Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing

The weight of words: typographic infrastructures and print communication in South Asia
2020-02-11 17:00 - 18:00 (Europe/London) | Edith Morley 150
Dr Vaibhav Singh
Typography & Graphic Communication

Publishing Class: online talk with Prof Katy Shaw, Philip Jones and Lisa Blower
2020-06-05 14:00 - 15:00
Join us for this talk on class in contemporary publishing with Professor Katy Shaw (Northumbria University), Philip Jones (editor of The Booksller) and author Lisa Blower.
Breaking the class ceiling in UK Publishing
The under-representation of British working-class writers in UK publishing has been identified as a major social and economic challenge by major publishers and the British government. In 2018 Arts Council England funded the first ever writing development programme aimed at redressing the balance for working-class writers. This talk evaluates the impact of this unique initiative on both creatives and the creative industries in the UK, as well as on wider industry awareness of the presence and impact of the class ceiling in UK publishing. It assesses for the first time the impact of a targeted class-based writing development programme on creatives and the creative industries in the UK, as well as on professional awareness of the challenge posed by the class ceiling in the wider UK creative industries today, and proposes new initiatives and recommendations arising from the research through implications for writers, readers and the future sustainability of British publishing in a post-Brexit context.
Access the Common People: Breaking the class ceiling in UK Publishing report (2020)
Professor Katy Shaw leads research into twenty-first century writings at Northumbria University. Her research interests include contemporary literature, especially working class literature, cultural representations of post-industrial regeneration and the languages of comedy. Katy is an expert in twenty-first century literature. She has produced two books on crime author David Peace, a monograph on representations of the Credit Crunch in contemporary culture, and a collection on the teaching of twenty-first century genre fiction. Her latest book Hauntology (2018) explores the persistent role of the past in the present of contemporary English Literature. She is a public intellectual, literary festival host, media presenter and Twitterer: @profkatyshaw
Philip Jones is editor of The Bookseller, and co-founder of FutureBook.net. He joined The Bookseller in 1996 under its then editor Louis Baum, and also worked for the magazine under two previous editors, Nick Clee and Neill Denny. He is a graduate of the University of Reading @philipdsjones
Lisa Blower is an award-winning short story writer and novelist. She won The Guardian’s National Short Story competition in 2009, was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2013, has been Highly Commended and long-listed for the Bridport Prize for three consecutive years, and was one of just 4 UK authors long-listed for The Sunday Times Short Story Award 2018. Her work has appeared in various presses including The Guardian, Comma Press, The New Welsh Review, The Luminary, Short Story Sunday, and on Radio 4. Her debut short story collection was ‘It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s’ (Myriad Editions, 2019) and her new book forthcoming is Pondweed (Myriad, 2020). @lisablowerwrite
Please join the conversation here through microsoft teams with video off and on mute. We will use the chat function for questions and debate.

Typing in tongues: British Academy Summer Showcase
2020-06-20 10:00 - 17:00
Congratulations to Vaibhav Singh who has been selected to participate in the British Academy Summer Showcase.
His (now virtual) exhibit at the British Academy’s Summer Showcase 2020 explores the intersection of technology and textual communication. It focuses on the interfaces and mechanical formulations that have given visual and material form to languages around the world. Have you ever wondered why the keyboard is arranged ‘qwerty…’? Or indeed why a keyboard is associated with text-input in the first place? What did mechanical devices for different writing systems around the world look like, how did they function? We invite you to join us in exploring these and other related questions. Take a look at an eclectic set of writing machines, learn about the encounters of Asian writing systems with alphabetic frameworks and technological infrastructure. Consider old and new variants of typing, text input, and related challenges – and much more – in this showcase that foregrounds the very tools that have transformed the written word over the last hundred and fifty years.
Tune in from 11:10 on Saturday 20 June to the British Academy YouTube channel

Monthly research coffee chat and catch-ups (informal, drop in)
2020-09-24 16:00 - 17:00
Last Thursday of the month 4-5pm, starting Thursday 24th September on microsoft teams
https://teams.microsoft.com/meetingOptions/?organizerId=09db04ce-8476-4deb-a404-56b29cec4336&tenantId=4ffa3bc4-ecfc-48c0-9080-f5e43ff90e5f&threadId=19_meeting_ODBjOWNmODgtNmY5MS00ODllLWFjOWMtM2UzOGIxYzNjNmY1@thread.v2&messageId=0&language=en-GB

Monthly research coffee chat and catch-up (informal drop in - all welcome!)
2020-10-29 16:00 - 17:00
Come join members of the Centre to talk about research over a virtual coffee. Last Thursdays of the month @ 4-5pm in term time.
Please join the conversation here using Microsoft Teams. Information on joining Teams meetings without an account can be found here.

Obituaries as 'Paper Monuments': Online Research Seminar by Dr Rebecca Bullard (English Literature)
2020-10-29 17:00 - 18:30
Paper Monuments: the Obituary as Memorial and Archive in Eighteenth-Century England
The obituary is one of the eighteenth century’s most significant, but least studied, contributions to print culture. In this talk, we’ll go on a guided tour of eighteenth-century obituaries, exploring the ways in which they were constructed, read, and used. I’ll show that obituary makers in this period are peculiarly self-conscious about the medium that their texts occupy – that is, about the fact that obituaries are memorials made out of paper. Rather than associating paper with ephemerality (as did some of the obituary’s early critics), I suggest that we should instead see obituaries as pioneering new ways of situating memorials in and through time. These texts prioritise and celebrate contingent and punctual acts of commemoration over the apparent durability of their close cousin, the memorial monument. This talk will be of interest to anyone whose research focuses on questions about mediation and memorialisation, as well as those with particular interests in eighteenth-century culture.
Dr Rebecca Bullard is Associate Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading.
Please join the seminar here using Microsoft Teams. Information on joining Teams meetings without an account can be found here.

Victorian Literary Businesses: Online Book Launch with Dr Marrisa Joseph (Henley Business School)
2020-11-12 16:00 - 17:30
Victorian Literary Businesses: The Management and Practices of the British Publishing Industry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
This book explores the business practices of the British publishing industry from 1843-1900, discussing the role of creative businesses in society and the close relationship between culture and business in a historical context. Marrisa Joseph develops a strong cultural, social and historical discussion around the developments in copyright law, gender and literary culture from a management perspective; analysing how individuals formed professional associations and contract law to instigate new processes. Drawing on institutional theory and analysing primary and archival sources, this book traces how the practices of literary businesses developed, reproduced and later legitimised. By offering a close analysis of some of publishing’s most influential businesses, it provides an insight into the decision-making processes that shaped an industry and brings to the fore the ‘institutional story’ surrounding literary business and their practices, many of which can still be seen today.
Prior to entering academia Dr Marrisa Joseph worked in the publishing industry in licensing, rights and sales. Her PhD is in Business & Management from Queen Mary, University of London, and her research focuses on the formation of business practices in the Victorian publishing industry. In particular her research on literary networks in gentlemen’s clubs received the Journal of Management History Award for Best International Paper at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting. Her first monograph Victorian Literary Businesses was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019, and currently she is a co-editor for a forthcoming volume The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing 1900 – 2000. Furthermore, Marrisa is the Principle Investigator for a project funded by the Barnett Foundation which explores professional women’s writing in domestic magazines 1850-1900; this project draws on business archives based in the UK and US. Marrisa teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in entrepreneurship and management in media and creative industries; she also undertakes dissertation supervision for MBA students.
Please join the seminar here using Microsoft Teams. Information on joining Teams meetings without an account can be found here.

Literary translation in children's and YA publishing: an online public talk with translator and diverse publishing activist Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
2020-12-10 17:00 - 18:30
Around the World in 18 Books:
An introduction to literary translation in children’s and YA publishing
A whistle-stop tour of the globe by way of translated books for children and young adults, introduced by Patricia Billings (Milet Publishing and Outside in World)
Literary translator and diverse publishing activist Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp takes us on a tour of 18 books from 18 countries, translated into English from 18 languages, giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse at a vibrant and growing sector: literary translation for children and teens.
In an illustrated talk taking in 18 examples of fiction, nonfiction and poetry for children and young adults, Ruth opens a door onto the global children’s publishing industry, looking at how publishing rights are sold from one country to another, how translations are commissioned and funded, how marketing and age-banding varies between territories, why there are so few translations from outside of Europe and so few translated books by non-white authors, and how that could change.
Besides translators and researchers, this whirlwind book tour is aimed at a general audience including booksellers, librarians, teachers and parents, indeed anyone keen to diversify their children’s bookshelves.
Warning: you may come away with a long wish list of books to buy!
Please join the seminar here using Microsoft Teams. Information on joining Teams meetings without an account can be found here.
This seminar is organised by the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation.

'From feminism to genealogy: Virginia Woolf’s impact in Italy', an online research seminar by Dr Elisa Bolchi (Languages and Cultures)
2021-01-20 17:00 - 18:30
Organised jointly with the Department of English Literature
From feminism to genealogy: Virginia Woolf’s impact in Italy
Woolf has been read in Italy since 1926, when she was at the core of the debate on ‘the new novel’, characterised by constitutive aspects of modernism such as an experimental form and a new psychological insight. Since then, and above all during the 1970s, her work has been widely read and translated and Virginia Woolf has acted above all as a catalyst for the debate on women’s role in society. But what role did Woolf’s work and thought play in the theoretical development of feminism in Italy? Which of Woolf’s texts were discussed the most in feminist groups? And how was her work received by these groups?
In this talk Elisa Bolchi will answer such questions drawing from archival research and from the interviews she carried on for her Marie Curie project Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers. What comes out from a first analysis is that, while Woolf’s essays Three Guineas and A Room of One’s Own became milestones in the Italian feminist discourse and a reference in their political practice, the same was not entirely true for her novels. The novel on which feminists’ discussions focused most was To the Lighthouse, which was criticized because of the fixed, traditional roles of the two female protagonists, who portrayed the conflict between ‘giving shape to a family and giving shape to oneself’. This led Italian feminists to claim that Virginia Woolf was ‘an excellent essayist and a not fully accomplished novelist’. However, a comparison between 1934 translation of the novel and its 1992 retranslation shows how such an interpretation was influenced by the first translation, which conformed to poetic (and ideological) standards of the Fascist period and presented Mrs Ramsay as a more stereotyped woman than she is in Woolf’s text. It was 1992 retranslation that allowed Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe to shine through their complex personalities, and that allowed the novel to gain the due relevance in women studies and feminist thought in Italy.
Dr Elisa Bolchi is a Marie Curie Research Fellow based in the Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Reading
Free to join, please contact s.l.heywood@reading.ac.uk for Zoom link and password.

'Children’s literature in translation: a window into the cultural changes of ‘68', online public lecture by Dr Sophie Heywood
2021-02-22 18:00 - 19:00
Children’s literature in translation: a window into the cultural changes of ‘68
Public event co-hosted by The Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) and the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (CBCP) celebrating International Mother Language Day at the University of Reading.
Books play an important role in our understanding of how society changes, both at the time of the change and in the long view of historical events. In this public lecture Dr Sophie Heywood will illustrate how the global upheaval caused by the protest movements of 1968 fuelled an explosion of radical creativity in children’s literature. By tracing the journeys of key books such as Where the Wild Things Are and The Little Red Schoolbook as they travelled across different countries, Dr Heywood will explore the crucial role that translations and cultural exchange played in the ‘children’s ’68’. How did concepts of what was ‘radical’ in children’s books change across time, place and context? And what were the long-term legacies of this watershed moment on children’s culture in Europe?
Sophie Heywood is Associate Professor in French at the University of Reading, and co-director of the CBCP. For more information on the Children’s ’68 project, click here.
This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest here to receive a personal invitation.

'Sniffin' Glue and Ripped & Torn: Two cases studies as to why fanzines matter', an online research seminar by Professor Matthew Worley (History)
2021-02-25 17:00 - 18:00
Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn: Two cases studies as to why fanzines matter

This paper will focus on Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn, two of the most influential fanzines to emerge through British punk in 1976-77. The objective is to use case studies to demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of fanzines as a cultural form, exploring the motivation that inspired their creation and their means of production. Attention will be given to the content of the fanzines, revealing how they provided a space for engagement, a mechanism for agency, and a medium to construct cultural meaning. From this, the benefit to the historian should be clear as semi-private/semi-public ideas in the process of becoming offer us insight into cultural histories formulating ‘from below’.

Matthew Worley is Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading.

Please join the seminar here using Microsoft Teams.

The Limited Editions Club oxymoron: the affordable livre d’artiste
2021-03-11 17:00 - 18:00
This paper will present the idiosyncratic publishing model of the Limited Editions Club of New York and will focus on the four books which were illustrated by the British artist Charles Mozley (1914–1991). Founded by George Macy in the depression year of 1929, the Limited Editions Club was a subscription based service committed to supply its members one beautiful book each month, in a limited print run of 1500 copies. The Club has published more than 600 titles over its 80 years of existence and has commissioned a profusion of prominent artists, illustrators and designers like Matisse, Picasso, W. A. Dwiggins, Giovanni Mardersteig and, later, Cartier-Bresson and Mapplethorpe.
Charles Mozley illustrated four books for the Limited Editions Club: Man and Superman by G.B. Shaw in 1962, Galsworthy’s The Man of Property in 1964, The Invisible Man by H.G Wells in 1967 and The Captain’s Daughter and Other Stories by Pushkin in 1971.
________
Cătălina Zlotea is a PhD student in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. Her research investigates the life and work of Charles Mozley, artist, illustrator, printmaker, and designer.
Please join the seminar here using Microsoft Teams.

The Transformative Female Publishers of Post-Franco Spain. Online research seminar by Dr Marta Simó Comas
2021-03-25 17:00 - 18:30
This presentation will provide an overview of the role played by women publishers in the post-Franco publishing industry and the way in which they engaged intellectually and politically with the profession. In particular, we will consider the cultural practices of two emblematic publishing houses founded and run by women (Rosa Regàs’ La Gaya Ciencia and Esther Tusquets’ Editorial Lumen), and how these contributed both to the emergence of a new progressive and critical attitude among the public, and to the genesis of a new cultural and social paradigm.
Dr Marta Simó Comas is lecturer in Spanish Culture in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Reading. Please join the seminar here using Microsoft Teams.

Online Panel: Experimental publishing and alternative networked cultures
2021-04-29 17:00 - 19:00
This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive a personal invitation: https://bit.ly/3sVPgVC

The emergence of experimental post-digital publishing over the past decade has opened up new modes and methods of design practice that have allowed for extended relationships between social and media environments. This panel discussion draws on historical as well as contemporary references to examine such approaches through a range of perspectives, spanning the fields of art, graphic design, digital media and software development. The projects and practices discussed in the presentations and subsequent Q&A will consider the shift away from fixed to more fluid forms of publication and acts of publishing that are contingent upon networked, interactive and hybrid (digital/analog) contexts. Presentations will examine the links between conceptual and performance art practices from the 1960s, which fed into critical debates in art and design discourse – vis-a-vis the role of the active audience/reader/user – emerging in the 1980s and ‘90s with the broader availability of desktop computing and networked communications. Alongside these developments, a thriving landscape of grassroots publishing and alternative networked social relations, with roots in 1960s counterculture, continues to disrupt and re-examine conventions of authorship, copyright, design, dissemination and reception. Looking at practices, processes and projects that embrace and reflect back on a variety of strategies including collaboration, participation and anonymity, as well as forms that can be permanent or transient, provisional and iterative, in nature, this event proposes the need for new, cross-disciplinary vocabularies to enter traditional discourses relating to publishing as practice.

Convened by Ruth Blacksell and Lozana Rossenova with contributions from Karen Di Franco, Aymeric Mansoux, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak.
Dr Ruth Blacksell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. She leads the Book Design Pathway for the Department’s MA in Communication Design. Her PhD (2013) at the University of Sheffield’s School of Architecture was supported by a concordat scholarship with the British Library and she recently established a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between the University of Reading and Tate Library. Much of her research to date has been concerned with typographic engagements and acts of publishing in post-1960s art and the emergence of a contemporary inter-disciplinary territory which, following this historical and theoretical lineage, utilises and exploits the vocabularies and contexts of both art and editorial design.
Dr Karen Di Franco is a curator and writer working within the contexts of archives and publishing, with a focus on practices that emerge between text and performance, the page and the body. Her PhD, (2015-20) titled Embodied Iteration: Materialising the Language of Writing and Performance in Women Artists’ Publishing, 1968–1979, was supported by the AHRC/University of Reading and based at the library and archive at Tate. Frequently concerned with an inter-generational dialogue with these forms, Di Franco has curated exhibitions that incorporate materials that problematise categorisations of artwork, documentation and ephemera.
Aymeric Mansoux is an artist and media researcher, with a background in economics, fine art, graphic design, and computer programming. He was a founding member of server based collective GOTO10. Recent collaborations include: The SKOR Codex, an archive about the impossibility of archiving, and LURK, a server infrastructure for discussions around net/computational art, culture, and politics. Mansoux received his PhD from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London for his investigation of the techno-legal forms of social organisation within free and open source based cultural practices. He currently runs the Experimental Publishing MA course (XPUB) at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam.
Marcell Mars is a researcher, programmer, and artist working in the fields of internet regulation, intellectual property and open source software. He is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA (Croatia). His research Ruling Class Studies, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011), examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. In 2012, Mars initiated Memory of the World to develop socio-technical infrastructure and invigorate the historical argument for universal access to knowledge. Mars is also a co-initiator of the Pirate Care project.
Tomislav Medak is a PhD researcher at Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures. His research interests are in technology, capitalist development and post-capitalist transition, with a particular focus on the planetary ecological crisis, techno-science and intellectual property. Medak is also a part of the theory and publishing team of Multimedia Institute/MAMA (Croatia), amateur librarian for Memory of the World, a co-initiator of the Pirate Care project.
Lozana Rossenova is a digital designer and researcher. She holds an MA from the Department for Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where she has been a Sessional Lecturer in hybrid and digital publication design since 2016. Rossenova has recently completed her PhD at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University) in collaboration with Rhizome, a leading international born-digital art organisation. Her research focuses on open-source and community-driven approaches to digital infrastructures, which organise, store and make knowledge, and different ways of knowing, accessible.

Credits: The image background is based on a capture from a 1988 Macintosh operating system booting up The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog, presented via software emulation in the Internet Archive.

Online panel: Translation outreach in schools and the move online
2021-05-05 18:00 - 19:30
This online panel event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive a personal invitation: https://bit.ly/3wzSYGK
The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing and Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism at the University of Reading, in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation, are delighted to invite you to a free online panel event on translation outreach in schools.
Translation workshops and activities with schools are a powerful way to nurture new linguists, promote understanding of multilingualism, raise confidence among multilingual students, and foster inclusive thinking. The panel brings together some of the most exciting people and organisations currently working with schools on translation, and whose activities encompass a wide range of perspectives and languages, including Arabic, French, German, Polish, Russian, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. Their discussion will reflect on how the move online during the Covid-19 pandemic has generated new ways of working, new opportunities for collaboration, and new resources accessible for teachers.
This event is aimed at teachers of languages across primary and secondary schools, Key Stages 2-5, covering both Modern Foreign Languages and work with learners who have English as an Additional Language. It will also appeal to librarians, educators and all who are interested in translation for children. Participants will learn about some of the major initiatives being led in schools to promote multilingualism and intercultural awareness, and gain ideas and new digital resources for their teaching practice.
Speakers:

Sarah Ardizzone is an award-winning translator from French. Co-founder of Translators in Schools, the Stephen Spender Trust’s flagship education programme, Sarah also consults for its Creative Translation in the Classroom programme. She is a long-term contributor to Pop Up Festivals, including the forthcoming Pop Up Festival of Multilingual Literature.
Gitanjali Patel is a translator, social researcher and co-founder of Shadow Heroes. This organisation explores translation as a social justice practice in schools workshops and training for translators.
Greet Pauwelijn is a linguist, translator and founder of Book Island, an independent publisher known for its beautifully-illustrated and thought-provoking picture books from around the world.
Charlotte Ryland is Director of the Stephen Spender Trust, a charity whose mission includes promoting literary translation and multilingualism. The Trust is currently co-curating the forthcoming Pop Up Festival of Multilingual Literature. She founded the Queen’s College Translation Exchange in 2018, with the aim of bringing multilingual creativity and culture to people of all ages, in particular to inspire young language-learners to continue with their studies through GCSE, A Level and beyond.

Chair:

Clémentine Beauvais is an award-winning writer for children and young adults in French, and a literary translator from English to French. She is Senior Lecturer in English in Education at the University of York.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on translation for children led by the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing in partnership with Outside in World. To be kept updated on the series, register your interest here.

Visualising the Database: Early Modern Women's Complaint Poetry Index
2021-10-28 17:00 - 18:00
The CBCP is pleased to host this talk by Michelle O’Callaghan and Jake Arthur introducing the new online database of Early Modern Women’s Complaint Poetry
This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/181636629047
Michelle O’Callaghan is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Reading. Her most recent book Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation (Cambridge, 2020) builds on her digital edition, Verse Miscellanies Online, co-edited with Alice Eardley, and is a study of the craft of making printed poetry anthologies published in the second half of the sixteenth century in England, showing how these anthologies helped to shape recreational cultures within the nation’s households, drawing men and women together from across the social classes.
Jake Arthur is a DPhil candidate and Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University. His thesis examines early modern women’s work in translation and paraphrase and seeks to reclaim the expressive and intellectual possibilities of ‘derivative’ works. The preliminary title of the thesis is ‘“The stuffe not ours”: the work of derivation in women’s writing, 1560–c.1664’. In collaboration with Sarah C. E. Ross, he is co-editor of the poetry section of the forthcoming Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. With Rosalind Smith, he has co-authored a chapter in Early Modern Women and Complaint: Gender, Form and Politics (2020) which considers the implications of digital resources for the traditional first-line index in relation to early modern women’s complaint poetry. He works as a researcher on the ARC funded project Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, and on the ARC and Marsden funded project, Woe is She: Early Modern Women and the Poetry of Complaint.

Expanding the design canon: fresh perspectives on women in type and publishing
2021-11-10 18:30 - 20:30
We are delighted to collaborate with the St Bride Foundation to celebrate recent contributions to the field of graphic design history, which seek to shake established narratives to expand the design canon. Our panel of speakers will share their thoughts on the imperative to reconsider women’s depiction in received design histories, and will highlight some past and present contributions by women to the fields of type, graphic design and publishing. The evening will also feature the launch of an exciting new website comprising a visualisation of the findings of the ‘Women in Type’ Leverhulme Trust funded project.
Invited Guest Speakers:
Martha Scotford
‘Research and Distribution: What Worked for Me’
Briar Levit
‘Reorienting Approaches to Disseminating Design Histories’
Rathna Ramanathan
‘Tara Books: Working with Marginalised Voices Across Cultures’
‘Women in Type’ project speakers:
Fiona Ross, Alice Savoie & Mathieu Triay
‘Women in Type: highlighting the contribution of women to type history
On-line event via Zoom. Book on url below

PiCoBoo: A Research Project and an Open-Access Database
2021-11-11 17:00 - 18:00
Dr Francesca Tancini, University of Newcastle
PiCoBoo: a research project and an open-access database
This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/181636629047
The PiCoBoo project aims to assess the significance of 19th-century European picturebooks, printed in colour for children, as a catalyst for major cultural and social changes.
It makes accessible a large corpus of picturebooks, so far dispersed across countries and institutions, only partially retrievable through local catalogues, not always correctly described and in a not-uniformed way. The database now provides almost 600 books, with hundreds of digitised images included and not retrievable elsewhere on the web.
PiCoBoo project has been hosted by the Children’s Literature Unit at Newcastle University, in partnership with Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books, and with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Tracing the Nigerian Civil War through Heinemann's African Writers Series archives: an undergraduate research project and its afterlife
2021-11-18 17:00 - 18:00
Dr Sue Walsh and Ms Temiloluwa Ogdugbesan
Tracing the Nigerian Civil War through Heinemann’s African Writers Series archives: an undergraduate research project and its afterlife
This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/182683369877
As is well known, Heinemann Educational Books’ African Writers Series was particularly significant for the development of postcolonial literature in Africa and when the series was first established in 1962, Nigerian authors, including its editorial adviser Chinua Achebe, were among its most significant contributors. But, when in 1967, civil war broke out as the south-eastern part of Nigeria (Biafra) attempted to secede from the rest of the country, Heinemann was left in a potentially difficult position; publishing a significant number of authors from the secessionist side of the conflict (including Achebe himself) whilst trying to maintain its offices in the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
This summer I supervised an undergraduate research project funded by the University of Reading, in which a second-year student, Temiloluwa Odugbesan, conducted research into where and how the civil war was discussed in the papers of the publishers (held in the Heinemann archives at the University of Reading’s Special Collections) during the civil war period (1967-70). The purpose of the project was two-fold: 1) to conduct some initial research that would support my longer term research into how Heinemann handled the implications of the civil war for its business in Nigeria; 2) to introduce undergraduate students and others not familiar with the AWS archives to them, through the production of a short series of blogs and an online exhibition to be hosted on the University of Reading’s Special Collections website.
This is the story of that research project, what Temiloluwa found and how she put together an engaging set of blogs and a fascinating online exhibition intended to introduce people to some of the greats of Nigerian literature, to the African Writers Series Archives, and to give some brief background to the civil war and its implications for the publishers at Heinemann and their authors.
Sue Walsh
I’m a lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. My original specialism is in children’s literature and theory and I am a member of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media, and I have published a monograph in this area (Kipling’s Children’s Literature: Language, Identity and Constructions of Childhood, was published in 2010 by Ashgate)
More recently however, having been born in New Bussa in north-western Nigeria in 1967, I have always been interested in Nigerian literature and particularly in the literature of the civil war period. I teach a third year module in Nigerian prose literature (from Achebe to Adichie) and have become more and more engrossed in archival work, looking into what Heinemann’s papers can tell us about this period and its impact on the authors and publishers.
Temiloluwa Odugbesan
I’m a current 3rd Year Spanish and Economics BA student and, during the summer of my second year, I undertook a unique research project ‘Tracing the Nigerian Civil war through Heinemann’s African Writers Series’.
My name is Temiloluwa and I am one of the Nigerian speakers for this event, which you may have been able to tell by my devastatingly wonderful name. I look forward to sharing my research project with you because not only is it relevant but also because the African Writers Series holds a special place in my heart as it celebrates Nigerian literature alongside many other great works. Growing up I have always appreciated literature and to explore it from an indigenous perspective this past summer has been amazing, you truly get to see how every writer has their story.
Furthermore, through understanding the context this adds to the ambience and feel of the writers – more to come in the talk!

