Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing

Historic Presses Workshop, 16 December 2024
2024-12-16 17:30 - 19:30 (Europe/London) | Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), 2 Earley Gate, RG6 6BZ, United Kingdom
We invite you to join us to celebrate the launch of the Historic Presses Workshop at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. The launch will feature demonstrations of letterpress printing and lithographic printing from stone.
To join us in person, come along to the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), 2 Earley Gate, Reading RG6 6BZ from 5.30pm on 16 December 2024.
This new printing workshop has been set up so that students and researchers can use and study an unusual and distinctive collection of historic printing presses. It comprises three research-led reconstructions: a one-pull press; a common press and a lithographic pole press each made by Alan May. These are complemented by examples of the major hand presses made and used initially in the nineteenth century, by a Harry Rochat etching press, and by a more conventional press for printing from lithographic stones. The workshop includes a collection of C19 wooden type and metal type for handsetting. A unique collection of world script metal type includes Chinese and Japanese, Cambodian, Tibetan, Bengali, Georgian and Syriac as well as Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
The Presses: Research-led reconstructions made by Alan May:

Reconstructed One-Pull Press
This press was reconstructed following Alan May’s research into how Gutenberg is likely to have printed the 42-line Bible, that is, one page at a time. Alan also considered a drawing of a press made by Albrecht Dürer in the design of the press. See Alan May’s account of how he made the press, and links to his research: https://makerpress.co.uk/the-gutenberg-press/ The press featured in the 2008 BBC film, ‘The Machine that Made Us’, fronted by Stephen Fry.
Reconstructed Common Press
The term ‘Common Press’ refers to a relief printing press made substantially in wood but with a heavy metal screw used in its impression mechanism. It appeared near the end of the fifteenth century and continued in use with only minor changes until the introduction of the iron press at the end of the eighteenth century. Alan May has made several reconstructions of this press, both full-size and small scale as he explains: https://makerpress.co.uk/the-common-press/ This press featured in the BBC series ‘Catherine the Great’ in 2019.
Reconstructed Lithographic Pole Press
This is a reconstruction the Senefelder Pole Press illustrated in Vollstandiges Lebrbuch der Steindruckerey (Munich and Vienna 1818, 1821). See Alan May’s account of the making of the press and related research: https://makerpress.co.uk/the-senefelder-pole-press/ To fit within the new workshop, and with guidance from Alan May and Michael Twyman we have reduced the height of the pole. This has not affected the working of the press.
Stanhope Press, unnamed
Acquired from Norfolk Museums, 2013.
John Brooks small Stanhope Press
Originally used by Parnells of Reading, a letterpress printing firm.
Wood & Co Albion Press, 1863, no. 7457
Acquired via Colin Banks bequest
Somerville & Crombie Columbian Press, c 1840
Acquired locally, mid-1960s
Hopkinson & Cope Albion Press, 1853
Acquired from Garratt & Atkinson, process engravers, Ealing, London when they closed down, mid-1960s.
Wood & Sharwoods Atlas Press, c. 1940s
Acquired from Bradley & Sons Ltd, Printers, Reading.
Lion Press, 1866
Acquired from the Type Archive, 2023.
‘Golding Jobber, no. 6’ Treadle Press, 1888
Acquired 2005 from Roy Mac’Neil, local printer, Reading.
Further information about the The Historic Presses Workshop:
What is distinctive and exciting about the workshop is that students and researchers can work with and experience the three major printing processes as well see historic examples of each printing process in the Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collections, including everyday life examples in the Centre for Ephemera Studies.
The workshop is set up so that some of the presses can be used by students undertaking modules that have been designed to encourage their use. Some of the presses are for demonstration purposes only, led by master printer Geoff Wyeth, and some presses are not yet usable.
We welcome visitors by appointment, and plan to have themed workshop events and demonstrations. Our very first demonstration by Geoff Wyeth, of the lithographic pole press delighted delegates at the SHARP 2024 conference many of whom had no idea how lithographic printing from stone was done.
We are grateful to the University of Reading for allocating and space and for refurbishment; to the School of Arts and Communication Design for supporting moving of presses and their maintenance and restoration to working order by AMR Press. Special thanks to Geoff Wyeth for workshop design and to Jude Brindley for her advice and guidance on health and safety.

Translations’ copyright/translators’ copyright: a history of power imbalance in the Italian book trade
2025-02-13 17:00 - 18:00 | Room 124, Edith Morley building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EL
Speaker: Anna Lanfranchi – Teaching Fellow in Translation & Transcultural Studies & Italian at the University of Warwick

This research seminar is a hybrid event and is free & open to all.

