"Book history," reports the Chronicle of Higher Education, has become "a particularly hot topic in the humanities and not just in the United States." The history of the book is not only about books per se: broadly speaking, it concerns the creation, dissemination, and reception of script and print, including newspapers, periodicals, and ephemera. Book historians study the social, cultural, and economic history of authorship; the history of the book trade, copyright, censorship, and underground publishing; the publishing histories of particular literary works, authors, editors, imprints, and literary agents; the spread of literacy and book distribution; canon formation and the politics of literary criticism; libraries, reading habits, and reader response.
The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing was created in 1991 to provide a global network for book historians, who until then had usually worked in isolation. SHARP now h as over 1000 members in over 20 countries, including professors of literature, historians, librarians, publishing professionals, sociologists, bibliophiles, classicists, booksellers, art historians, reading instructors, and independent scholars.
SHARP works in concert with a number of affiliated scholarly organizations around the world to encourage the study of book history. We were very proud that one of these societies, the American Printing History Association, chose SHARP as the winner of its Institutional Award for 2001. This award is given each year to an institution that has made "distinguished contributions to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history." Past recipients have included the Gutenberg Museum, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the St Bride Printing Library and the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Accepting the award for SHARP, the Society's co-founder and first president, Jonathan Rose, delivered an address in which he re-envisioned the field's future as an academic discipline. Since that time SHARP has continued to be an advocate, and a home, for historians of the book all over the world.
As part of this scholarly outreach, many SHARP members serve as liaisons to scholarly organizations. Their role is to facilitate communications between the organizations in a variety of ways. A list of current liaisons is available online.
Join SHARP today and play a part in this expanding community.
The first annual SHARP conference was held in New York City in the summer of 1993. At the first Annual General Meeting an Executive Committee and a Board of Directors were elected. Subsequent conferences eventually established a rhythm of meeting in alternate years in North America and elsewhere:
Find news of "Book Culture from Below" the 18th annual SHARP conference, to be held at the University of Helsinki, 17-21 August 2010.
Conferences devoted to special themes and regions are also held under the aegis of SHARP, such as the very successful SHARP Copenhagen: "Published Words, Public Pages" conference in September 2008, whose program illuminated issues in the history of Nordic and Baltic Sea print culture.
James Kelly of the Unversity of Massachusetts has compiled an illuminating checklist of papers delivered at SHARP conferences between 1993 and 2007. Recently, he has taken this project further by compiling an even more informative bibliography of published work that has derived, in whole or in part, from SHARP conference papers. If you are the author of such a work, please contact James Kelly.
Becoming a SHARP officer or member of the Board of Directors means joining a special comradeship, and opens up satisfying opportunities to help build the kinds of connections among diverse enthusiasts for which SHARP is so well known. The current President of SHARP is Leslie Howsam of the University of Windsor; her Vice-President is Ian Gadd of Bath Spa University. If you would like to get more involved with helping SHARP to encourage and support book history worldwide, we would love to hear from you. Please get in touch with us through the website at webmaster@sharpweb.org.
SHARP News, the society's quarterly newsletter, features stimulating essays, book reviews, calls for papers, conference announcements, a listing of new publications, notes and queries, and reports on book studies throughout the world. You can download a sample issue here (in PDF format). Members wishing to contribute to SHARP News should contact Sydney Shep, the editor-in-chief:
Dr. Sydney Shep
Wai-te-ata Press
Victoria University of Wellington
P.O. Box 600
Wellington
NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64-4-463-5784
Fax: +64-4-463-5446
email: SHARP Editor
For more information about contributing or contacting the editors, please see the SHARP News page.
Book History
In 1998 SHARP achieved an important milestone with the first appearance in members' mailboxes of Book History, an annual hardcover scholarly journal edited by Jonathan Rose and Ezra Greenspan. In December 1999, the Council of Editors of Learned Journals honored Book History as "the best new journal," with the CELJ awards committee praising its "impressive range" and "sustained engagement with the subject," and predicting "real staying power on the academic landscape." To browse the tables of contents of current and past issues, please visit the BH webpage, where you'll also find information about submitting articles and contacting the editors. Book History can be ordered directly through Johns Hopkins University Press.
If you are already a SHARP member, you can access Book History online by creating a password and login.
In 2004 SHARP first presented an award for extraordinary achievement in the history of the book. Such achievement might be that of an institution, a research team or project, and it might take the shape of a printed volume or volumes, or it might appear in digital form as an Internet site or web-based publication. That first prize went to Bibles imprimés du XVe au XVIIIe siècle conservés à Paris, a catalogue of the early modern printed Bibles that survive in the main Parisian libraries. The catalogue is edited by Martime Delaveau et Denise Hillard.
In 2006 the SHARP ADA was shared by two impressive projects. One is an institution, the Archive of Publishers’ Records at University of Reading (England) Library. To quote from the nomination, “Through its agency and that of its archivist Michael Bott, the University has rescued from oblivion several important publishers’ archives and continues to be active in seeking acquisitions in the field.” Mike Bott and his (very small and highly committed) staff at Reading not only take care of the papers and catalogue them magnificently, but also help researchers to make the best possible use of their rich intellectual contents. Materials from the Reading archive have been at the backbone of several works in the history of the book, and they will continue to support such works in the future. Members of the staff at Reading are themselves active researchers in book history, and knowledgeable about contemporary issues in the publishing industry.
The other, and equal, award for Distinguished Achievement went to the Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800-1900. The nomination cited the Waterloo Directory as "one of the great feats of humanities scholarship in modern times, an essential reference to which anyone who works on the history of the printed word in the nineteenth century turns time and time again." John North and a revolving team of fortunate graduate students have taught us that the volume of periodicals in the Victorian period is about 100 times as large as that of printed books for the same period, and have made their resources available by patient indexing. The Waterloo began in print form, back in 1976, and in addition to the 20 volumes, it is now published in searchable electronic form, just in time to support research in the new generation of electronic editions of the Victorian periodicals it has indexed.
To nominate a candidate for the Award for Distinguished Achievement, contact the ADA Committee.
SHARP annually awards a $1000 Book History Prize to the author of the best book on any aspect of the creation, dissemination, or uses of script or print published in the previous year. Owing to the generosity of the DeLong family in endowing the prize, from 2004 it has been known as the George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Book Prize. Submission deadline for the 2010 Prize is 31 March 2010.
The winners of the last seven prizes have been:
The editors of Book History annually award a graduate student essay prize consisting of $400 and publication in the journal to the author of the best article submitted on any aspect of book history. The deadline for submission for each editorial year is 31 August. Please contact either Ezra Greenspan or Jonathan Rose.
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Last updated 4 February 2010, LNM