The annual Print Networks conference
‘Unfinished Business: Progress, Stasis and New Directions in the study of the Book Trade since Peter Isaac’
Newcastle University, 9-10 July 2024
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Joseph Hone (Academic Track Fellow in Literature and Book History, University of Newcastle)
Professor Peter Isaac (1921-2002) investigated numerous strands of the British book trade. A distinguished professor of Civil and Public Health Engineering at Newcastle University, he also enjoyed a highly regarded career as a print historian and bibliographer. The working group that he founded, The History of the Book Trade in the North, was immensely influential in moving the study of the British book trade beyond the confines of London. More broadly, his work insisted on the value of the local for our national and global understandings of the book trade. He considered the internationally famous engravings of Thomas Bewick; the ornament stocks of the Alnwick pharmacist and printer William Davison; and the inventory of books sold by a Penrith grocer in the seventeenth century to be equally worthy of scholarly attention and careful study.
This conference at Newcastle University invites papers focussing on the British or Irish book trades locally, nationally or in their global perspective, including comparative perspectives. How has research on these trades’ histories developed and advanced, or not, in the past two decades? How has an emphasis on valuing the local, the specific or the seemingly minor been taken up in studies of the book trade? How do such interests sit with the expansion of book trade research into ever larger data-sets and/or within national and global print histories? What are the key social, political and/or technological questions scholars of the book trade are now grappling with? In what fresh directions must the study of the trades now strike out?
We welcome work focussing on any period from the hand-press era to modern and contemporary print practices. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
The establishment and development of the print trade outside its original centres
Old and new sources of/for the history of the book and the book trade
Digitisation, data and print
Case-studies of individual buyers, sellers and readers of print
Studies in paper and bookmaking
People, print and the book trade in Newcastle, the North-East and Cumbria
The visual cultures of print
Chapbooks and cheap books
Links between the book and other trades
News, newsmaking and newspapers
Libraries, coffee houses, reading rooms, bookshops
The regulation of books and the booktrade
New directions and fresh questions for the study of the British book trades
The Medieval and Early Modern Studies network at Newcastle has kindly offered a number of bursaries to cover the expenses of PGRs, ECRs, precariously employed scholars, and/or independent scholars offering papers on early modern topics (c. 1450- c. 1750). Please indicate your interest in this bursary when submitting your abstract.
Please submit abstracts of 200-250 words by February 22nd 2024 to booktrades@newcastle.ac.uk
Enquiries/queries to: ruth.connolly@ncl.ac.uk