Rare Book School 2025 Livestreamed Lectures

Rare Book School provides continuing-education opportunities for students from all disciplines and skill levels to study the history of written, printed, and digital materials with leading scholars and professionals in the field.

The following four lectures, which will take place in person at the University of Virginia, will also be livestreamed at the Kislak Center Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion on the 6th floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center. Register below to attend the livestreamed events.

Mindell Dubansky: "The Parallel History of Books and Blooks"

June 2, 5:30 - 6:30 pm

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Throughout the world, for hundreds of years, people have expressed themselves by making plain and decorated objects in imitation of specific titles and types of books. No genre of book or bookbinding has been ignored. Mindell Dubansky calls these objects blooks, a contraction of book-look. History has shown that infusing an object with bookish characteristics creates an emotional attachment to the object analogous to our feelings for a beloved or important book. This, in turn, increases our desire to own, share, and treasure our book-shaped objects. Love, friendship, humor, play, faith, enlightenment, and commemoration are all common and abiding themes of blooks. Dubansky’s lecture will touch on some of the areas in which real books and book-like objects most closely intersect. These include how the bookbinding trade was involved in making blooks, how blook-making followed publishing trends and popular titles, how disused books have historically been repurposed as blooks, and how the idea of the book has been translated into a myriad of unexpected objects by artists and inventors. Dubansky’s curated show on blooks for the Center for Book Arts in New York City was profiled earlier this year by the New York Times.

Janine Barchas: "Jane Austen on the Cheap"

June 4, 5:30 - 6:30 pm

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In the latter half of the nineteenth century, cheap and shoddy reprintings of Jane Austen’s novels performed the heavy lifting of bringing her work and reputation before the general public. Inexpensive reprints and early paperbacks of Austen were sold at Victorian railway stations for one or two shillings, traded for soap wrappers, awarded as book prizes in schools, and targeted to Britain’s working classes. At just pennies a copy, Austen’s novels were also squeezed into tight columns on thin paper. Few of these hard-lived books survive. Yet such scrappy everyday versions of her novels made a substantial difference to Austen’s early readership. These were the books bought and read by ordinary people. And these are the books that, owing to their low status and production values, remain uncollected by academic libraries and largely unremarked by scholars. About 15 years ago, Janine Barchas began hunting for these lost books of Jane Austen. This is the story of how private collectors, eBay, and some lucky breaks came to the rescue.

Paul Halliday: "Stationery Bindings: A Law Story"

June 9, 5:30 - 6:30 pm

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This presentation explores the legal lives of the hundreds of stationery-bound books that survive in English court archives. Who made them, who used them? How did handfuls of paper stitched into limp parchment covers threaten common law and its parchment practices? A stationery book was just one cog in a legal knowledge machine that bound communities of practice together across generations. What might such books tell us about how that machine worked? How did stationery books change the machine, from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth? How did they change the law itself?

Alexander Bevilacqua: "Chivalry in Color: Central European Tournaments and the Matter of Race"

June 11, 5:30 - 6:30 pm

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In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Central Europe, princes and nobles donned costumes and masks to impersonate warriors from distant lands. While these men were not at the forefront of overseas expansion, they imagined and experienced the newly expanding world through equestrian performance. If early costumed tournaments focused especially on the rivalry between Christians and Muslims, later ones represented participants from the Americas, Africa, and South Asia, eventually evoking the entire world. A festivity of medieval origin at which the old military elite asserted its martial values, the tournament proved a flexible medium from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment. Through chivalric performance, princes and nobles not only asserted their claim to rule, they also shaped European ideas about the physiognomy and dress of foreign peoples, recording and illustrating their ephemeral performances in both manuscript and print. This lecture considers the peculiarities and challenges of the bibliographic documentation of cross-racial chivalric masquerades. Focusing in particular on the use of scrolls, parchment, and color, it asks: what can material bibliography teach us about the intersection of post-medieval chivalry and pre-modern race?