David King: Authoring the Visual Narrative by Design
2021-11-25 17:00 - 18:00
Professor Rick Poynor
David King: Authoring the Visual Narrative by Design
This event is free and open to all. This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place on the University of Reading campus, Edith Morley Building Room G74 and online. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/182700621477
David King (1942-2016) occupies an unusual position in British graphic design and publishing. At the Sunday Times Magazine, where he worked for 10 years, he was both a designer and a visual journalist, developing, researching and sometimes photographing his own stories. In 1972, he co-authored his first book, about Trotsky, and he went on to build up a world-class private collection of graphics and photographs from the Russian revolutionary period (now owned by Tate), which he used in his own work. As an expert visual researcher with an ever-developing command of the subject, he designed and authored a range of catalogues and books about Russian and Soviet history, among them The Commissar Vanishes (1997), Ordinary Citizens (2003) and Red Star Over Russia (2009). King was a leading example of “the designer as author”, able to conceive and construct visual narratives that would never be attempted by text-led historians or designers who lacked his deep historical knowledge. This talk will trace the development of King’s visual practice as an author, consider the visual signature he derived from constructivism, and assess the combination of visual and editorial skills that enabled his publishing projects. What are the implications of King’s body of work for a more complex form of visual authorship?
Rick Poynor is Professor of Design and Visual Culture at the University of Reading. He was the founding editor of Eye, the international review of graphic design, and co-founder of the Design Observer website. His most recent books are David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian (Yale University Press, 2020) and National Theatre Posters: A Design History (Unit Editions, 2017). His other books include Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001), No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (2003) and Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice (2008). Occasional Papers will publish Graphic Cultures, his fourth volume of essays, in 2022.

Poetry & Money: A Speculation
2022-01-20 17:00 - 18:30
Professor Peter Robinson, Department of English Literature, University of Reading
This event is free and open to all. This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place on the University of Reading campus, Palmer Building Room G02 and online. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/poetry-money-a-speculation-tickets-228788541687
Poetry & Money: A Speculation (Liverpool University Press, 2020) is a study of relationships between poets, poetry, and money from Chaucer to contemporary times. It explores how trust is essential to the creation of value in human exchange, and how money can, depending on conditions, both enable and disable trustfully collaborative generations of value. Drawing upon a vast range of poetry for its exemplifications, the book includes studies of poetic hardship, religious verse and debt redeeming, the economic revolution, debates over metallic and paper currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as modernist struggles with the gold standard, depression, inflation, and the realised groundlessness of exchange value.
For his presentation of work from this book, Peter Robinson will concentrate on two sections inspired by materials held in Special Collections at the University of Reading, namely documents connected with the publication of Translations from the Night by Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo in the Heinemann African Writers series, and an anonymous Jacobite Ode on the South Sea Bubble.
Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953, and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He holds degrees from the universities of York and Cambridge. Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading and poetry editor for Two Rivers Press, he is the author of many books, especially of poetry and translation, for some of which he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and on the University of Reading campus, room G02, Palmer Building http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/maps/whiteknights-campus-map.pdf (Building number 26 on this map).

Experimental publishing and new archival initiatives
2022-01-27 17:00 - 19:00
Experimental publishing and new archival initiatives
This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/experimental-publishing-and-new-archival-initiatives-tickets-228856103767
This panel is the second in a series of events, which draw on historical as well as contemporary references to examine experimental publishing through a range of perspectives, spanning the fields of art, communication design, digital media and software development. This event looks specifically at the ways in which archival initiatives in experimental, grassroots publishing have extended relationships between social and media environments over the past decade. Looking at three specific practitioner-led case studies, the presentations and the subsequent Q&A will consider the breakdown of strict boundaries between activities of publishing and archiving, enabled through the development of new forms of networked, social interactions, and the hybridization of digital and analog contexts. In particular, these case studies will point to convergences between technical and social phenomena which have challenged the status-quo and offered new imaginaries through the availability of cheap and accessible technologies (both hardware and software) to design, produce, distribute and simultaneously archive publications; significant developments in the open source software movement; and the cross-reference to specific ideas from feminist and queer cultural theory, as well as cyberfeminism. This event will contribute to the overall aims of the Experimental Publishing series by highlighting again the importance of new, cross-disciplinary vocabularies to enter traditional discourses in order to adequately further scholarship around experimental and grassroots practices in the publishing field.
Convened by Ruth Blacksell and Lozana Rossenova with contributions from Simon Browne, Ami Clarke and Mindy Seu. The case study presentations include The Bootleg Library, the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing, and The Cyberfeminism Index.
Dr Ruth Blacksell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. She leads the Book Design Pathway for the Department’s MA in Communication Design. Her PhD (2013) at the University of Sheffield’s School of Architecture was supported by a concordat scholarship with the British Library and she recently established a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between the University of Reading and Tate Library. Much of her research to date has been concerned with typographic engagements and acts of publishing in post-1960s art and the emergence of a contemporary inter-disciplinary territory which, following this historical and theoretical lineage, utilises and exploits the vocabularies and contexts of both art and editorial design.
Simon Browne is an artist, researcher and self-proclaimed “contingent librarian”, convenient shorthand for an ever-expanding list of actions he performs in his practice. Simon is the initiator of the “bootleg library”, a digital/physical/social collection of texts and the readers collected around them. His work engages with the social dimension of publishing, free software and infrastructure that supports interpersonal knowledge-sharing networks. He lives and works in Rotterdam, where he is active as a member of Varia, a collective-space for everyday technology.
Ami Clarke is an artist working within the emergent behaviours that come off the complex protocols of platform capitalism in everyday assemblages, with a focus on the inter-dependencies between code and language in hyper-networked culture. She is interested in acknowledging, and thinking through, the complexities of the subject emerging in synthesis with their environment, from a critical intersectional position. She is also founder of Banner Repeater; a reading room with a public Archive of Artists’ Publishing and project space on a working train station platform at Hackney Downs station, London. She is also the initiator and artistic director of the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing, an online platform that seeks to connect publications and artists across collections.
Lozana Rossenova is a digital designer and researcher. She holds an MA from the Department for Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where she was a Sessional Lecturer in hybrid and digital publication between 2016–2021. In 2021, she completed a PhD at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University) in collaboration with Rhizome, a leading international born-digital art organisation. Her research focuses on open-source and community-driven approaches to digital infrastructures, which organise, store and make knowledge, and different ways of knowing, accessible.
Mindy Seu is a designer and researcher currently writing the manuscript for the Cyberfeminism Index, to be released by Inventory Press in Fall 2022. She holds an M.Des from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from University of California, Los Angeles. Seu is currently an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.
Credits: The image background uses a source photo from the Banner Repeater instagram account.

Ed Fella: Exit Level Design, 1985–2012
2022-01-31 - 2022-03-25
Exhibition: Ed Fella: Exit Level Design, 1985–2012 curated by Rick Poynor. Monday 31 January – Friday 25 March 2022, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, ToB2, Earley Gate.
The American graphic designer Edward Fella’s career divides into two complementary phases. For 30 years, Fella (born 1938) worked as a designer, commercial artist and illustrator in Detroit, Michigan. In his late 40s, hoping to teach, he gained a first degree in graphic design and studied for an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art, then a centre of theoretical thinking and experimental graphic practice. In the second phase of his career – the focus of this exhibition – Fella became, as he put it, an “exit level designer”, leaving clients and commissions behind to teach at California Institute of the Arts and pursue a freewheeling investigation of form unique in contemporary graphic design. After years of professional studio experience, Fella was a master of diverse graphic styles and hand-lettering. Work that might at first glance seem neglectful of design’s cardinal “rules” came from a deep well of knowledge. He created flyers for lectures by himself and other designers that are loaded with allusions. In his sketchbooks, he produced a daily stream of collages and drawings best understood as art about design. In his 50s, Fella became internationally famous for a self-motivated body of work that overflows with invention and surprise.
Credit: Flyer designed by Ed Fella

Read the World: Picture Books and Translation
2022-02-03 17:00 - 18:00
Read the World: Picture Books and Translation
This event is free and open to all. This research seminar will be online. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/x/read-the-world-picture-books-and-translation-tickets-251121821127
The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation, are delighted to announce the latest event in their seminar series on translation for children:
Read the World: Picture Books and Translation
A Reading Library Exhibition at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (Amherst, MA)
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book’s current library exhibition “Read the World: Picture Books and Translation” highlights the role of translators, showcases multilingual books, and introduces readers to recent English translations and their publishers.
Join Professor Regina Galasso (UMass Amherst), Caroline Seitz (Amherst College), Education Director Courtney Waring (The Carle) and Literacy Educator David Feinstein (The Carle) as they share themes and highlights from the exhibition, and discuss their process curating and creating interpretive materials for young readers.
Participants:
David Feinstein (The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art)
Regina Galasso (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Caroline Seitz (Amherst College)
Courtney Waring (The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art)
Credits: Sonja Wimmer, Illustration for The Day Saida Arrived written by Susana Gómez Redondo and translated by Lawrence Schimel (Blue Dot Kids Press). © 2020 Sonja Wimmer.

Researching the history of printing in Iran: particularities and challenges
2022-02-24 17:00 - 18:30
Dr Borna Izadpanah , Department of Typography, University of Reading
This event is free and open to all. This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place on the University of Reading campus, Typography Department, Room A6, and online. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/researching-the-history-of-printing-in-iran-particularities-and-challenges-tickets-242664866147
This seminar introduces some of the particularities and challenges that Borna’s recently completed PhD research faced in developing the chapter that deals with the introduction of Arabic-script printing to nineteenth-century Iran. One of the significant aspects of Arabic-script metal types produced in Iran is their extremely minimal use. This is also true of the number of surviving copies of the early Persian publications in Iran which were printed with those types. For example, the first Qurʾān printed with both typography (1827) and lithography (1834) are limited to two identified copies. Additionally, the condition of extant copies of books printed in Iran during this period are often extremely poor and, in many cases, incomplete.
This presentation demonstrates Borna’s experience of investigating the early Persian publications in Iran, which shows that many of these publications have yet to be identified. As will be shown, the discovery of previously unknown publications in libraries or private collections – which is not an infrequent occurrence – often overturns the received history of printing in Iran.
Borna Izadpanah is a typeface designer and researcher based in London. He holds a PhD in Typography & Graphic Communication from the University of Reading, where he also graduated with an MA in Typeface Design. His doctoral research explored the history of the early typographic representation of the Persian language. Borna has received numerous prestigious awards for his research and typeface design including the Grand Prize and the First Prize in Arabic Text Typeface in Granshan Type Design Competition, TDC Certificate of Typographic Excellence, and the Symposia Iranica Prize for the best paper in Art History.
This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and on the University of Reading campus, Room A6, Typography Department http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/maps/whiteknights-campus-map.pdf (Building number 21 on this map).

Five go to France.... and are translated back again
2022-03-10 17:00 - 18:00
An online panel event with the editor and translator to mark the publication of Hachette’s new Famous Five graphic novel series. Register here

About this event

Speakers:
Alexandra Antscherl (Editorial Director, Enid Blyton Entertainment and Fiction Brands at Hachette Children’s Group)
Emma D. Page (Translator, PhD student at the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, University of Reading)
Chair:
Sophie Heywood (Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, University of Reading)
The panel will explore the new Famous Five series retold as graphic novels for the first time ever. The series translates back into English the French adaptation of Blyton’s novels by Béja and Nataël, a talented father-and-son team of graphic novel experts. Together the speakers will discuss the French and English books, the translation process, and publishing Blyton in the 21st century. This will be followed by a Q&A.

