UPenn Rosenbach Lectures

The A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, 2013 Rosenbach Lectures 

Paul Needham, Librarian, The Scheide Library 

The First Quarter Century of European Printing 

Lecture Dates: March 18, 19, 21, 2013 All lectures begin at 5:30pm 

Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, 6th floor 3420 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 

March 18, 2013: The 1450s: Bookmaking Inventions 

March 19, 2013: The 1460s: Slow Diaspora 

March 21, 2013: 1470-1475: The Sowing of Printing Shops 

Registration is requested but not required. Please RSVP HERE.     

Since 1998, Paul Needham has served as the Curator of the Scheide Collection at the Princeton University Library, before which he worked at Sotheby's and the Pierpont Morgan Library. He is on faculty at the University of Virginia's Rare Book School. Widely acknowledged as the leading expert on Johannes Gutenberg and the early history of printing, Dr. Needham has written or contributed to more than 90 publications. His most recent book is Galileo Makes a Book: The First Edition of Sidereus nuncius, Venice 1610 (Akademie Verlag, 2011). For more information: (215) 898-7088; jpollack@upenn.edu. 

List of Past Rosenbach Lectures: Rosenbach Lectures for 2007-2011 are available through the Penn Libraries Scholarly Commons repository. View and download available podcasts. The Rosenbach Fellowship in Bibliography, established by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania in 1928, honors a gift for that purpose from A.S.W. Rosenbach, one of America's greatest book dealers and collectors. Its intention is to further scholarship and scholarly publication in bibliography and book history, broadly understood. Rosenbach Fellows typically present a series of three lectures over a period of one to two weeks while in residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Because of a continuing commitment to the series by the University of Pennsylvania Press, many of these lectures have been published as book-length studies. The Rosenbach Lectures are the longest continuing series of bibliographical lectureships in the United States. The series began in 1931, with Christopher Morley as the first Rosenbach Fellow. Over the years, lecture topics have included fifteenth-century printing, the relationships between print and manuscript, papermaking, book illustration, American reading and publishing, and medical and scientific texts. Among recent lecturers are Robert Darnton, Anthony Grafton, Peter Stallybrass, David D. Hall, Paul Saenger, Michael Warner, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, and Alberto Manguel.