To join us in person come along to Room 124, Edith Morley building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus)
To join via MS Teams, please register here

Seminar topic:
In the second half of the 19th century, international legal frameworks gave to the authors of literary works a new level control over the translation and publication of texts across national borders. While recognising the status of translations as original works in their own merit, authors and translators faced different challenges in the rapidly changing transnational landscape. Drawing on research on the post-Unification Italian publishing industry, the paper discusses the different treatment of translations’ and translators’ copyright in the first half of the 20th century, and explores the consequences of such power imbalance for the structural and professional development of the Italian book trade.
About our speaker:
Anna Lanfranchi is a Teaching Fellow in Translation and Transcultural Studies and Italian at the University of Warwick (UK). Her research focuses on transnational book history from the 19th century to the present day. She has published on Italian translation and publishing history, wartime book programmes, and intellectuals in the book trade. Her first monograph, Translations and Copyright in the Italian Book Trade: Publishers, Agents, and the State (1900-1947) (Palgrave 2024) explores the legal frameworks and the professional networks informing the negotiation of translation rights to British and US works in Italy in the first half of the 20th century.

Type, technology and translation: A case study of Chinese metal type
2025-02-26 17:15 - 18:00 | Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ
Speaker: Xunchang Cheng – CBCP Visiting Research Fellow
This research seminar is a hybrid event and is free & open to all.

To join us in person come along to Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus)
To join via MS Teams, please register here

Seminar topic:
Xunchang’s talk investigates two sets of Chinese metal type recently acquired by the University of Reading collections, sourced from the St Bride Library and The Type Archive in London. These collections provide rare material evidence of missionary-led Chinese metal type production and offer insights into the adaptation of Western type-making techniques for Chinese script. Through material analysis, print testing, and historical comparisons, this presentation will explore the origin, production techniques, typeform characteristics and storage methods of these two founts.
The project aims to establish a methodology for testing and analysing historical Chinese founts, facilitating their application in broader typographic and historical research. In addition, the study explores the potential for reusing these types in today’s typesetting applications. By combining material study with contemporary typographic experimentation, this project contributes to a deeper understanding of the evolution of Chinese type-making and its cross-cultural significance in the 19th century.
About our speaker:
Xunchang Cheng is a multilingual typeface designer, researcher, documentary director and exhibitions curator. His current research primarily focuses on exploring the evolution of Chinese typeforms up to the 20th century from the perspective of typeface designers.

Book launch: Sophie Heywood's "Children’s Publishing in Cold War France: Hachette in the Age of Surveillance and Control"
2025-03-24 17:00 - 18:00 | Room 125, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading
Join us in person or online on Monday, 24 March 2025 for the launch event for Sophie Heywood’s new monograph:
Children’s Publishing in Cold War France: Hachette in the Age of Surveillance and Control (Bloomsbury, Perspectives on Children’s Literature series, 2025)
Author: Sophie Heywood (CBCP/ University of Reading)
Discussant: Lucy Pearson (Newcastle University)
Chair: Nicola Wilson (CBCP/ University of Reading)
This is a hybrid event & is free & open to all

To join us in person come along to Room 125, Edith Morley building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus)
To join us via MS Teams, please register here

Exploring the history of Cold War censorship legislation and its impact on the French publishing industry for children, this open access book focuses on the publisher Hachette to detail how it dominated the country’s new context of surveillance and control.
Using extensive new multilingual archive material including legal and business records and US State Department files, Sophie Heywood traces both the history of the French Communist Party’s (PCF) and anti-comics activists’ efforts to prevent American ‘propaganda’ reaching the hands of children, and Hachette’s strategic and editorial responses. Children’s Publishing in Cold War France covers such events as the campaign waged against the global multi-media phenomenon Tarzan; the impact of Cold War tensions on Hachette’s publishing of Disney books and comics in French; and studies the translation of series fiction from Nancy Drew to The Famous Five, where self-censorship could be a radical and creative process.
Children’s Publishing in Cold War France presents a timely historical study of how states and political campaigners seek to control children’s access to culture, and the legacies of such conflicts.
The book is open access and can be downloaded for free (from 20 February 2025) here.
Author: Sophie Heywood is Associate Professor in French and a founding co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading, UK. She specializes in the history of comparative children’s literature and publishing. Her first monograph was a literary and publishing history of iconic French children’s author, the Comtesse de Ségur (Manchester University Press, 2011), and between 2016 and 2018 she led an international research network on the impact of the ’68 years on cultures of childhood, The Children’s ’68, funded by the STUDIUM/Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship programme.
Discussant: Lucy Pearson is Senior Lecturer in Children’s Literature at Newcastle University, and leader of Newcastle’s Children’s Literature Unit. Her research focuses on children’s publishing and the development of children’s literature since the mid twentieth century. She is the author of The Making of Modern Children’s Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criticism in the 1960s and 1970s (Ashgate, 2013) and is currently working on a new history of the UK’s Carnegie Medal.

