Shakespeare for Sale

I am very pleased to announce the publication of "Shakespeare for Sale" -- a special double issue of Philological Quarterly that features some of the best new work in the field of Shakespeare and book history. Of course, I edited this collection (which started as a seminar I led at the Shakespeare Association of America in 2011) so I don't exactly possess an unbiased opinion -- so you should seek it out for yourself! Fortunately, you can read my introduction along with the table of contents at one of the links just below -- and for more information on Philological Quarterly (which is edited here in the Department of English at the University of Iowa) go here. If your institution subscribes to Literature Online, the issue will also soon be available there, as well.

You can download my introduction either at my Academia.edu page or through this direct Dropbox link. You can also download the entire issue here.

Animae Anchora Spes Viva

This past summer I was fortunate to be chosen as the E. Ph. Goldschmidt Fellow at Rare Book School. The fellowship gave me the opportunity to take a course on 15th-Century Books in Print and Manuscript, led by the inimitable duo of Will Noel and Paul Needham. The course was not down at the home base of RBS in Charlottesville, but in residence in Philadelphia at the brand new (and beyond gorgeous) Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania, home of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS). And then there were the field trips to the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Scheide Library at Princeton. I won't go into all the details here (oh, the incunabula!) but needless to say, if you saw my Twitter feed over the summer, you know exactly how jealous you should be.

Enough humble-bragging, though, and back to the point of this post. E. Ph. Goldschmidt was an antiquarian bookseller renowned for his commitment to scholarship (not to mention, as this entertaining biography of Goldschmidt shows, for his commitment to late nights and cigarettes). It just so happens that one of the preliminary readings for my RBS course was Goldschmidt's monumental two-volume study of Gothic and Renaissance Bookbindings, exemplified and illustrated from the author's collection (1928). (The sub-title is no less magnificent for being understated). While reading through Goldschmidt's book on bindings, one in particular caught my eye -- and if you're reading this blog, I think you know exactly why.

Here's an illustration from the second volume of the book, a binding that features a particular printer's device: