Dear People of Print Conference Delegate
This is the brief for a further piece of research in which Kayley, Adam, and Rachel are engaged and in which we invite you to join us. In the coming months we will be seeking editors and contributors. There will be a meeting for interested parties at the end of the conference, from around 2.30-4.00pm on Saturday 14th. You are very welcome to come but please let us know beforehand so we can plan the discussion. If you have thoughts or feedback on this project but can’t stay for the meeting do speak with us over the course of the conference or get in touch via the email below. Alternatively, there is space at the end of this brief for you to write comments to hand to us before you leave. A further way to find out more or to express your interest is to contact us at booktradepersonnel@gmail.com, and do feel free to send on this brief to anyone else you think we should meet!
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The Directory of Book Trade Personnel (1470-1830)
A project of the Print Culture, Agency, Regional Identity network
General Editors: Dr Rachel Stenner (University of Sussex), Dr Kaley Kramer (Sheffield Hallam University), Dr Adam James Smith (York St John University)
Overview
The first movers and shakers of the media world were the women and men of the book trade. By turns technological innovators, cultural influencers, ideological brokers, and political activists, the range of their achievements during the hand press period is vast.[1] Many of these people are unsung heroes. Public and scholarly ignorance remains about the extent, and more particularly the nature, of their work. This is despite the rise to prominence of book history and, more recently, printing history.
The Directory of Book Trade Personnel (DBTP) aims to redress this situation. A long-term project, it will develop into a peer-reviewed, open access, online directory of individuals who worked within the book trades in the British Isles during the hand press period. Entries will comprise short commissioned essays (1,000-2,000 words), each covering one figure. The entry will describe the individual’s oeuvre, focusing on their cultural / literary / social / political work and influence alongside their trade practices. Each entry will also provide a concise list of further reading. A comparable example is offered by the Literature Online author biographies. We aim to tag entries with searchable categories and make them browsable.
The general editors perceive a gap in the existing resources that the DBTP will fill. On one hand sit websites such as the British Book Trade Index (BBTI) and the London Book Trades Database (LBTD); both of these draw extensively on archival material to provide biographical data, with the LBTD also emphasising the familial and professional relationships within the trades. They are open access, detailed resources but do not adopt a synthesising nor analytical approach. The data they provide is essential, but we seek to go a step beyond it. On the other hand are the standard scholarly monographs and articles. These works are rarely open access and they provide more detailed information than the DBTP will offer. Then there are the Literature Online biographies, which take a more traditionally literary approach to their selection of entries. Many book trade people can be described as ‘literary’, but do not yet attract the attention of literary (or other) scholars.
The scope of this project is potentially very broad and it therefore needs to commence selectively. We will establish trial sections before undertaking a more systematic approach to building the directory. The trial sections that we envisage are:
- Women in the print trade
- Global scripts
- Regional print trades
- Abolition publishing
We have selected these sections for very particular reasons. The narrative of printing history that exists in Anglophone and European scholarship is patriarchal, Eurocentric, London-centric, and often exclusionary of people of colour. We seek to revise that narrative with this work. Moreover, there is currently a groundswell of scholarly interest in the first three of these areas as evidenced by publications in progress under the auspices of the Centre for Printing History and Culture (women in the print trade; global scripts) and the General Editors of this project (regional print trades). We envisage that each section would be led by a Section Editor who is an established scholar. By providing opportunities for short form, peer-reviewed publication in emergent areas of scholarship, this project also aims to support early career researchers, particularly PhD students and postdocs.
Aims
The aims of this project are to
- Provide a peer-reviewed, open access first port of call for researchers and public readers.
- Bring to public and scholarly attention the many neglected or unknown historical figures within the book trades.
- Achieve more understanding of the range of activities undertaken by book trade personnel, and gain public and scholarly recognition of that work.
- Foreground understudied areas within the existing narratives of book and print history.
Funding
Potential funders include the bodies below; further suggestions for funding would be gratefully received.
- Willison Foundation Trust
- BA / Leverhulme Small Research Grant
- Bibliographical Society
- Printing Historical Society
- AHRC Research Networking Grant
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For Discussion at Planning Meeting
- Introduction of project and feedback from attendees
- Research objectives (do the ‘Aims’ above accurately represent these?)
- Editorial Board and Advisory Board membership
- Technical expertise
- Funding
- Timeline and events
- Outside of academia, what is the desired change as a result of this research (i.e. its potential ‘impact’)?
Key Aims for Planning Meeting
- Editors / potential editors identified for trial sections
- Indicative timeline discussed
- Members / potential members of Advisory Board identified
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Any comments you would like to feed in? Please leave your name and email address so that we can contact you later.
[1] ‘Ideological broker’ is a term coined by Mark Knights in ‘John Starkey and Ideological Networks in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, Media History 11.1-2 (2005), 127-45 (139).