Script and Print: January 2010

Update for January/February 2010

Script & Print 34.1 (2010) is with the printer and should delivered to Shef by the end of the week. Shef is aiming to distribute copies next Monday (1 February). Please keep in mind that this issue is being posted in New Zealand, so it will take a little longer to arrive than the issues distributed from Melbourne over the last three years.

Per Henningsgaard's paper at the State Library of Victoria was very well attended and prompted a health discussion of the future of books, e-books and e-readers (For my own short post on the latest technology, see here). The recording of this paper will be published online as a podcast.

We hope to organise one more seminar between now and the mid-year BSANZ 2010 Conference in Melbourne. Details will be published here.

Planning for the 2010 Conference is in full swing. The administrative core-component, the budget, is set to be finalised this week. And the academic core-component, the abstracts, are already piling up, even though the final date for abstract-submission is still a month away.

Occasional Publications and Special Issues

The latest version of the list of Script and Print Occasional Publications is available for download here.

The latest version of the list of Script and Print Special Issues is available for download here.

MBC Event for 21 January 2010

I am pleased to announce that on Thursday, 21 January 2010 at 5.45PM, off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, Per Henningsgaard will present a paper on "Book Publishing, E-books, and the Production of Literatures of Social Reform."

Predictions abound about the future of the book. Most of these, however, are about the future of the codex rather than the book. Furthermore, most predictions will be outdated within a matter of months, since they are often preoccupied with detailing the specifics of the latest e-book and e-reader technology. In spite of their almost compulsive accounting of the ‘specs’ of this technology, these predictions are notoriously unspecific in their discussion of books—as evidenced by the failure to distinguish between "the book" and "the codex," but also in their neglect of more conventional (and specific) categories such as "fiction," "poetry," and "non-fiction."

This seminar presentation will attempt to chart a remedial course by considering the (possible) effect of e-books on one specific literary category—more specific even than "fiction" or "non-fiction," though in fact crossing these two categories. This category is literatures of social reform. That is to say, books which inspired social reforms of one type or another.

This category of books, most of which were undeniably "popular" at the time of their publication, will be used as the basis for yet another prediction about the future of the book. This prediction, however, will recognise the differences between book and codex; it will also be informed by a clear understanding of the role of book publishers in the production of literature.

Finally, this seminar presentation will consider the prospects for literature functioning as an agent of social change in an e-book future.

Per Henningsgaard is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP). He went to UWSP from Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia, where he was employed as a Sessional Tutor following the completion of his PhD in 2008 at The University of Western Australia. Originally from Minnesota, Per moved to Australia in 2005 under the auspices of a Fulbright Grant. His research interests include Australian and other postcolonial literatures, as well as publishing and book history.

Members who attended the 2007 BSANZ Conference in Hobart may remember Per because, in that year, he won a Postgraduate Conference Travel Award to present a paper on the "Fremantle Press and the Cultivation of a Regional Press in Australia."

Our New Editor: Shef Rogers

About Shef

Shef Rogers, our new editor, is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Otago in Dunedin. His areas of interest are eighteenth-century British publishing practices and analytical bibliography. More recently, he has also become involved in a collective attempt to compose a single-volume history of book culture in New Zealand. And he is rapidly developing an expertise in the details of Chicago style!

A Word from Shef

Script & Print has moved yet again across the Tasman, but this time further south. All going well, the move will reduce both printing and postage costs of the journal, but not alter the quality. Keeping up the high standard and rapid-fire pace of Patrick's editiorial work is proving a challenge already, but subscribers will have to judge for themselves in February, when the first issue under the new editorship should arrive.

Script & Print continues to welcome essays relevant to the journal's scope, which is generally broad and bookish and not confined to Australasian topics. Indeed, the next issue will include a note on stop-press corrections in a nineteenth-century French book, a beautifully-illustrated essay on the bookbindings of a major New Zealand collector, Alexander Turnbull, and an archival study of trade relations between an Australian and an English bookseller in the 1930s.

[Script & Print 34:1 (2010)]

Unlike many bibliographical journals, Script & Print welcomes illustrations. We can always include one in full colour on the cover, and we do pretty well with grayscale images in the text, so we encourage contributors to think about which images might be worth a thousand words. Because each issue is limited to sixty-four pages, articles of four to seven thousand words are ideal, though we have run longer pieces in several parts.

Contributors need not be members of the Society to have their work considered, though they will no doubt want to subscribe in order to see their work in such elegant and engaging print.

Reviews of relevant titles are also welcome and should be sent to the reviews editor, Patrick Spedding.