The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children's Literature, 1762–1860
2025-04-30 17:15 - 18:00 | Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, University of Reading, RG6 6BZ
Speaker: Dr Elizabeth Hoiem – Assistant Professor, Illinois School of Information Sciences

This research seminar is a hybrid event & is free & open to all

To join us in person come along to Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6BZ
To join via MS Teams, please register here

Seminar topic:
By the close of the eighteenth century, learning to read and write became closely associated with learning about the material world, and a vast array of games and books from the era taught children how to comprehend the physical world of “things.” Hoiem’s 2024 book analyses the class politics behind the playful literature, toys, and learning aids created to teach reading alongside science, technology, and economics. argues that with the rise of manufacturing, skills such as tinkering, observation, and experimentation became essential new literacies for an industrial economy. To maintain their social position, wealthier families taught their children “mechanical literacies,” or the ability to interpret the laws governing how things are manipulated, created, purchased, manufactured, and exchanged. To do this, families incorporated artisan practices into their nurseries and classrooms, teaching their children to play-act the work of making things. Playful learning thus offered children of leisure a way to acquire mechanical literacies by handling books, games, crafts, and learning aids as physical proxies for immersive experiences with work, while remaining protected from the hardships of child labour.
In this talk, Dr Hoiem compares educational materials created to teach reading, writing, and political economy to privileged children with books and lessons developed by author-educators active in British working-class movements for universal suffrage and political reform. Instead of teaching mechanical literacy through play, radical working-class authors reclaimed manual labor as a legitimate source of knowledge about the material world. They developed manipulable learning aids to teach not only writing but the equitable distribution of resources, preparing youth through mechanical literacy to analyse political systems and suggest new governing laws. Making and manipulating material texts—combining words and putting things together—signaled children’s potential to make knowledge and design machines, and to fully participate in political and economic systems. But manipulating toys with texts held different meanings for different communities, reflecting divergent beliefs about whose children are capable of rational thought and political participation.
About our speaker:
Elizabeth Massa Hoiem is assistant professor at the Illinois School of Information Sciences and a visiting fellow at the University of Leeds, Center for the History and Philosophy of Science. Her work draws on theoretical and historical perspectives from children literature and material culture studies, history of education, book history, history of science and technology, working-class history, and literacy studies. She received the Justin G Schiller Prize for her book, The Education of Things (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), and the 2019 Judith Plotz Emerging Scholar Award for her article on 1830s radical broadsides, songs, prayers, and journalism for working children. Her article on representations of slavery across 200 years of sugar production stories for children won the 2021 Illinois Humanities Research Institute Prize for Best Faculty Research. She is currently starting a new book project, The Earth’s Childhood: Geology, Deep Time, and the Origins of Life in Children’s Books, 1860 to 1960, and another project on production stories, or stories about how everyday things are made.

3rd CBCP Postgraduate Symposium, 29 May 2025
2025-05-29 09:00 - 17:30 | Global Studies Lounge & Room 227, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EL
The 3rd CBCP Postgraduate Symposium will be held at the University of Reading on Thursday May 29th, in the Global Studies Lounge & Room 227 in the Edith Morley Building. The Symposium will be an occasion for PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers to showcase their research while engaging with the wider community of researchers within the CBCP.
No cost to attend. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
Registration has now closed.
9.00 – 9:15 am Arrival and refreshments (provided) (Global Studies Lounge)
9:15 – 9: 20 am Welcome note and Introduction (Global Studies Lounge)
9:25 – 10:55 am
Panel I: Multilingual Readership (Chair: Cristina De Luca) (Global Studies Lounge)

Sarah Bramao Ramos (University of Hong Kong), “Reading across, reading together: Multilingual Readers of Manchu-Language Books in Qing China” (online)
Thalatha Gunasekara (University of Kelaniya), “An exploration of the translation theories, methods, procedures, and strategies employed by Sugathapala De Silva in his Sinhala translations of The Gadfly, Death is Part of the Process, and ‘Funny Boy’” (online)
Elena Hueso Garcia (University of Valencia), “Multimodal Critical Literacy in a Multilingual Classroom: Exploring Migration and Refugee Narratives through Visual and Textual Resources” (online)
Helena Moros-Gracia (Jaume I University), “Words, worlds, and identities: Young Adult literature in multilingual contexts” (online)

Panel II: Transforming formats and approaches in Children’s Literature (Chair: Emma Page) (Room 227)

Pamela Ellayah (Le Mans University), “Rediscovering Margaret Wise Brown’s Picture Books with Contemporary French Translations”(in person)
Isabel Lopes Coelho (Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo), “Translating formats: the development of a YA literary digital artefact from a traditional book project”(online)
Cheeno Sayuno (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), “Mediatization of Philippine Children’s Literary Production: Experiences in Storybook Development, Distribution, and Consumption in Pandemic Learning Environments” (online)
Ginny Xu (Tilburg University), “The Disappearing Chinese YA Literature” (online)

10:55 – 11:10 am Coffee/tea break (provided) (Global Studies Lounge)
11: 15 – 12: 45 pm
Panel I: Publishing and the mediation of national identity I (Chair: Emma Page) (Global Studies Lounge)

Clara Défachel (Univeristy of St. Andrews & University of Sterling), “Staging Arabics and Frenches on the page in French translations: the ‘Collection Khamsa’” (in person)
Sulthana Nasrin (Jawaharlal Nehru University), “Book Trade in Colonial South India: Tensions between the Missionary and Native Print Worlds” (online)
Yueran Wang (University of Leeds), “Translating and Publishing Modern Mainland Chinese Literature in English: A Case Study of Penguin Random House” (online)

Panel II: Cultural transformations in print (Chair: Abeera Zishan) (Room 227)

Hanan Alshawi (University of Reading), “The development of pilgrimage booklets 1900 to 2020” (in person)
Yangyang Liu (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), “Vertical or Horizontal: The Debate on Chinese Printing Directionality and the Unheard Voices” (online)
Simi Nath (University of Delhi), “On Readership After the Advent of Print in Assam” (online)
Jennifer Taylor (University of Reading), “Printing Eve: Gendered Performance and Book Design in Perrault’s Adam ou la création de l’homme (1697)” (in person)

12:45 pm – 1:55 pm Lunch (provided)
2:00 – 3:00 pm Guest Talk (Chair: Cristina De Luca) (Global Studies Lounge)
Mariangela Dicillo (Digital Sales Specialist for the Mondadori Group – Audiobooks) – (online)
3:05 – 3:20 pm Afternoon refreshments (provided) (Global Studies Lounge)
3:25 – 4:55 pm
Panel I: Women in Publishing: Workers, translators, gatekeepers (Chair: Pritha Mukherjee) (Global Studies Lounge)

Izzy Barrett-Lally (Royal Holloway, University of London), “A Comparison of Anglophone and Francophone Literary BookTube: Identifying Interpretative Codes and Communities” (online)
Maria Belén Riveiro (University of Buenos Aires), “An International Comparative Approach to Women Publishers” (online)
Patience Haggin (Independent Scholar), “Virtually No Rights at all for Herself”: Anna Maria Ortese and Her Translators”(online)
Josephine Murray (University of East Anglia), “Patricia Crampton: advocate for translators’ rights, ‘freedom fighter, risk taker and forger of the future’ (2017)” (online)

Panel II: Publishing and the mediation of national identity II (Chair: Cristina De Luca) (Room 227)

Fatih Aşan (Boğaziçi University), “From Constantinople with Love:How an Ottoman Printer Became a European Sensation” (online)
Andrea Romanzi (University of Milano & University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari), “Translating Heimskringla: Cultural Identity and Power in Early Modern Scandinavia” (in person)
Ekaterina Shatalova (Aarhus University), “Border Crossing in Russian and Ukrainian editions of Yuri Nikitinsky’s Vovka Who Saddled the Bomb” (online)
Deborah Lyons (University of Birmingham), “Reading Between the Leaves: Transcultural Print Histories of Zoë Wicomb’s ‘In the Botanic Gardens’” (online)

5:00 – 5:30 pm Closing remarks and farewell (Global Studies Lounge)
If you would like the Teams links to be able to listen to any of the talks remotely, please contact Cristina De Luca or Emma Page.

Typographic Landscape Research Network (TLRN) seminar, 2 June
2025-06-02 18:00 - 19:00 | Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ
You are cordially invited to join the upcoming Typographic Landscape Research Network (TLRN) seminar on Monday 2nd June, at 6pm UK time:

The technology-supported exploration of linguistic landscapes with Lingscape with Dr Christoph Purschke.

This research seminar is free & open to all. Join us in person in the University of Reading’s Department of Typography, Room T4. To join via MS Teams, please click here.

This presentation is for you if you are interested in learning and discussing how large volumes of image data (in this case thousands of photos of text in urban spaces) can be captured, stored, geo-referenced, analysed and tagged in an open source citizen science project.

Abstract:
For almost nine years now, the participatory research platform Lingscape has offered a way to explore linguistic landscapes with technical support. The various projects hosted on the platform have not only significantly expanded the analytic capabilities of the application, but have also led to the introduction of new features in response to community requests – to address different usage scenarios. In this talk, I will trace the evolution of the project and the challenges of developing it into a collaborative research platform. I will also discuss Lingscape as an example of a technical tool for language linguistic landscapes research in the context of current technological developments.

About our speaker:
Dr Christoph Purschke is Associate Professor in Computational Linguistics and Head of the Culture & Computation Lab at the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at the Université du Luxembourg.

CBCP workshop: Re-vision: On re-publishing & re-design, 1 July 2025
2025-07-01 10:00 - 16:15 | Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ
This workshop brings together creatives and practitioners involved in the art and business of republishing to explore the social, artistic, political and economic dynamics of bringing previously published texts back to life in different historical, linguistic, textual, and geographical contexts for new markets and audiences.
The workshop is free to attend. If you would like to come in person, please click here to select tickets.
Refreshments (incl. lunch) will be provided throughout the day. If you have any dietary or accessibility requirements, please email the Centre for Book Cultures & Publishing at cbcp@reading.ac.uk.
Workshop Programme
10.00-10.15am: Refreshments & Welcome
Republishing:
10.15-11.15am: Social justice and republishing Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (Jess Samuel and Amber Stevenson, University of Exeter & Jenny Harper, University of Reading).
Chair: Dr Nicola Wilson
11.15-11.30am: Refreshments
11.30am-1.00pm:

Designing co-editions on Marie Neurath with Quinto Quarto (Prof Sue Walker, University of Reading)
Ethics and republishing children’s books (Dr Darren Chetty, UCL)
Lurid publishing: Reprints from a pedagogical perspective (Dr D-M Withers, University of Exeter)
Chair: Dr Sophie Heywood

1.00-2.00pm: Lunch
Industry:
2.00-3.00pm:

The backlist from the literary agent’s perspective (Norah Perkins, Curtis Brown Heritage Division)
Small publishers & audiobooks (Kate Bland, Spiracle Audiobooks)
Chair: TBC

3.00-3.15pm: Break
Forms:
3.15-4.15pm:

Re-imagining Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery as a Graphic Novel (Sophie and Scarlett Rickard)
Re-translations: amplifying discourse [online] (Prof Gerry Leonidas, University of Reading)
Chair: Prof David Brauner

Book launch: Nicola Wilson's "Recommended! The influencers who changed how we read"
2025-07-15 16:00 - 17:00
Join us or online on Tuesday, 15 July 2025 (4pm-5pm BST) for the launch event for Nicola Wilson’s new monograph:
Recommended! The influencers who changed how we read
(Holland House Books, 2025)
Author: Nicola Wilson (CBCP / University of Reading)
Discussant: Claire Battershill (University of Toronto)
Chair: Sophie Heywood (CBCP / University of Reading)
This event is free & open to all.
To join us via MS Teams, please register here.
Before Reese Witherspoon and Zoella’s Book Clubs, there was Oprah Winfrey and Richard and Judy. And before them, there was Hugh Walpole and the Book Society. This is the story of Britain’s first celebrity book club and the judges who changed how we read.
For forty years between 1929-1969, the Book Society chose from the best of world literature to mail out one book a month – fiction, history, travel, or biography – to subscribers in over thirty countries. The judges established what a good ‘book club book’ looked like: well-written, entertaining, informative; worth investing your time and money in, not too highbrow nor obscure. Making book-buying easier, they started a revolution. And the legacy of their taste is still with us on bookshelves today.
Hugh Walpole, J. B. Priestley, Sylvia Lynd, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Edmund Blunden were the literary influencers of their day; household names whose personal lives, affairs, and politics informed their recommendations, mixing the personal and professional; social history with the domestic; love, disappointment, and war. They made global bestsellers with books that saw readers through Empire and the growth of fascism and antisemitism, the Great Depression, Spanish Civil War, and World War Two.
Recommended! explores how a group of writers shook up the interwar book world, changing forever how we buy and think about books.
“A deeply researched, stylishly written piece of narrative history, full of detail and telling vignettes. The organisation – around the five characters at the heart of the Book Society – works wonderfully, giving an emotional richness to the story.
An enormous pleasure to read, while also deepening immeasurably my understanding of the literary business of the interwar period out beyond the well-walked squares of Bloomsbury.”
Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the
Recommended! – The Book Society 1929-69

Author:
Dr Nicola Wilson is Associate Professor of Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading, co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, and a founding director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project. Her research is in the history of reading, book history, and working-class writing. Her first book was Home in British Working-Class Fiction (Routledge, 2015) – reviewed in the TLS as an important contribution to the study of working-class writing – and she is co-author of Scholarly Adventures in the Digital Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She has edited three academic books including, most recently, The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (2024), edits an Elements strand for Cambridge University Press on ‘Women, Publishing, and Book Cultures’. Over many years, Nicola has worked to get the writings of Lancashire mill-woman Ethel Carnie Holdsworth back into print.
Discussant:
Dr Claire Battershill is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Faculty of Information and the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the history and future of the book. Specifically, her work examines relationships between feminist experimental publishing, literary aesthetics, and practices of book making in 20th and 21st-century literature.
Professor Battershill is a Co-Director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), a critical digital archive of early 20th-century publishers’ records, the author of a collection of short stories, Circus (McClelland & Stewart, 2014) and the Co-Creator of ‘Make Believe,’ a collaborative research-creation project funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. Her most recent books are Women and Letterpress Printing: Gendered Impressions (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom (revised 2nd edition, Bloomsbury, 2022).
Book details:
Recommended! The influencers who changed how we read
Format: Hardback (300 pages)
ISBN: 978-1-7391047-5-7
Price: £14.99
Tel: 0845 862 1730
Email: sales@signaturebooksuk.com
Holland House Books: Recommended! | Holland House Books
Publication Date: 26th June 2025

CBCP Modernist Editing Symposium, 23 September 2025
2025-09-23 10:30 - 16:15 | Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ
This symposium brings together leading scholars and practitioners in modernist textual criticism and scholarly editing. Organised by Dr Buxi Duan and Lawrence Jones at the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (CBCP), with support from the Samuel Beckett Research Centre and the Bibliographical Society UK, the event explores how scholarly editions of modernist texts can better preserve and reflect their dynamic evolution – from manuscript and typescript to first editions, serial publications, and comprehensive scholarly editions.
With CBCP’s commitment to examining book and publishing cultures, as well as the political and material conditions of textual production, this symposium focuses on the key issue of how editorial theory and practice have shaped these cultures and the modernist texts we read today. Our speakers will discuss how they respond to publishing contexts, editorial interventions, and book cultures reflected in the many editions of the works they are editing – and how, as 21st-century readers and researchers, we might critically evaluate these often-competing editions of modernist texts, especially those that remain or become controversial.
This in-person symposium is free to attend. However, due to limited capacity, please click here to reserve your tickets. Because of the nature of the presentations, which involve discussions of unpublished materials and in-progress editorial work, we regret that online participation is not possible on this occasion.
To join us, please register here.
Refreshments (incl. lunch – vegetarian & vegan) will be provided. If you have any dietary or accessibility requirements, please email the Centre for Book Cultures & Publishing at cbcp@reading.ac.uk.
We are delighted to announce that, thanks to the generous conference subvention provided by the Bibliographical Society UK, four travel grants of up to £50 will be available to PGRs and ECRs who do not have institutional support to attend this in-person symposium. If you would like to be considered for this financial support, please send a short message to Dr Buxi Duan (b.duan@reading.ac.uk) by Monday, 1 September 2025 at 5pm, describing how you expect this symposium to benefit your research project. Decisions will be communicated on Monday 8 September 2025.
Please note that campus parking is limited, and availability cannot be guaranteed.
Image: Typescript with handwritten annotation for Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf from the Hogarth Press archive. Courtesy of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project
Programme
10.30-10.45am: Refreshments & Welcome
10.45-12.00pm: Modernist Authorship in Scholarly Editions (20mins each + 15mins Q&A)

Dr Chris Mourant (University of Birmingham), editor of A Passage to India, The Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E.M. Forster
Dr Gareth Mills, editor of Doom of Youth, OUP Wyndham Lewis
Dr Wim Van Mierlo (Loughborough University) – ‘Modernist Editing in Perspective’

12.00-12.15pm: Coffee break
12.15-1.00pm: Launch Event of the Digital Anon (Virginia Woolf) (30mins + 15mins Q&A)
Dr Joshua Phillips (University of Oxford), Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
1.00-1.45pm: Lunch (provided)
1.45-3:00pm: Editorial Frameworks & Scholarly Editions (20mins each + 15mins Q&As)

Dr Barbara Cooke (Loughborough University), Co-executive Editor of Oxford Waugh
Dr Becky Bowler (Keele University), General Editor of Edinburgh Sinclair
Prof Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow), Co-General Editor of Cambridge Woolf

3.00-3.15pm: Coffee/tea break (provided)
3.15-4.00pm: Roundtable: Challenges & New Perspectives in Modernist Editing

Panel: Prof Mark Nixon, Prof Steven Matthews, Dr Wim Van Mierlo, Dr Buxi Duan
Chair: Prof Nicola Wilson

4.00-4.15pm: Wrap up followed by an informal CBCP social/drinks at Park House (located on the university campus)
To join us, please register here.

CBCP x OIW webinar: Building a Global Youth Literature Collection 101
2025-10-23 17:00 - 18:30
‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ is a webinar series co-organised by The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (University of Reading) in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation.
On Thursday 23rd October at 5pm UK time we will be in conversation with the leaders of the project Building a Global Youth Literature Collection 101, sponsored by The Global Literature in Libraries Initiative.

To join via MS Teams, please register here.

The impact of global events is unmistakably apparent in our daily lives, yet Americans, especially children and teenagers, know little of world events and cultures. Moreover, those best positioned to spark their learning — particularly librarians, who are charged with bringing the knowledge of the world even to their littlest patrons — are ill-equipped to help them. Shockingly, only a handful of accredited U.S. library schools even offer courses in international youth literature.
The Building a Global Youth Literature Collection 101 website is intended to serve as a toolkit for librarians, but also for others who wish to learn more about youth literature — especially translations — from other countries. A global collection helps librarians serve communities with families from different countries and cultures, helps children develop greater international understanding, opens avenues for curiosity, and creates opportunities for learning from counterparts abroad.
Used well, these books can open windows, unlock doors, and serve as mirrors. To this end we provide curated booklists created by librarians, subject matter experts, and community contributors in the Starter Kit and aggregate relevant web-based materials in the resource-rich Hub. Together, they are a one-stop shop for the global youth literature novice, and the project leaders hope that even those already familiar with this literature will discover something new.
Speakers:
Dr. Annette Y. Goldsmith is the librarian at the Levy Library, Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel in Los Angeles. She is the founding editor of the online children’s literature journal, The Looking Glass. An international youth literature specialist, she teaches online graduate classes in children’s and young adult literature and librarianship, most recently for the Kent State University Information School.
Dr. Marc Aronson is Associate Professor of Practice, Library and Information Science, at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information. He has worked in the field of literature for younger readers for more than thirty years as an author, editor, speaker, publisher, and critic. He is the only person to have been a winner or finalist for both of the American Library Association’s prizes for excellence in youth nonfiction as both an author and as an editor.

David Jacobson is a journalist, author and Japanese translator. His award-winning picture book biography, Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, introduced the life and work of a beloved Japanese children’s poet to English-language readers. He is currently writing a biography of Jella Lepman, founder of the International Youth Library and the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY).

Panel discussion: Bernardine Evaristo in Translation, 5th November 2025
2025-11-05 16:30 - 18:30 | Global Study Lounge, 2nd floor, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EL, RG6 6EL
On 6 November 2025, the University of Reading will host an International Symposium on the work of Booker Prize-winning author, Bernardine Evaristo. It will be the first academic symposium dedicated to her work. (For more information about the symposium, click here.)
Before the main symposium begins, a special panel dedicated to discussing Evaristo’s work in translation and adaptation will be held on Wednesday 5 November from 4.30-6.30pm (GMT). Our four international panellists for this event and the titles of their talks are as follows:

“Girl, Woman, Other… Readers: Translation and Reception in Serbia”
Emilija Lipovšek, Academy of Applied Studies Belgrade (Serbia)
“Bernardine Evaristo in Polish: Prototyping inclusivity in translation”
Bartosz Wójcik, Maria Curie Skłodowska University (Poland)
“From Girl, Woman, Other to Dekle, ženska, druga_i: translating gender”
Katja Zakrajsek (Slovenia)
“Translating/Adapting Bernardine Evaristo’s (Short) Fiction: From Identity Fragmentation to a Multimodal Transformative Storytelling of Subversive Liminalities”
Ester Gendusa, University of Palermo (Italy)

Welcome: Professor Daniela La Penna, Head of School of Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Book Cultures & Publishing at the University of Reading
Chair: Dr Nicola Abram, University of Reading
The event is free to attend and will be held in person and online.
To register for a ticket to join us in person, click here.
(Please note: The venue for the panel discussion is the Global Study Lounge, 2nd floor, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading, RG6 6EL)
To register for a ticket to join us online, click here.
More information on our speakers:
Emilija Lipovšek Defended doctoral thesis entitled ‘Postcolonial London: City and Identity’ at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, Serbia in 2015. Has participated in a number of international conferences with presentations and published papers on postcolonial authors and novels (including Evaristo’s Lara, Soul Tourists), literary and cultural tourism, industrial cultural heritage. Works as a Senior Lecturer of English Language at the College of Tourism, Academy of Applied Studies Belgrade, Serbia and has held several seminars on postcolonial literature at the University of Bamberg in Germany.
Bartosz Wójcik is the author of Afro-Caribbean Poetry in English: Cultural Traditions (2015) and a member of the Polish Literary Translators Association (http://stl.org.pl/profil/bartosz-wojcik/). Published translations of prose include Diana McCaulay (Jamaica), Kevin Jared Hosein (Trinidad and Tobago), and Nathan McCall (USA), as well as poetry by Lauren K. Alleyne (Trinidad / USA), Jacqueline Bishop (Jamaica), Stewart Brown (UK), Carol Ann Duffy (UK), Salena Godden (UK), Joy Harjo (USA), Kei Miller (Jamaica / UK), Grace Nichols (Guyana / UK), Roger Robinson (Trinidad / UK), Tanya Shirley (Jamaica), and Dorothea Smartt (Barbados / UK). Translator of academic essays (literary studies, visual culture, history, political studies), theatre plays, and films.
Katja Zakrajšek holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Ljubljana. She is a literary translator working from English, French and Portuguese into Slovenian. Believing in decolonising and diversifying literary canons, she prefers to focus on literary traditions and spaces underrepresented in translation, in particular African and Afro-Diasporic writing. She is the recipient of several translation awards, including the Sovre award for best literary translation into Slovenian for Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other in 2022.
Ester Gendusa holds an MA from Birkbeck College and a PhD from the University of Palermo (Italy), where she is currently a research fellow in English language and translation. The author of Asimmetrie di genere e di razza in The Grass is Singing di Doris Lessing (2011) and of the first Italian monograph on Bernardine Evaristo’s literary production, Identità nere e cultura europea (2014), she has published extensively on post-colonial and (Black) British authors. Her most recent research interests reside in the interplay between language and power in contemporary multimodal discursive arenas (including news media) and in the representation of antinormative identities in British and American films.

CBCP x OIW Webinar: Publishing Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations
2025-12-11 17:00 - 18:30
CBCP x OIW webinar ‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ is a webinar series co-organised by The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (University of Reading) in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation.
On Thursday 11th December at 5pm (UK time) we will be in conversation with the leaders of the project on Publishing Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations.
How do children’s books cross borders in wartime and what happens to them when they do? This joint talk traces the translational lives of war-related titles from commissioning to circulation, and the challenges the publishers meet along the way. Birgitte Beck Pristed introduces the Aarhus University project “PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War,” examining how Ukrainian and Russian children’s publishers operate under wartime conditions and how the books reflect child readers’ experiences of war and dislocation. In this talk, she focuses on the publishers’ hurdles of bringing books across borders. Drawing on new interviews with Ukrainian publishers, Nadia Pavlyk examines how international support and solidarity are negotiated in practice, and how these transnational networks shape the capacity to produce, translate, and present war-themed children’s literature under fire. Finally, Ekaterina Shatalova shows how, in Russia’s “hybrid” censorship environment, translated children’s books become politically charged objects: the same titles can function as cultural solidarity while being securitised as “threats.” Together, the speakers argue that translation is double-edged – both a vehicle of ethical resistance and a liability within contested information regimes.

To join via MS Teams, please register here.
Speakers:
Birgitte Beck Pristed is Associate Professor at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is PI of the 2024-2027 research project ‘PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine war,’ https://projects.au.dk/publish.
Nadiia Pavlyk is a researcher on the projects “PUBLISH: Children’s literature in Russia-Ukraine War” (Aarhus University, Denmark) and MSCA4Ukraine “DaR:UA. Dialogues and Reading. Shared Reading for Ukrainian Young People” (2025-2027), https://projects.au.dk/darua. She is a professor at Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University (Ukraine) and a member of the Pool of European Youth Researchers (PEYR). Her main research areas focus on youth policy, youth work, and non-formal education.
Ekaterina Shatalova is a prolific translator of children’s books and TV shows. She holds a Master’s degree in Victorian Literature from the University of Oxford and an Erasmus Mundus International Master’s degree in Children’s Literature, Media and Culture from the University of Glasgow, University of Tilburg, and Aarhus University (2022). She is currently a PhD fellow at Aarhus University as part of the joint project “PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War.”
