I am so excited to have received an honorable mention in this year’s Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize for my collection “The Book as Art and Commodity: Design Reform and Commercial Publishing, 1890-1915.” It’s an honor to be among such distinguished collecting company!

Meet the Winners of the 2026 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize - The Millions

In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged 30 years and younger. Our goal, at the time, was to expand the popular perception of who book coll...

themillions.com

We have been discussing private ownership of cultural heritage materials with students and when they argue that history shouldn’t be in private hands (though I may agree, for some materials, in theory) I show them examples like this to demo why we cannot always trust institutional stewardship.

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 3w ago

Oxford lets OpenAI train its AI models on Bodleian library

Look at all those Carolines!

I pulled our copy of this recently as part of my project moving decorative covers from circulating into special collections!

The Public Domain Review@publicdomainrev.bsky.social · last mo.

Andrew Lang's Book of Dreams and Ghosts (1897) — Containing 78 weird happenings, from a demon strangling Devonian farmers in 1682 to a poltergeist terrorising a contemporary Chinese couple. Read it here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-book-of-dreams-and-ghosts-1897

Morning timeline cleanse—the Ohio State Marching Band, “The Best Damn Band in the Land” playing the university Alma mater “Carmen Ohio” drifting into my living room, accompanied by the crickets and other fauna of central Ohio in late summer.

JOB!! The Department of History at the University of Ottawa invites applications for a position in medieval and/or transregional history, 7th-16th centuries. French or English, bilingualism an asset. universityaffairs.ca/search-jobs/...

A glimpse into the sixteenth-century printing office. This 16th-century Bible sheet became a printer’s copy: a gathering from an earlier edition, marked in red by compositors and used as copy for a new setting, placed on the visorium above the type cases. #earlymodern #bookhistory #rarebooks 📚💙📜

This is such a cool typographical cover!

Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My copy of this just arrived and I’m very much looking forward to reading it! The bits I caught online were fantastic.

Hey, guys, when the librarians get pissed about the destruction of books, it’s time to put those listening ears on. Because we are very comfortable with the idea that books are tools that can be retired. What’s happening right now is not that.

Me trying to mentally reverse engineer how Kate moved the combs through the marbling tray in order to achieve this pattern on the right

Kate Ozment@grubstreetwomen.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Never not obsessed with marbling

Half the planet is having a massive fight about how to correctly interpret an Ancient Greek poem but go ahead, close some more humanities departments.

And because it’s out, a timeline cleanse. Still one of the most beautiful examples of typography ever, IMO!

Staining in the magnificent 1905 Doves Press Bible—these stains, which appeared in pages of vol. 1 as a result of too little hanging space (and thus attempting to dry too many stacked sheets after printing, causing the sheets to stay damp overlong and discolor). Lamented by the printer.

Plates of William Morris’ designs for Morris & Co., and other parts of his career, reproduced in “The Art of William Morris” (1897—one year after Morris’ death), printed at the Chiswick Press.

Inventorying historical architecture books means lots of lovely 2nd half of 18th-early 19th century decorated book papers.

Shout-out to our department’s Cold Nose Illuminator (“Old”) which some random person made in their garage in the 1990s and we ended up with. No company-produced cold nose illuminator can live up to it. It is eternal and weighs about 30 pounds. Also includes ancient tic tac box with spare parts.

This morning: the lovely italic of Robert Estienne, one of the most important 16th-c. French printers. This book is a 1543 copy of Cato’s De Re Rustica.

Admiring the tangled glory that is this fifteenth-century binding. Sadly detached. One of the usual suspects.

Three gigantic fine press bibles today—Nonesuch (1924), Pennyroyal Caxton (1999), and Arion (2000) Presses. Pennyroyal and Arion are particularly interesting as they were published and produced within a year of one another.

For perspective, this is equivalent to what I earned as an assistant professor fresh out of grad school 25 years ago in a rust belt city where large houses in nice neighborhoods near the university cost $150k.

TOEBI@toebi.bsky.social · 4mo ago

📣 #jobalert #medievalsky #OldEnglish 📜 Curator for Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts 🏛️ British Library, St Pancras ⏳ Full Time, Permanent 💷 Salary: £35,993 per annum ⏰ Deadline: 12 July 2026 📲 Application details: tinyurl.com/25fs9kun

Letterpress friends! Would anyone be able/willing to sell me a photopolymer plate to incorporate into my teaching collection? I’m hoping for text but dot screen images would also be of interest.

This is the opposite of what Hartmann argued for. This is allowing the machine to literally rewrite history, asking the manifestation of the structures of power that created the gaps in the archive to then fill them. Critical fabulation, not to be undertaken lightly, requires a human moral compass.

Peter Whitewood@pwhitewood.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Rebranding a hallucination as a ‘critical confabulation’ that can fill archival gaps is a big no from me.

Woodcuts/wood engravings I saw at work this week.

The Dance Magazine, July 1926. Pulled for a group of high schoolers doing a dance intensive summer program in OSU’s Dance dept. visiting us on Wednesday!

For your viewing pleasure, this beautiful “liber” in one of OSU’s newest manuscript fragments, copied in gorgeous Montecassino-style Beneventan script.

Unexpected encounter with an old friend today: looking at copies of William Morris’ works published by Longmans and printed at the Chiswick Press, 1901-2 and stumbled upon another major fine printer… in the circulating collection, no less. (Deep breaths)

Was delighted today to receive North Yorkshire-based @nepenthepress.bsky.social’s new “The Domain of the Pale Queen” by Benjamin Tweddell—absolutely gorgeous!

Summer project: finding things in the circulating collections that should be in special collections, and transferring them… aka searching “decorative cloth publishers’ binding” in the catalog and having fun :)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the influence of William Morris’ book design aesthetic on lower cost, commercial printing, and nothing sums this up so literally like the title spread from J. M. Dent’s initial run of the Everyman’s Library series, 1905-1910 (right. Left: Morris’ Kelmscott Chaucer.)

A few highlights from the NY Antiquarian Book Fair a few weekends ago…