The Decorative Arts Trust Announces Recipients of Publishing Grants
From the press release (13 June 2024) . . .
The Decorative Arts Trust congratulates the inaugural recipients of their new Publishing Grants. The Hispanic Society Museum and Library; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens received Publishing Grants for Collections, Exhibitions, and Conferences, and Dr. Joseph Larnerd from Drexel University received a Publishing Grant for Dissertations and First-Time Authors.
In November 2024, the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York City’s Washington Heights will publish A Room of Her Own: The Estrados of Viceregal Spain to accompany their landmark exhibition of the same name. Guest Curator Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack and Deputy Director and Head of Collections Margaret Connors McQuade will lead this examination of the estrado, defined in the early 18th-century treatise Diccionario de Autoridades as the “set of furniture used to cover and decorate the place or room where the ladies sit to receive visitors.” The estrado was a remarkable space where a diverse group of women engaged in elaborate social practices and displayed their collections of valuable objects from the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Decorative arts, paintings, rare books, and engravings from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library’s collection will be presented in an entirely new light, with many to be exhibited for the first time.
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California plans to release a comprehensive publication about an influential Los Angeles-based ceramics artist in fall 2026. Although additional details cannot be announced at this time, the book will complement an exhibition led by Lauren Cross, PhD, the Gail-Oxford Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is publishing Art, Industry, and Reform in Philadelphia, 1876–1926, accompanying the museum’s spring 2026 exhibition of the same name. David Barquist, The H. Richard Dietrich, Jr., Curator of American Decorative Arts, and Colin Fanning, Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts, lead the exhibition and publication, which will focus on Philadelphia artisans and architects who drew on a range of inspirations—from the British Arts and Crafts movement to masterworks at the World’s Fairs—to address challenges of urban industrialization. Their investigation will be among PMA’s offerings during the nation’s 250th commemoration, which is also the museum’s 150th anniversary year.
Dr. Joseph Larnerd received the inaugural Publishing Grant for Dissertations and First-Time Authors. Larnerd, an Assistant Professor of Design History at Drexel University in Philadelphia, will publish Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age with the University of Delaware Press in fall 2025. This publication offers an original history of cut glass refracted through the labors required to make and maintain the glistening wares. Larnerd will show how popular representations of the medium and these widely discussed labors undercut how working-class peoples imagined and enacted social class, privilege, and mobility.
The deadline to apply for Decorative Arts Trust Publishing Grants is March 31 annually. For more information, visit decorativeartstrust.org.
Conference | The Study of the Book Trade since Peter Isaac
From the Centre for Printing History and Culture:
Unfinished Business: Progress, Stasis, and New Directions in the Study of the Book Trade since Peter Isaac
Annual Print Networks Conference
University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 9–10 July 2024
Organised by the University of Newcastle and sponsored by Print Networks and the Centre for Printing History and Culture, this conference considers the British and Irish book trades locally, nationally, and in their global perspective, including comparative perspectives. It addresses questions such as 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 technological questions scholars of the book trade are now grappling with? In what fresh directions must the study of the trades now strike out? The fee for this two-day conference is £80.
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.
t u e s d a y , 9 j u l y
9.30 Panel 1 | Politics and the Print Trade
• Kate de Rycker (Newcastle), ‘Danter’s Gentleman’: Thomas Nashe and the Precarity of Cheap Print
• Maria Zukovs, (St Andrews), Beyond the United Irishmen: A View of the French Revolution from the Dublin Press, 1789–94
10.45 Panel 2 | Radical Work
• Fionnghuala Sweeney (Newcastle), The Unfinished Business of Freedom: Slave Narratives, Surfeit, and the British Northeast in Antebellum Black Atlantic Print Culture
• Andrea Lloyd (BCU), ‘An Indissoluble Unity’: Considering the Relationship between outward Influences and the Design of Birmingham’s Radical Newspapers, 1815–36
12.15 Panel 3 | The Marketplace of Print: Advertising, Promotion, Demand
• Bethan Elliott (York), ‘None… Took any Notice of It’: Publication and the Promotion of Romantic Drama in Print
• Karen McAulay (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), ‘Music for All’: The Rise and Fall of Scottish Music Publishing, 1880–1964
13.15 Lunch break
14.15 Panel 4 | Advancing the Study of Women in the Book Trade
• Emma Sibbald (Queens’ College, Cambridge), ‘A Servant’s Receipt for the World’: Women Wagoners and the Antiquarian Book Trade at the Bodleian Library, 1690–1720 [online]
• Joanne Butler (Keele), Locating Women Booksellers in 18th-Century Regional England
• Charley Matthews (Edinburgh), Geraldine Jewsbury’s Labour as a 19th-Century ‘Publisher’s Reader’
16.15 Keynote 1
• Ruth Frendo (Stationers’ Company)
w e d n e s d a y , 1 0 j u l y
9.30 Panel 5 | The Networks and Power Structures of the Early Modern Book Trade
• Sam Bailey, Sorority, Spycraft, and Sodomy: Collaboration and the Erotic Book Trade in 18th-Century London
• Beth DeBold, A House Divided: The Internal Conflict of the Stationers’ Company
• Matt Ryan, ‘Unquiet Spyrittes’: Martin Marprelate and Communal Strategies of Resistance
11.00 Lunch break
13.30 Keynote 2
• Joseph Hone (Newcastle), How to Smuggle Books into 18th-Century Britain
14.45 Panel 6 | Unconsidered Forms
• Roseanna Smith (BCU), A Book by Any Other Name? 19th-Century Trade Catalogues as a Unique Format of Print
• Holly Day (York), Selling the Memorandum Book in 18th-Century Britain: Bibliographic Trends and the Mechanics of the Trade
16.15 Panel 7 | Technology and the Print Trades
• Ian Dooley (Institute of English Studies, UCL), Cheap Colour Ink and the Creation of Mass Print Culture
• Helen Williams (Edinburgh Napier), Newspapers, Timetables, and the ‘World’s First Comic’: The 19th-Century Print Trade in Glasgow
Roundtable | Advancing the Study of North East Print
Helen Williams (Northumbria), Barbara Crosbie (Durham), and Kirsten Gibson (Newcastle)
Enfilade 
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