Conference - Inside and Outside Modernism: An Anatomy of 1922 and its Cultures
2022-03-28 | University of Reading, London Road Campus
Monday 28th March 2022
“James Joyce is quite wrong headed. Anyhow, with his wilfulness, he has made novel reading into a fair imitation of penal servitude…” (ARNOLD BENNETT on ULYSSES)
Keynote Speakers: Professor Patrick Collier (Ball State University), Dr Beci Carver (University of Exeter)
This one-day conference intends to examine 1922 looking at the cultures and writers associated with this significant year, in all their forms and geographical spread. It will consider the year holistically, considering cultural and personal interactions and how they relate to the intellectual work of modernism. The conference is designed to bring the year into clearer focus with interdisciplinary contributions from politics, history, science, economics, music, literature, book history and visual culture and areas that have fallen outside the purview of traditional modernism. Some questions the conference would like to approach include: how has modernism impacted on the study of artistic cultures? How far did recent history shape social attitudes? How did the political and economic uncertainties in 1922 permeate different cultures? Was 1922 important for anything more than modernism itself?
Panels:

Ephemeral Modernism
Poetry and Performance
High Modernism
Publishing and Trade

Other highlights include:

University of Reading Special Collection and Archive exhibition of materials
The Handheld Press will showcase a selection of texts for attendees to browse and purchase on the day

The conference will take place in-person at the University of Reading, London Road Campus, with some blended panels. Please note that the schedule is subject to change according to University COVID-19 guidance and advice. We will inform all speakers and attendees of any changes in advance of the conference as soon as possible.
Registration is free but places are limited and will be available on a first come, first served basis. Lunch and refreshments will be available to purchase on-site. Register here.
If you have any questions, please contact the organisers, Benjamin Bruce (b.bruce@pgr.reading.ac.uk) and Domonique Davies (domonique.davies@pgr.reading.ac.uk)
Supported by the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing and the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at University of Reading.

Adaptation Student Showcase and Masterclass
2022-04-29 13:00 - 16:30 | Bob Kayley Theatre Space, Minghella Building, Whiteknights Campus
Featuring: A showcase of creative adaptations across stage and screen including live performances, audio experiences, film excerpts, and production files created by student artists from Film, Theatre and Television, curated by Dr Sarah Bartley (University of Reading); Head of Fundraising, Edd Pickering (University of Reading) presents the latest Cine Valley developments; topped off with an Adaptation masterclass with award-winning author Robin Mukherjee (Bath Spa University).
Robin Mukherjee has written extensively for television, radio, theatre and film. He has also written a book on screenwriting and a novel. His first feature film, ‘Dance of the Wind’, won the Audience Prize at the London Film Festival. His most recent feature, ‘Lore’, has won numerous awards world-wide and was Australia’s official entry to the Oscars. His three part television series, ‘Combat Kids’ was nominated for a BAFTA.

Writing Classy Places: Creative writing workshop at Reading Central Library with Lisa Blower
2022-05-19 17:30 - 18:45 | Reading Central Library, Abbey Square, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 3BQ
Part of ‘Class in Publishing and Print’
Writing Classy Places
Join prize winning author Lisa Blower for a creative writing workshop on how to draw class into place and create places because of class. Lisa will discuss her own fiction and offer personal tips on how to generate believable settings and the lives within them.

This is a free event, but places are limited. Please register here to book your place.

Bio:
Lisa Blower is a prize-winning short story writer and novelist. She won the Arnold Bennett Prize in 2020 for It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s – a collection of stories that draws from her Potteries childhood and the chattering of matriarchs she grew up with. She is the author of 2 novels – Sitting Ducks (2016) which was shortlisted for The Rubery, the Guardian’s Not the Booker and the People’s Book Prize, and Pondweed (2020), a road trip in the slow lane from Stoke to Snowdon via pints, pitches, and pit stops. She won The Guardian’s National Short Story Competition in 2009, has been shortlisted for the BBC Short Story award, The Sunday Times Short Story Prize, and The Bridport Prize. She holds a PhD in Creative & Critical Writing and is Programme Leader & Senior Lecturer in Creative & Professional Writing at Wolverhampton University.

Class in Publishing and Print: ceilings, inequalities, diversities
2022-05-20 10:00 - 16:30 | University of Reading, London Road Campus
CBCP Annual Conference
This conference at the University of Reading brings together academics, writers, publishers and agents to explore the relationships between publishing genres, printing, national and regional diversity, readers, business decisions and social class.
Registration is free but places are limited and will be available on a first come, first served basis. Click here to book your place.
Keynote Speakers:

Professor Katy Shaw, Northumbria University
Lisa Blower, author
Natasha Carthew, writer and founder of Working Class Writers Festival
Emma Shercliff, literary agent
Professor Dave O’Brien, University of Sheffield

Social class has long been a barrier for writers from working-class backgrounds to getting into print. From D. H. Lawrence to James Kelman, Buchi Emecheta to Pat Barker, working-class writers have been told to edit and revise dialect, style and characters to get their work published in the literary mainstream.
Thanks to austerity policies and the erosion of the welfare state, barriers to entry in the creative industries are higher than ever (see Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries by Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2018). Prompted by today’s inequalities and the systemic barriers to entry in the cultural and creative industries, interest in contemporary working-class writing is at a high and publishers are trying to address the “class ceilings” and regional biases in their own workforces.
The conference will take place in-person with one online panel. Please note that the schedule is subject to change according to University COVID-19 guidance and advice. We will inform all speakers and attendees of any changes in advance of the conference as soon as possible.
For the full programme and further details see here: Class in Publishing and Print Conference Document_NW BEST (1)
