Last Friday paleographer Erik Kwakkel charmed thousands of book and animal lovers on Twitter with hourly pics of creatures in medieval manuscripts. Here’s his #ManuscriptZoo.
[View the story “Erik Kwakkel’s #ManuscriptZoo” on Storify]
Since the time of Homeric libation rituals and Plato’s wine-soaked Dionysian revels, alcohol has been an abiding fixture in the works and lives of many of our greatest writers, poets and philosophers. Their liquid inspiration and sustenance—to say nothing of ruin—has played a surprisingly major role in the development of literary history. Our new series of posts will explore both famous and...
On October 3rd, the Toronto Centre for the Book together with the Friends of Victoria Library invited Professor William St Clair to give the inaugural J.R. de Jackson Lecture for the 2012 Book History and Print Culture Lecture Series. In this lecture, titled “Image and Word: Towards a Political Economy of Book Illustration,” Prof. St Clair explores how the changing political economy...
On September 20, lauded U of T professor John Baird visited the Deer Park Branch of the Toronto Public Library to give a reading and lead a discussion of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. As part of the TPL’s lecture series “Celebrate Dickens,” which commemorates the bicentennial of the author’s birth, Prof. Baird addressed the social mores of Victorian England...
Listen here: Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. On March 19, Ryerson University hosted an interview and launch for Ruth Panofsky’s new book, The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture, at the Modern...
On March 13, 2012, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Jorge Cauz, announced that the organization, which published the first edition of the pre-eminent English-language encyclopaedia in 1768, has decided to cease production of printed editions as it shifts all major editorial energy to the maintenance of its online edition. My first thought, I confess, was a superficial one: now how will...
Join The Toronto Review of Books at Massey College next Saturday, March 31st for the interdisciplinary symposium on e-Reading we’re hosting in collaboration with the University of Toronto’s program in Book History and Print Culture and the Toronto Centre for the Book. All are welcome to attend what promises to be a fascinating afternoon. The program is as follows: E-Reading An...
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. On November 17 as part of the Toronto Centre for the Book lecture series, and in Association with the Centre for the Study of the United States, Hester Blum (Penn State University) spoke on “Polar Imprints”: Narratives...
Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern. Anonymous. New York: H. Long and Brother, 1855. Condition: Cover very worn, pages water-stained. Inside front cover bears a small sticker reading “B. Dawson, Bookseller & Stationer, Montreal”. Acquired: Sometime in the mid-1980s, from a thrift shop in Ottawa, for maybe $0.75 A little poking around on the Internet reveals a whole saga of veiled identities and...
On September 23, 2011, Bill Sherman, Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Renaissance & Early Modern Studies at the University of York, spoke at the Toronto Centre for the Book lecture series. His talk was entitled “The Reader’s Eye: Between Annotation and Illustration.” Listen here! Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip...
On January 20, 2011, University of Toronto Professor Ann Komaromi spoke in the Toronto Centre for the Book lecture series on “Samizdat: Material Texts and Extra-Gutenberg Publics.” (Samizdat is a form of grassroots and DIY publishing that circulated dissenting texts in Soviet Europe.) Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the...