The Bibliographical Society Of America

"A bibliography of poetry composed in what is now the United States of America and printed in the form of books or pamphlets before 1821"--Provided by publisher.

The First White House Library is the first book to consider the history of books and reading in the Executive Mansion.

The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.

The state of bibliography today (1979) -- Physical bibliography in the twentieth century (1979) -- The evolving role of bibliography (1984) -- Issues in bibliographical studies since 1942 (1992) -- Years on : bibliography then and now (2003) -- Thoughts on the centenary of The Bibliographical Society of America (2004) -- The historiography of American literary publishing (1965) -- The Bibliographical Society's News sheet, 1894-1920 (1967) -- The descriptive bibliography of American authors (1968) -- Copyright records and the bibliographer (1969) -- The periodical literature of English and American bibliography (1968) -- Indianapolis in the world of books (1973) -- Bibliography and science (1974) -- The descriptive bibliography of eighteenth-century books (1975) -- The centennial meeting and convocation of the Grolier Club (1984) -- Exhibitions at the Grolier Club (1984) -- The varieties of scholarly editing (1985) -- The fiftieth anniversary of The Bibliographical Society of the University Of Virginia (1997) -- A history of Studies in bibliography : the first fifty years (1997) -- A brief history of the English short-title catalogue in North America (1998) -- Some thoughts on catalogues (2008) -- The textual criticism of visual and aural works (2008) -- Bibliographical history as a field of study (1988).

This volume examines private libraries and book ownership in seventeenth-century England, with particular focus on how libraries developed over this period and the social impact that they had.

The introduction of printing in Italy coincided with the flowering of the Renaissance in Europe. Enterprising printers established themselves in many towns, and a complex interrelated network of authors, suppliers and booksellers developed to serve the expanding market both at home and throughout Europe. The Italian Book 1465-1800 addresses a host of issues and problems, which three centuries of the history of the book in Italy, present for modern researchers, in essays written by scholars in the field of historic bibliography. The volume is published in honour of Dennis E. Rhodes, retired Deputy Keeper in the British Library, and a prolific contributor to scholarly study of printing in Italy.

Book-jackets (or "dust-jackets," as they are often called), along with other detachable book coverings such as slip-cases, have been regularly used by publishers in the English-speaking world and some countries of the European continent since the early part of the nineteenth century. Historians of publishing practices, however, have not accorded them the scrutiny that one might have expected such a ubiquitous and noticeable phenomenon to receive. This illustrated book is intended as a compact introduction to the historical study of these objects, which -- though removable from the books they cover -- are essential parts of those books as published. The present work offers a concise history both of publishers' detachable book coverings (primarily British and American) and of the attention they have received from scholars, dealers, collectors, and librarians. It also surveys their use by publishers (as protective devices and advertising media) and their usefulness to scholars of literature, art, and book history (as sources for biography, bibliography, cultural analysis, and the development of graphic design). In effect, the book constitutes a plea for the preservation and cataloguing of this significant class of material, so that it will be available for future examination. Following the text is a list of some of the surviving pre-1901 examples of British and American publishers' printed book-jackets and other detachable coverings. This list, with 1,888 entries, is the outgrowth of a process the author began in 1969: he has kept a record of every pre-1901 jacket that he came across or learned about. Because surviving jackets from the nineteenth century are scarce (most having been thrown away by the original booksellers or purchasers of the books), and because the large majority of those that do survive are known in only a single copy, it is important to have a listing that indicates their whereabouts, or at least the basis for knowing that they exist or once existed. The list thus provides a guide to the body of evidence on which generalizations about the history of nineteenth-century jackets must be based, until more examples are reported. The book also contains two image sections: the first containing eight black-and-white plates, and the second containing sixteen color plates. G. Thomas Tanselle, former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and adjunct professor of English at Columbia University, is president of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and co-editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the writings of Herman Melville. He has previously served as president of the Bibliographical Society of America, the Grolier Club, and the Society for Textual Scholarship. His books include Royall Tyler (1967), Guide to the Study of United States Imprints (1971), A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989), Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (1990), The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers (1993), Literature and Artifacts (1998), Textual Criticism since Greg (2005), and Bibliographical Analysis (2009). His collection of American imprints is in the Beinecke Library at Yale, where his assemblage of nineteenth-century book-jackets will soon be placed as well.