis Morse, rarely appear on the market and even more rarely are offered by private owners.
Further Covid lock-downs and frigid winter weather which prevented trips to the local Massachusetts Post Office delayed the arrival of the volume, but it was well worth the wait. It was a delight to open the parcel and have before me an elegant and symbolic Cockerell binding that effectively used gilt rules and dots to evoke a pathway from the bottom of the front cover to the top. The volume is a book of poetry by William Inglis Morse entitled, The Narrowing Path. An added associated bonus on the verso of the front end-paper was an inscription from William Morse to Amy Sacker (1872-1965), a Boston book designer, painter and teacher, who founded her own school of design in 1901.
Collection development in Special Collections is often the result of hours of research and sometimes it is just out of the blue.
Karen Smith
Special Collections Librarian
Dalhousie University Libraries |
|
En mai 1992, je publiais la première livraison de ma bibliographie numérique, XVIIIe siècle : bibliographie. Au 22 février 2023, elle comportait 550 livraisons, pour un total de 64 408 titres. Sauf rarissimes exceptions, les textes relevés ont paru depuis 1991.
Toutes les livraisons se trouvent, en format HTML.
En février 2023, j’ai rendu disponibles l’ensemble des données de la bibliographie sous trois formats : valeurs séparées par des tabulations (.tsv); valeurs séparées par des virgules (.csv); classeur Excel (.xlsx). Ces fichiers sont téléchargeables.
Ces données diffèrent légèrement de celles en format HTML : j’ai profité de l’occasion du dépôt pour normaliser un certain nombre de choses et pour corriger quelques coquilles et erreurs. (Il en reste.)
Quiconque souhaite s’approprier ces données peut le faire, sous deux conditions.
1. L’attribution de la collecte des données doit toujours être rappelée, par exemple sous la forme «Données colligées par Benoît Melançon».
2. Aucune exploitation commerciale de ces données n’est tolérée. Elles ne peuvent pas être vendues sous quelque forme que ce soit. Autrement dit, chez Creative Commons : Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Je suis évidemment curieux de savoir quelle utilisation on fera des données; n’hésitez pas à m’écrire à ce sujet. De même, je répondrai, dans la mesure du possible, aux demandes qui me seraient adressées quant à la mise en forme des données. Vous trouverez mes coordonnées ci-dessous.
Cette mise en ligne des données ne signifie ni la fin de la publication de la bibliographie ni la fin de sa mise en ligne sous format HTML. Il n’est pas impossible que d’autres jeux de données soient rendus disponibles au cours des prochaines années.
Merci à l’avance de bien vouloir respecter les consignes ci-dessus et bonne exploitation des données.
Benoît Melançon
Professeur titulaire, Département des littératures de langue française, Université de Montréal
benoit.melancon@umontreal.ca
NDLR : Benoît Melançon a reçu en 2021 la Médaille Marie-Tremaine et le prix Watters-Morley de la Société bibliographique du Canada «en reconnaissance de services exceptionnels rendus à la cause de la bibliographie canadienne».
|
|
|
Continuing Collaboration at St. Francis Xavier University
Dr. Laura Estill, Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities and English Professor and Susan Cameron, Special Collections Librarian at the Angus L. Macdonald Library have had another successful collaboration.
During a fortuitous impromptu tour of the library's attic space, Dr. Estill espied a shelf of beautifully bound Punch Magazines. It made an impression. The seeds of the next collaborative project were sown.
Dr. Estill's idea to use our Punch Collection for an assignment in her English 205: Shakespeare Today! turned into another rich learning experience for the students. Sessions were held in the library where the students chose one Shakespeare related item from the magazine and did a one page description of why Shakespeare was being invoked. Class sessions included a lecture from myself and my assistant, Lorena Brother, in which we discussed aspects of book history, such as information about provenance, binding, the uniqueness of our set, about book collectors in general, and how Special Collections and the library benefit from the work and passion of these individuals.
The provenance of this set brought some unexpected and fascinating details to light. Our donor, Dr. Lauder Brunton, as it turned out, had an interesting pedigree going back to his grandfather, Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton, a well known physician and medical researcher. When a prominent individual is involved, the results of the research unearthed some tantalizing leads, and eventually to the donor's son and daughter.
A publication is being produced from the student assignments, which will also include an introduction by Dr. Estill on the importance of Punch and the extensive presence of Shakespeareana within it. My contribution will describe some of the library's benefactors and their stories, which will include the donor of this particular set. The assignment will be appended as well.
I was able to work directly with the students as they researched the piece they chose and for many of them it was their first exposure to this type of periodical literature, and they were excited to handle the volumes which spanned the years, 1841-1948. These projects also garner attention by being featured in university news. Dr. Estill and I were interviewed by our Teaching and Learning Centre for an Innovative Classroom Zoomcast series.
Susan Cameron
Special Collections Librarian
St. Francis Xavier University |
|
|
|
