vivdunstan

Been having a bit of a time travelling afternoon, rediscovering a whole load of bumf from the SHARP Antwerp book history conference I spoke at in 2014. I even found my husband's lanyard with wifi details on the back! He was accompanying me, free, as my wheelchair pusher/helper. Happy memories.

I gave a talk about Doctor Who and its fanzines, which was very well received, and entertained the audience immensely. Otherwise I slept a lot, on alternate days, and saw a bit of the conference, and some of Antwerp. Martin explored while I was sleeping. My over riding memory is of old buildings and cobbles. The latter are not fun in a not high tech manual wheelchair! But we had a marvellous time.

Just blogged my thoughts after finishing my watch on catchup of the SHARP 2023 book history conference.

I'm continuing to watch panels of interest to me from this summer's SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) book history conference. Which this year was totally online. I was too ill at the time to watch anything live, but have until the end of August to watch the Zoom recordings I want to see. So far I have watched 8 panels, each usually with 2 or 3 speakers. And a list of more to watch in the coming weeks.

Every single academic conference talk I am able to watch - now usually from home, in my pyjamas, typically in bed! - inspires my own research. For example today I was watching a panel about black voices and enslaved workers in the North American book trade. So many similar names to the black servants I have been uncovering in eighteenth-century Scotland. I need to get that research written up and submitted to an academic journal for peer review. Watching this panel today gave me a kick up the butt to do that! Another talk I enjoyed was an academic who researched popular readership and translations of Asian literature in the Victorian era for his PhD. Along the way he started building up his own collection of books from that field and era. He talked in the panel about how he researched those books' owners and readers. And again that reminded me that I have some slightly related research that I should write up and publish on sometime.

Two more SHARP book history conference panel recordings watched. The first discussing special collections and book history teaching. Including cook book collections. Also a quite gobsmacking talk where the class was given a budget to buy things to add to the special collections - e.g. from rare book dealers etc. - and the students chose candidates and voted on what would be bought. I couldn't see that happening in many universities over here for obvious reasons! The other panel I watched was about Dickens and his readers and manuscripts. The first was a really interesting account of his reception in Australia and New Zealand in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And then a talk about how Dickens prepared his manuscripts for compositors. Which should have had illustrations of the manuscripts, but they were having huge technical difficulties. Despite that the speaker communicated the key issues well. So good stuff. I will be watching more SHARP panels later this week. I can watch the recordings until the end of August.