The A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures are an endowed lectureship in bibliography established in 1928 by rare-book and manuscript dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach at the University of Pennsylvania. [1]
The Rosenbach Lectures are the longest continuing series of bibliographical lectureships in the United States. Individuals appointed as Rosenbach Fellows present three lectures over several weeks. [2]
The 1971 A.S.W. Rosenbach Fellowship in Bibliography marked the Theodore Dreiser Centenary. [3]
The 1974 A.S.W. