About the S&P Editorial Board

The eleven members of the Script & Print Editorial Board are listed below. The Board is composed of a mixture of research-focused academics and respected Rare Books librarians from Australia, New Zealand, Britain and North America.

Board members are unpaid (like the editor) and normally serve for a period of five years. Board members advise on refereeing, reviewing, and special issues and, if need be, resolve conflicting referee reports. They also, on occasion, help with long-term planning and promotion of Script & Print. The present incumbents are, in alphabetical order:

Des Cowley is the Acting Collection Services Manager, previously the Rare Printed Collections Manager, at the State Library of Victoria, with more than twenty years' experience working with the library's Rare Books Collection.

Wallace Kirsop is Director of Monash University's Centre for the Book and an Honorary Professor in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University. He is also a Principal Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. See my post About Wallace Kirsop.

Brian McMullin is an honorary research associate in the Centre for the Book at Monash University and manager of its Ancora Press. He is also a former editor of the BSANZ Bulletin. See my post About Brian McMullin.

Simone Murray, 2005 winner of the SHARP DeLong Book Prize, is a Senior Lecturer in the Communications and Media Studies program at Monash University.

Richard Overell is the Rare Books Librarian at Monash University Library. From 1981 to 1988 he was a Librarian in the La Trobe section of the State Library of Victoria.

James Raven, Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex, one-time Munby Fellow in Bibliography, founding director of SHARP and Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust.

Sydney Shep is Senior Lecturer in Print and Book Culture and The Printer at Wai-te-ata Press, Victoria University of Wellington, Editor of SHARP News; she was former President of the Book Arts Society of New Zealand, and editor of the BSANZ Bulletin (during its 2004–5 transition to Script & Print).

Peter Shillingsburg, director of The Centre for Textual Scholarship at De Monfort University, Leicester is General and Textual Editor of The Works of W. M. Thackeray and Associate Editor of The Oxford Companion to the Book (Forthcoming, 2008). Peter was also one-time Visiting Professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of NSW, Canberra. Peter has his own site here.

G. Thomas Tanselle, formerly vice-president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and adjunct professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, past president of the Bibliographical Society of America, the Grolier Club, and the Society for Textual Scholarship, is President of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. He has written and lectured widely on the theory and practice of analytical bibliography and textual criticism.

David Vander Meulen, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, Vice President of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and editor of Studies in Bibliography, has published widely on descriptive and analytical bibliography.

Elizabeth Webby recently retired as Professor of Australian Literature and Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. She is a member of the editorial board of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature project and co-edited the Academy Edition of Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (2006).

Literary Tattoos: Writing on the Body

Literary Tattoos, undoubtedly an unusual form of publishing, have been in the news of late, or so it seems from Shirley Dent's piece in The Guardian, and the various links she provides. Her essay, Written on the Body: Literary Tattoos, links to A (Not So) Complete History of Literary Tattoos and Literary Tattoos for People who Love Books. To these I can add Written on the Body: The Art of Tattoo Storytelling, a Flickr group (Tattoos of Words Only) and Margot Mifflin's A Blank Human Canvas.

This last article discusses Shelley Jackson (who announced in 2003 that she would publish a 2,095-word short story called “Skin” on participants who agree to be tattooed with randomly assigned words from her text) and goes on to discuss, in fascinating detail, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Emily Prager’s Eve’s Tattoo (1991), Brooke Stevens’s Tattoo Girl (2001), Joyce Carol Oates’s The Tattooed Girl (2003), Jill Ciment’s The Tattoo Artist (2005).

Below are a ten images culled from these various sites. (And as Mifflin explains, and as the following images suggest, the literary tattoo has been imagined overwhelmingly by and for women.)

Extended deadline for BSANZ Conference

As previously noted (here), the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand 2008 conference will be held at the University of Sydney on Thursday 2 and Friday 3 October. The conference convenors (Lawrence Warner and Nathan Garvey) invite abstracts for papers exploring the topic of The European Book in the Antipodes.

Papers on all aspects of manuscript and print cultures related to this theme are welcomed; subjects might include, but are not limited to:

Physical bibliography of European books in Australia and New Zealand

The history of reading and readerships

Book collecting, collections, and library history

Aspects of publishing and the book trade between Europe and the Antipodes

Please send a 250-word abstract, with a brief biographical note, by 30 June 2008 (extended from 30 April 2008), to the conference convenors at BSANZ2008@gmail.com, or to

Nathan Garvey,
Woolley Building A20,
University of Sydney,
Sydney, NSW, 2006.

Update for June 2008

Script & Print 31:3 has finally gone to BPA for printing, a month later than we expected. We were held up by our desire to bundle both Joe Rudman's "Riposte" (see below) and John Burrows' reply to this, in the same issue. In the end it simply wasn't possible to print them this way. The good news is, however, that Script & Print 31:4 should be ready to send to press in only a few weeks time, so members will not be kept long waiting for John's (and Tony's) reply. We expect BPA to return the printed copies to us in about two weeks, so I expect we will post S&P 31:3 by 30 June and S&P 31:4 about two or three weeks later.

The contents of the two issues are as follows

Contents of S&P 31:3

Article 1: Dirk H. R. Spennemann & Jon O’Neill, "A Library in Paradise: The deBrum Library on Likiep (Micronesia)"

Article 2: Joseph Rudman, "Sarah and Henry Fielding and the Authorship of
The History of Ophelia: A Riposte"

Article 3: B. J. McMullin, "An Unrecorded Title-page Border: The Castle of Knowledge (1556)"

Article 4: Craig Brittain, "Steinbeck’s Use of Ledgers in the Writing of East of Eden and Journal of a Novel"

Reviews: Ada Cambridge, A Black Sheep (reviewed by Mary Jane Edwards); Engines of Influence (reviewed by Ross Harvey); Manon Lescaut de l’abbé Prévost, 1731–1759 (reviewed by Angus Martin); Literary Cultures and the Material Book (reviewed by Jason D. Ensor).

Draft Contents of S&P 31:4

Article 1: Susann Liebich, “ 'The Books Are The Same As You See In London Shops': Booksellers in Colonial Wellington and Their Imperial Ties, ca. 1840–1890"

Article 2: Sue Reynolds, "Bookbuying at the Victorian Supreme Court Library, 1853–1863: A Tale of Duplicity and Intrigue"

Article 3: John Burrows and Anthony Hassall, "Sarah and Henry Fielding and the Authorship of The History of Ophelia: A Reply"

Article 4: B. J. McMullin, "Shared Printing: James Flesher’s part in Matthew Poole’s Synopsis Criticorum, vol. 1 (1669)"

Article 5: Patrick Spedding, "To (Not) Promote Breeding: Censoring Eliza Smith’s Compleat Housewife

Obituary: Rory Muir, "Marcie Muir (1919–2007)"

Reviews: The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore, vol. 2 (Reviewed by Patrick Buckridge); The Commonwealth of Books (Reviewed by James Raven); Amassing Treasures for All Times (Reviewed by Rachel Salmond); Be Merry and Wise (Reviewed by Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario).