The USTC has appointed a new member of staff to the project group in St Andrews.

Jan Alessandini joins the USTC from University College, London, where he is completing a PhD on Schwanksammlungen, collections of short comic tales that were a considerable vogue in the middle of the sixteenth century. This forms the point of entry or a wider consideration of laughter, wit and ridicule in the urban context in German-speaking lands.

Jan will be principlally responsible for enhancing the USTC survey of German materials, as we expand coverage of the database into the seventeenth century. This will involve a wide-ranging survey of German books outside German libraries, and a full listing of the first generation of German newspapers.

He replaced Dr Richard Kirwan, who resigned his position with the USTC in December to take up a lectureship in the Department of History at the University of Limerick.

The USTC recently co-hosted a workshop at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, designed to raise interest in a systematic survey of 16th century German broadsheets. The decision of the German National Bibliography, the VD 16, to exclude broadsheet items, has created the most significant obstacle to comprehensive coverage of 16th century publishing in the USTC. In advance of our launch in 2011, the USTC team gathered together records for some 3,000 German broadsheets, including such iconic items as Luther’s 95 theses. But many thousands more remain to be discovered or described in German libraries, archives and museums.

The Wolfenbüttel workshop gathered together specialists in the field of Einblattdrucke, together with librarians, archivists and curators of collections with known holdings. While most early printed books are to be found in libraries, this is by no means the case with single-sheet items, especially the illustrated broadsheets for which the reformation era was justly famous. Meanwhile many unillustrated items, especially ordinances issued by local authorities, are filed away in archives, often not separately catalogued. The history of the 16th century indulgence trade can also not be fully explored until surviving copies of these important historical artefacts are fully documented.

Direction of the meeting was shared between the USTC team and Falk Eisermann, Director of the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke and the author of the comprehensive catalogue of 15th century broadsheets that could serve as a model for a 16th century project. The meeting ranged over issues of cataloguing and typology, digitization and description, and how unknown items could be identified in less fully described collections.

After the conclusion of the meeting, Professor Pettegree paid a visit to the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, to investigate the work necessary to describe this important collection. He is seen here with Christiane Caemmerer, curator of Einblattdrucke in the library’s Manuscript department.

The USTC Project is pleased to announce a new vacancy. We will be appointing a post-doctoral researcher to this position within the AHRC-funded project grant.

The successful candidate will have responsibility for that part of the project dealing with the bibliography of the German lands, 1501-1650. This will involve an enhancement of the data currently available from the German bibliographical projects VD 16 and VD 17 by the systematic search of collections outside the German-speaking lands. The USTC will also be seeking to incorporate data on printed items that fall outside the terms of reference of the VD 16 and VD 17.

The successful candidate is likely to have experience working within the field of German history or literature, and to have prior experience of working with early printed books. There are no teaching duties attached to this post, although opportunities to obtain teaching experience may be available by agreement with the Project Director. The USTC places a high value on teamwork, and the successful candidate will be expected to work closely with the other staff and students of the USTC group.

Details of the vacancy can be accessed here.

View Vacancy Details

The closing date for applications is 31 December 2012.

The USTC has entered into an agreement with publishers Brill to provide the editorial direction for a re-launched Book History Online (BHO).

BHO is the online version of the Annual Bibliography of the History of the Book (ABHB), the leading international bibliography in the field of book and library history. It records all publications of scholarly value, written from an historical point of view. This may include monographs, articles and reviews, dealing with the history of the printed book, its arts, crafts, techniques and equipment, its economic, social and cultural environment involved in its production, distribution, preservation and description. More specifically, BHO contains information on the history of printing and publishing, papermaking, bookbinding, book illustration, type-design and type-founding book collecting, libraries and scholars.

The ABHB was published as annual volumes between 1970 and 1998, and now comprises some 27,000 records. In 2011 publishers Brill of Leiden took over responsibility for the resource from the previous hosts, the Royal Library in The Hague. The USTC has now entered into a four year agreement to staff the management of the project, co-ordinating the gathering of data with international partners. USTC Director Andrew Pettegree, who will join the management board of BHO, welcomed the new agreement: ‘For St Andrews this offers the opportunity to be at the heart of a resource which can be an invaluable tool for all bibliographers and historians of the book. We look forward to working with Brill to make this a comprehensive up-to-date and accessible resource.’

The USTC hosts an active programme of internships. This is intended to provide scholars and students interested in developing an interest in bibliography with an opportunity to work with the project team in St Andrews. They will receive instruction in rare books cataloguing and have the chance for hands-on experience with the University Library’s uncatalogued 17th century collections.

In addition to physical bibliography, the internship will involve extensive practice in the manipulation of digital resources.

In the year 2012 the project group hosted a team of four interns from the universities of Erlangen, Amsterdam, Harvard and St Andrews. It is intended to recruit a team of similar size for the year 2013.

The internship will be for a period of 6-8 weeks, and will generally fall in the months between May and July. The USTC will meet the costs of transportation to and from St Andrews, and contribute a subvention towards accommodation costs. There is no further remuneration attached.

Terms and conditions, and an application form are attached. Further enquiries should be directed to Professor Andrew Pettegree at admp@st-andrews.ac.uk.

The deadline for applications is 31 December 2012, and successful candidates will be notified in January 2013.

Internship terms and conditions 2013

Interns on the USTC summer programme were among the many who turned out to greet the Olympic flame on its progress to the Games.  USTC  interns Edwin Goi and Drew Thomas are seen here with Reformation Institute and USTC students Beth Tapscott and Sophie Mullins and one of the Olympic torches.

During the course of the summer the USTC welcomed a team of five students from St Andrews, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States.  In this, the first year of the programme, the interns divided their time between preparing date for entry into the project database, and cataloguing work with the university’s collection of uncatalogued rare books, working under the supervision of Daryl Green in Special Collections. Project Director Andrew Pettegree paid tribute to their contribution: ‘We were exceptionally fortunate this year to be able to recruit such a talented group of young scholars.  The work they have done has helped lay the foundations for the next stage of the project, taking the USTC survey into the seventeenth century.’

Applications for internships in 2013 will open in August, and details will be posted on the website at that time.

 

28-30 June 2012

The Early Modern Book world was characterised by great variety, but also by fierce competition.  Many printers and publishers responded by developing a highly specialised output, utilising skills and expertise that gave them a vital commercial edge, and deterred potential rivals.  Books that required specialised typefaces (music and Greek texts) were inevitably the preserve of a small number of firms; but others took advantage of the sophisticated European distribution network to develop an international reputation for specific genres.  The production of Books of Hours was dominated by a few Parisian firms; in 1541 Georg Joachim Rheticus would carry the precious manuscript of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus 1,000 kilometres across Europe to find a printing centre (Nuremberg) capable of doing it justice.  But much less well capitalised firms could also find their niche in the new genres that underpinned the market: almanacs, calendars and news.

Speakers at the conference include: Zsuzsa Barbarics-Hermanik, Natasha Constantinidou, Iain Fenlon, Neil Harris, Richard Kirwan, Isabella Matauschek, Rémi Mathis, David McKitterick, Roger Paas, Massimo Petta, Pedro Rueda Ramirez, Ursula Rautenberg, Lluís Agustí Ruiz, Paul Shore, Bjørn Skaarup and Francisco António Lourenço Vaz.

Conference registration is now open. Please click here to enter your registration details.

For further information on the conference, please contact the conference organisers: Richard Kirwan (rk22@st-andrews.ac.uk), or Sophie Mullins (sam223@st-andrews.ac.uk)

 

The project group was delighted to play host to a visit from Professor Brendan Dooley, of University College Cork, one of the world’s leading authorities on Early Modern communication networks.

Professor Dooley worked at Harvard, with the Medici Archive Project in Rome and with the Institut Deutsche Presseforschung in Bremen before moving to Cork as Professor of Renaissance History in 2009.  In an intensive week of conversations and seminars, Professor Dooley met with members of the USTC project group team to compare working methods and to discuss future plans.  He also gave two papers, to the Media History Seminar, ‘The Dangers of Communication: Renaissance and Beyond’, and to the Reformation History Seminar, ‘Forbidden Love in Counter Reformation Florence:  the Romance of Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza’.  Having already published an edition of this correspondence (Amore e guerra nel tardo Rinascimento: le lettere di Livia Vernazza e don Giovanni de’ Medici. Florence: Polistampa, 2009), Professor Dooley will next year launch a monograph study of this doomed romance.

 

 

Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby initiated the field work for USTC 17 with a trip to libraries in Brussels and Antwerp.

The new survey of books published in the Low Countries, 1601-1650, will be a co-operative venture with the two established bibliographical projects, the STCN (Netherlands) and STCV (Vlaanderen).  For the northern Netherlands work will consist of examining material in libraries outside the Netherlands.  The survey of the 17^th century southern Netherlands will require more fundamental work to incorporate materials published in the French-speaking Walloon towns and in Brussels.

During this first trip the USTC researchers concentrated attention on the fine pamphlet collections of the Royal Library in Brussels and in the Museum Plantin Moretus in Antwerp.  Adopting the STCN fingerprinting system used in both established bibliographies will all USTC researchers working in remote libraries to differentiate pamphlets often published in several simultaneous editions.  The first stage of this work in Belgium permitted the identification of around 150 editions not previously described in the national bibliographical projects as well as the logging of several hundred additional copies.  Work will continue in Belgian Libraries in May.

 

Dr Malcolm Walsby will be giving a paper at the École des Chartes in Paris on Friday 17 February entitled “Un portail vers le monde de la Renaissance: l’Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC)”.

The paper will be the first time that the USTC is demonstrated to a francophone audience since it went on line at the end of last year. Dr Walsby’s paper will be followed by a round table discussion with Jean-François Gilmont, Mireille Huchon and Magali Vène.

The event is co-organised by the Société Française d’Étude du Seizième Siècle (SFDES), the Atelier XVIe siècle of the Sorbonne and the École des Chartes. The event starts at 5pm.

The launch event was organised by Professor Annie Charon.