Enfilade

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)