In manuscript and print, as cultural and technological artifact, the book has provoked discussion from the early modern period through the present. This series will further our historical understanding of the book as a cultural object, a discussion made all the more relevant as text becomes an increasingly electronic medium. Please contact Kathryn James (kathryn.james@yale.edu) for more information.

"The Economics of Color Plate Book Publishing in  Antebellum America"
by William S. Reese
Thursday, October 29, 2009, 4:00 p.m.
William S. Reese, proprietor of the antiquarian book firm William Reese Company and graduate of Yale College in 1977, is a longstanding supporter of the Yale University Library collections and current chair of the Yale Library Associates.

"Reading and Identity"
by Alice Prochaska
Tuesday, December 1, 2009, 4:00 p.m.
Alice Prochaska has been the Yale University Librarian since 2001, before which she was the Director of Special Collections of the British Library. Having received her undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Somerville College, Oxford, she will be returning to her alma mater as Principal in 2010.

"God goes to Grub Street"
by Adrian Johns
Tuesday, March 24, 2009, 4:00 p.m.
Adrian Johns is Professor of History and chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago.

"Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Papers for Scholarly Use"
by Matthew Kirschenbaum
Thursday, April 9, 2009, 4:00 p.m.
Matthew Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland.

"Digital readers: the future of the history of the book"
by John Palfrey
Thursday, October 16, 2008, 4:00 p.m.
John Palfrey, a Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School, is the Co-Director of the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In August, he and co-author Urs Gasser published Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. He has recently been appointed Vice Dean of the Harvard Law Library.
Click here for a podcast of this talk

"From The History of a Book to "the history of the book": readers and users in Victorian Britain"
by Leah Price
Monday, November 17, 2008, 4:00 p.m.
Leah Price, Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University, works in the field of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, the novel, and the history of books and reading. She is the author of Compiling authority: the anthology and the novel in modern Britain (1998), Anthology and the rise of the novel from Richardson to George Eliot (2000) and, with co-editor Pamela Thurschwell, Literary secretaries/secretarial culture (2005). With Seth Lerer, she edited a special issue of PMLA entitled The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature (2006).

"The Grand Tour as Literary Production"
by Jeremy Black
Wednesday, March 26, 2008, 4:00 p.m.
Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, is a historian of 18th-century British history, cartographic history, and military history. His most recent publications include Great powers and the quest for hegemony: the world order since 1500 (2008) and European warfare in a global context, 1660-1815 (2007).

"The Lion and the Lily: Power and Cartography in Early Modern England and France"
by Christine Petto
Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 4:00 p.m.
Christine Petto, a professor in the History department at Southern Connecticut University, is the author of When France was king of cartography: the patronage and production of maps in early modern France (2007).

"The Medieval Title Page"
by Walter Cahn
Wednesday, December 5, 2007, 4:00 p.m.
Walter Cahn, the Carnegie Professor Emeritus of the History of Art in the Yale Department of Art History, is a specialist in Romanesque art and manuscript illumination.  He is the author, among many other works, of Romanesque Bible Illumination (1982) and A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in France (1996).

"'Take thee a tile . . . and portray upon it the city' (Ezechiel 4): Maps in medieval exegesis"
by Catherine Delano-Smith
Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 4:00 p.m.
Catherine Delano-Smith, a historian of medieval and early modern cartography, is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, the editor of Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography, and the author of many works on the history of cartography, including Maps in Bibles 1500-1600: An illustrated catalogue (co-authored with Elizabeth Ingram in 1991) and English maps: a history (co-authored with Roger Kain in 1999).

"Blockbooks and the earliest incunable book illustration"
by Paul Needham
Wednesday, October 10, 2007, 4:00 p.m.
Paul Needham is the Librarian of Princeton University's Scheide Library and the author, among other works, of Twelve centuries of bookbindings, 400-1600 (1979) and The printer & the pardoner: an unrecorded indulgence printed by William Caxton for the Hospital of St. Mary (1986).

"Poetry in Motion: Lyric Circulation in the Antebellum U.S."
by Meredith McGill
Thursday, November 2, 2006, 4:00 p.m.
Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, Meredith McGill is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834-1853 (University of Pennsylvania, 2003). She has published essays on American copyright law, handwriting and mass production, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Lowell, and Wallace Stevens.

"Recovering the Contents: Public, Circulating and Pornographic Libraries in the UK 1857-1912"
by Simon Eliot
Thursday, October 5, 2006, 4:00 p.m.
Simon Eliot is Professor of the History of the Book at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and the Deputy Director of its Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies.