The next session of Reading Allowed will take place on Wednesday, 6 July, with Assoc. Prof. Paul Tankard reading from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Lorraine Johnston reading from Jane Mander’s Story of a NZ River. Pop in from 5.30pm and rediscover the joy of being read to.

The library of the Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute (https://theconnection.ece.org/PacificIslsLegalInf/516/r0).

The call for papers is now active for this year’s research symposium.  Topics might include:

• Trade and production of print in each nation;
  Literacy among peoples indigenous and colonial;
  Print and control;
  Print and indigenous art;
  Books imported, donated, discarded;
  How books and print shape, define or disrupt our sense of place;
  Role of books and print in shaping, defining or sustaining diaspora communities;
  Books and print and evangelism in the Pacific;
  Books and print and food in the Pacific;
  Books and print and scientific exchange in the Pacific;
  Impacts of literacy, intentional or unintentional

Please submit abstracts of 250–300 words to the Centre for the Book (books@otago.ac.nz) by 1 September. Feel free to contact either of the organisers, Shef Rogers (shef.rogers@otago.ac.nz) or Donald Kerr (donald.kerr@otago.ac.nz), if you have any questions. We aim to send out notifications about acceptances and a draft programme by mid-September.

The next session of Reading Allowed will take place on Wednesday, 11 May, with Assoc. Prof. Paul Tankard reading from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, and Lorraine Johnston reading from Picnic at Hanging Rock  by Joan Lindsay. Pop in from 5.30pm and rediscover the joy of being read to.

Ground floor, Dunedin City Library.

Same readers, new books!

The next session of Reading Allowed will take place on Wednesday, 13 April, with Assoc. Prof. Paul Tankard reading from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, and Lorraine Johnston reading from The Matriarch  by Witi Ihimaera. Pop in from 5.30pm and rediscover the joy of being read to.

Ground floor, Dunedin City Library.

The next session of Reading Allowed is on Wednesday, 9th March, with Dr Paul Tankard reading from Gulliver’s Travels and Lorraine Johnston reading from To Kill a Mockingbird. Pop in from 5.30pm and rediscover the joy of being read to. Ground floor, Dunedin City Library.

To all of our loyal Centre for the Book fans, we are sorry to have to report that Covid is yet again complicating life for all of us.  We’ve agreed to postpone the World Book Lecture until Wednesday, 19 October, in hopes that all will be well enough for us to gather and enjoy the intellectual stimulation of hearing Professor Harry Ricketts on what books have meant in his life, followed by the social stimulation of a convivial dinner at the Staff Club.

So please stay tuned for updates later in the year, and keep on reading.

READING ALLOWED 

@ THE CUBE — City Library (ground floor)

 

Come along to our inaugural monthly Reading Allowed event next Wednesday, 9 Feb. at 5.30pm and listen to our two wonderful volunteer readers.

Every month, we will present two or three c. 30-minute extracts from well-known literary works.  This month it’s

A Study in Scarlet (A Sherlock Holmes story, by Conan Doyle)

The Waste Land (great modernist poem, by T.S. Eliot)

Tell friends and family about this event as we would love to have a nice audience (socially distanced of course) for it. It is free (no need to RSVP) and should be fun.

Lorraine Johnston will read from A Study in Scarlet – find out how Watson met Sherlock Holmes. Paul Tankard from the University’s English Department has a passion for reading aloud. He will read from T. S. Eliot’s ground-breaking modernist poem, The Waste Land— this year is its centenary. It is a poem full of voices and is great to hear aloud.

Those interested in NZ print history may be delighted to learn that the Bible Society of NZ has issued a facsimile of the 1827 Pukapuka Karaipiture Tuatahi, the fifth book to be published in Māori and the first to translate portions of the Christian scriptures.  The new issue has been published with a facing-page modern Māori translation of the same texts.

The book is available to download for free, or you may order print copies.  For full details, see https://biblesociety.org.nz/1827-booklet/

For those of you who were not able to join us last Thursday evening, you can now watch the keynote address here. Many thanks to Nicole Kearney for arranging this for us.

I have also posted a talk originally proposed for the symposium, but not specifcally related to natural history (though it does feature some marvellous animals in the watermarks). The talk is by Ian Christie-Miller, who has designed a very good system for photographing backlit watermarks and demonstrates in his talk the value of watermark information.

Thanks again to all who presented last Friday, esp. Rosi Crane for framing our day with clear connections to natural history publications in NZ, and to all who joined us online. I was relieved that the technology behaved for the most part, and am grateful for the support from the University lecture theatre technicians and eConferencing services. This was our largest symposium to date, thanks to online participation.