Includes full descriptions of over 100 items on show at the Grolier Club, January 26-March 10, 2006. Designed by Jerry Kelly, and printed in an edition of 525 copies.

An account of what papyrology is and what the papyrologist does. _

Managing Readers explores the fascinating interchange between text and margin, authorship and readership in early modern England. Printed marginalia did more than any other material feature of book production in the period between 1540 and 1700 to shape the experience of reading. William W. E. Slights considers overlooked evidence of the ways that early modern readers were instructed to process information, to contest opinions, and to make themselves into fully responsive consumers of texts.
The recent revolution in the protocols of reading brought on by computer technology has forced questions about the nature of book-based knowledge in our global culture. Managing Readers traces changes in the protocols of annotation and directed reading--from medieval religious manuscripts and Renaissance handbooks for explorers, rhetoricians, and politicians to the elegant clear-text editions of the Enlightenment and the hypertexts of our own time. Developing such concepts as textual authority, generic difference, and reader-response, Slights demonstrates that printed marginalia were used to confirm the authority of the text and to undermine it, to supplement "dark" passages, and to colonize strategic hermeneutic spaces. The book contains twenty-two illustrations of pages from rare-book archives that make immediately clear how distinctive the management of the reading experience was during the first century-and-a-half of printing in England.
William W. E. Slights is Professor of English, University of Saskatchewan. He is also author of "Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy,"

Influential scholars from Britain and North America discuss future directions in rapidly expanding field of manuscript study. The study of manuscripts is one of the most active areas of current research in medieval studies: manuscripts are the basic primary material evidence for literary scholars, historians and art-historians alike, and there has been an explosion of interest over the past twenty years. Manuscript study has developed enormously: codices are no longer treated as inert witnesses to a culture whose character has already been determined by the modern scholar, but are active participants in a process of exploration and discovery. The articles collected here discuss the future of this process and vital questions about manuscript study for tomorrow's explorers. They deal with codicology and book production, with textual criticism, with the material structure of the medieval book, with the relation of manuscripts to literary culture, to social history and to the medieval theatre, and with the importance to manuscript study of the emerging technology of computerised digitisation and hypertext display. The essays provide an end-of-millennium perspective on the most vigorous developments in a rapidly expanding field of study. Contributors: A.I. Doyle, C. David Benson, Martha W. Driver, J.P. Gumbert, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linne R. Mooney, Eckehard Simon, Alison Stones, John Thompson. DEREK PEARSALL is former Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, York, and Professor of English at Harvard University.

When does a book that is merely old become a rarity and an object of desire? David McKitterick examines, for the first time, the development of the idea of rare books, and why they matter. Studying examples from across Europe, he explores how this idea took shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how collectors, the book trade and libraries gradually came together to identify canons that often remain the same today. In a world that many people found to be over-supplied with books, the invention of rare books was a process of selection. As books are one of the principal means of memory, this process also created particular kinds of remembering. Taking a European perspective, McKitterick looks at these interests as they developed from being matters of largely private concern and curiosity, to the larger public and national responsibilities of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Is hideous prose and ghastly poetry more fabulous than great literature? Determined to find out, award-winning comedian Robin Ince has spent most of the 21st century rummaging through charity shops, jumble sales, and even the odd skip to compile the defining collection of the world's worst inadvertently hilarious books. This book will guide you through the hinterland of celebrity autobiography, unearthing underappreciated classics such as those by It Ain't Half Hot Mum's Don Estelle and the brother of a former PM (MAJOR MAJOR). It offers a detailed study of romance sub-genres, from the equine (DIAMOND STUD) to the gynaecological (SIGN OF THE SPECULUM). And it will prove invaluable to anyone who wants to know THE SECRETS OF PICKING UP SEXY GIRLS. Above all, the Book Club is a manual - almost a life guide - training you up for membership of the Grand Order of Curators of Books That Should Never Have Been. Join the club.

An illustrated history of football trade cards, an epic saga of 1,000 brands and myriad collections. The A-Z traces the earliest cards and stickers - British inventions, both - through a century of sports cards from tobacco cards to Panini stickers, via everything that came in between: footballers issued with chewing gum and sweet cigarettes, lucky bag mementoes, football teams cut from packets of tea, and many more. It chronicles the epoch of our forefathers and the very first football cards, dating back to the 1880s, followed by the era of their children and the earliest stickers - and so the rise of cigarette cards and paper soccer star adhesives. These days, along with our Panini stickers and trading cards, we appreciate these vintage treasures not only for their beauty but also for their value. Fond recollections of childhood passions past and present will warm hearts, while enchanting galleries of rarely seen cards will captivate football fans and collectors alike. Incorporating a guide to values, the A-Z is priceless.

Writing a new page in the surprisingly long history of literary deceit, Impostors examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. This book looks at authors who posed as people they were not, in order to claim a different ethnic, class, or other identity. These writers were, in other words, literary usurpers and appropriators who trafficked in what Christopher L. Miller terms the "intercultural hoax." In the United States, such hoaxes are familiar. Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree and JT LeRoy's Sarah are two infamous examples. Miller's contribution is to study hoaxes beyond our borders, employing a comparative framework and bringing French and African identity hoaxes into dialogue with some of their better-known American counterparts. In France, multiculturalism is generally eschewed in favor of universalism, and there should thus be no identities (in the American sense) to steal. However, as Miller demonstrates, this too is a ruse: French universalism can only go so far and do so much. There is plenty of otherness to appropriate. This French and Francophone tradition of imposture has never received the study it deserves. Taking a novel approach to this understudied tradition, Impostors examines hoaxes in both countries, finding similar practices of deception and questions of harm.

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany systematically destroyed an estimated 100 million books throughout occupied Europe, an act that was inextricably bound up with the murder of 6 million Jews. By burning and looting libraries and censoring ""un-German"" publications, the Nazis aimed to eradicate all traces of Jewish culture along with the Jewish people themselves.""The Holocaust and the Book"" examines this bleak chapter in the history of printing, reading, censorship, and libraries. The topics include the development of Nazi censorship policies, the celebrated library of the Vilna ghetto, the confiscation of books from the Sephardic communities in Rome and Salonika, the experience of reading in the ghettos and concentration camps, the rescue of Polish incunabula, the uses of fine printing by the Dutch underground, and the suppression of Jewish books and authors in the Soviet Union. Several authors discuss the continuing relevance of Nazi book burnings to the present day, with essays on German responses to Friedrich Nietzsche and the destruction of Bosnian libraries in the 1990s.The collection also includes eyewitness accounts by Holocaust survivors and a translation of Herman Kruk's report on the Vilna ghetto library. An annotated bibliography offers readers a concise guide to research in this growing field.

Little is known about William Clarke, the author of this 1819 survey of libraries in Britain, though hints in the opening pages suggest that he was acquainted with the activities of the Roxburghe Club. His object is 'to assist ... the collector in his pursuit of valuable editions of rare books'. A short survey of the major libraries of Europe is followed by descriptions of the collections which make up the British Museum's library, the great 'public' libraries, including those of Oxford and Cambridge, and the libraries of learned societies. Private libraries covered include those of Sir Joseph Banks, William Beckford, and the duke of Marlborough. The final portion of the work describes the content of some great library sales (a fuller list of sales having been given earlier in the book), from the seventeenth century to Clarke's own time. This remains a useful source for bibliographers and those interested in the provenance of books.

Originally published in 1948, this book contains the text of the Sandars Lectures in Bibliography for the previous year. Carter reflects upon the evolution and method of book collecting from the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1940s, and meditates on what it means to be a book collector, the changing definition of that term, and recent developments in collecting styles. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in bibliophilism or the history of book collecting.

Learn when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em with Card Night, a collection of 52 classic card games, including rules and strategies. Featuring step-by-step, illustrated instructions, and two indexes that organize each game by difficulty and number of players needed, Card Night includes directions for playing all the most popular card games, including Hearts and Bridge, Rummy and Go Fish. In addition to providing the rules of standard game play, Card Night also details the fascinating stories and peculiarities behind some of the world's most famous card decks, some of which were used as currency, tools for propaganda, and even as a means for sending coded messages. Offering one game for each week of the year, Card Night is the go-to companion for weekly game nights, long car rides, and rainy days spent at home. Wow your friends and family with your game playing prowess and keep them entertained with fascinating details from playing card history.

Music, like books, has attracted collectors for centuries; but whereas book-collecting has been well served by innumerable scholarly monographs and studies, the history and techniques of music-collecting have been largely ignored. In choosing British music collectors as the subject of his Sandars lectures, Mr King did much to redress this neglect; and here, in this 1963 volume, these lectures form the first book on the subject in any language. In the course of four lectures Mr King describes the interests and activities of nearly two hundred collectors. He gives details of the rare or interesting items owned by each, and in doing so says something of the character and purpose of collecting in different periods. His researches into the transmission and location of manuscripts and rare printed items carry us through an absorbing range of musical topics, and reveal a remarkable breadth of taste and interest among amateur collectors.