Volume 3, Number 3
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SHARP News Volume 3 Article 1 Number 3 01/01/1994 Summer 1994 Volume 3, Number 3 Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news Recommended Citation (2010) "Volume 3, Number 3," SHARP News: Vol. 3: No. 3. Available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol3/iss3/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in SHARP News by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. et al.: Volume 3, Number 3 mmm Volume 3, Number 3 lmmm Summer 1994 Two Hundred Attend Washington Conference With superb hospitality and efficiency, the Center cultural attache at the Czech embassy in Washington. for the Book sf the Library of Congress hosted the The aim of such 3 conference would be to bring second annual SHARP conference in Washington from together book historians from the West and Eastern 14 to 16 July. The meeting attracted 200 participants Europe. As such, it will require considerable financial (up from 130 last year), including two Librarians of support and logistical planning. Eastern European Congress. The incumbent Librarian, James H. scholars will certainly need travel subsidies, and we Billington, offered a gracious welcoming speech; and would like to hold down costs for Western attendees his predecessor, Daniel J. Boorstin, attended as well. as well. We believe that the combined efforts of four A total of 82 papers were presented by a broad book history organizations can raise the necessary interdisciplinary range of scholars from the United funds from private and government sources. Advising States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the us will be Peter B. Kaufrnan, president and founder of Netherlands, and Israel. The panels (even including PUBWATCH, a foundation that helps East European the closing sessions) generally attracted substantial publishers adjust to the realities of a free press and crowds and generated plenty of discussion-a telling free markets. (Mr. Kaufman was the banquet speaker measure of the success of the conference. at the Washington conference, delivering a well- The participants applauded John Y. Cole and his received talk on "Books and East-West Relations.") staff at the Center for the Book for their superlative In planning for 1997, we welcome the assistance work in organizing the conference. Thanks are also of SHARP members-not only in fundraising, but in due to James R. Kelly of the Washington Rare Books the perhaps more difficult job of locating and Group, who arranged the accommodations. This year contacting Eastern European book historians, most of as last year, the Association of American Publishers whom are still unaware of SHARP'S existence. The helped underwrite the costs of the conference, so we inspiration behind the conference, and our organizer are doubly grateful to AAP President Nicholas Veliotes on the ground in Prague, is JHina Smejkalovb- and his Director of Public Affairs, Roger Williams. Strickland, lecturer at the Charles University. She can Plans are already under way for future conferences be contacted at DuSkova 14, 150 00 Prague 5, Czech -at the University of Edinburgh in 1995 (see our call Republic, fax 42-2-2327 106. for papers below) and at the American Antiquarian Given that Prague might be too remote or expen- Society in Massachusetts in summer 1996. sive for some SHARP members, we may schedule an We are also working to organize an international additional regional conference somewhere in North conference in Prague in summer 1997. Our plans for America earlier in 1997. The University of Iowa is Prague are still gelling, but we hope to make it a one possible host under consideration. trilingual meeting, with proceedings in English, French, and German, and some provision for simultaneous translation. It would be a joint effort Call for Papers: involving SHARP; the Leipziger Arbeitskreis zur 1995 SHARP Edinburgh Conference Geschichte des Buchwesens; the Paris-based Institut pour la Memoire de 1'~ditionContemporaine (IMEC); The third annual conference of the Society for the and SHARP'S Francophone counterpart, the Associa- History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing will tion Internationale de Bibliologie (AIB). The AIB's meet 15-17 Ju.1y 1995 at the University of Edinburgh. President, Jacques Michon of the University of Sher- SHARP welcomes papers dealing with the creation, brooke, spoke to the SHARP Washington conference diffusion, or reception of the written word in any about the AIB and its interest in collaborating on a historical period. Conference proceedings will be in Prague meeting. Also present was Jan Zelenka, English, but papers may deal with any national litera- Published by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 2010 1 SHARP News, Vol. 3, No. 3 [2010], Art. 1 2 SHARP News ture. There are no limitations on topics, but we may very nature, books refuse to be contained within any organize special panels on publishers' archives, discipline, whether it be bibliography, literature, electronic texts, periodicals and newspapers, Scotland, history, economics, or sociology. They also refuse to interdisciplinarity and cultural studies, ongoing respect national boundaries, especially in the early collaborative research projects, and teaching programs modern era, when educated people everywhere read in book history. Latin and French. So I did not begin with some pious Proposals for individual papers or panels (one page determination to work in an interdisciplinary mode on maximum per paper), and inquiries concerning the an international scale. I merely tried to make sense of conference itself, should be sent to the conference the game I was hunting in the archives; and as the host, Dr. Bill Bell, Department of English Literature, chase gathered speed, I realized the goal was to of Edinburgh, 5 Buccleuch Place, understand the role of the printed word as a force in EdinburgUniversiX EH8 9JX, Scotland. The deadline for history-a goal defined by Febvre and Martin. I proposals is 1 November 1994. suspect that other book historians of the 1960s had a The program committee will meet in Edinburgh a similar experience. few weeks after that date to consider the proposals. Now, in the 1990s, we find ourselves occupying Any SHARP member who is not submitting a proposal some welldemarcated terrain. New journals, research may serve on the program committee, but you must centers, colloquia, congresses, and thousands of publi- notify Dr. Bell in writing of your intention to serve no cations have spread the word. Research moves so fast later than 1 November. Dr. Bell is also the person to that, in order to keep track of it, historians of the book contact if you would like to moderate a panel. have developed networks around nerve centers like IMEC (Institut pour la Mbmoire de 1'Edition Contem- poraine), SHARP (Society for the History of Author- Book History, the State of Play: ship, Reading and Publishing), and (to name one of An Interview with Robert Darnton the newest and most promising) the Leipziger Arbeitskreis zur Geschichte des Buchwesens. In short, Recently, Robert Darnton (Princeton University) the last thirty years have seen the emergence of a was interviewed for a Bulgarian publication by distinctive scholarly field. To observe its growth is to Krassimira Daskalova of SoJia University. We are follow an interesting episode in the sociology of pleased to publish the original English version here. knowledge. Although I see those thirty years as a success DASKALOVA:Interest in books has existed since ,I regret one negative tendency. Library schools the dawn of civilization. The scholarly discipline stgus to provide training in analytical bibliography and bearing the name "history of the book," however, is the history of books. Now they mainly stress comparatively recent, starting in the 1950s with an computer science and cataloguing. Despite some good agenda derived from the "Amales School" of history. intentions, I fear that the new British Library and How do you assess the place of this discipline now, Bibliothkque de France will not contain important some thirty to forty years after its birth? research centers for the history of books. For a moment, it looked as though the two greatest libraries DARNTON:Certainly, the " Annales school" in Europe would create a London-Paris axis around provided the impulse that has defined the direction of which the history of the book would turn for t!!e book history since the 1950s-that is, it integrated foreseeable future. But now, just as the tunnel under traditional research on books in the new variety of the English Channel has opened, it seems that the socio-cultural history developed by Marc Bloch and moment is passing, for lack of financial support. Lucien Febvre. But the early, programmatic publications, such as L'Apparition du livre by Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, merely set the course for subsequent work. Since then a whole library of monographs and general studies has grown up, and the SHARP NEWS is the quarterly newsletter of the history of books has emerged as a distinctive field of Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and study. The two main characteristics that set it apart Publishing, Inc. Annual membership in SHARP, from other fields are: first, it is interdisciplinary and, which includes a subscription to SHARP NEWS,is $1 5 in the United States and Canada, f 10 in Britain, $20 second, it is international. elsewhere. Send membership dues to Linda Connors, That seems clear in retrospect. But when I first Drew University Library, Madison, NJ 07940, USA. wandered into the field in 1965, there was no sense of Address editorial correspondence to the Editor, a "field" at all, no defining character to the enterprise Jonathan Rose, History Department, Drew University, -except the object of study, the book itself.