The Centre for the Book is delighted to welcome one of NZ’s own luminaries of the print culture world,  Dr. Sydney Shep, to deliver the World Book Day Lecture on Thursday, 5 March 2020 in Archway 3.  Her topic will engage book history in its fullest sense—looking at an important NZ book in its historical context but also challenging the ways book historians have traditionally talked about such texts.  It promises to be an exciting evening.

“If Books Could Talk.”
Bibliographers are trained in the forensics of the material book and speak in a language that appears at once arcane and quaint. Terms such as duodecimo, signatures, chain lines, catchwords, morocco, gauffering, collation formulae are liberally sprinkled throughout their conversations. But what if the books themselves could talk? As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin asked in 1916, “What would they tell us? Or are they speaking already and we just don’t hear them?” Join me for an excursion into object autobiography as I listen to a copy of Williams’ Māori Dictionary (1844) that travelled the world and eavesdrop on examples of contemporary letterpress printing that cross linguistic, visual and material boundaries.

Dr Sydney J. Shep is Reader in Book History and The Printer, Wai-te-ata Press | Te Whare Tā O Wai-te-ata at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Her practice-based research involves the interdisciplinary study of transnational and cross-cultural book history and print culture, in the contexts of the history of empire, history of technology, and the history of reading. Topics of perennial interest include graffiti, ghost signs, generative art, and the digital handmade. Sydney is a Past President of SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), a 2018-19 British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton, and a government-appointed Kaitiaki | Guardian of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

You are also invited to join Dr. Shep and a loyal band of Centre for the Book supporters for the annual dinner at the Staff Club following the lecture.  Tickets are $50 and are available from Donald Kerr in Special Collections (cash or cheque).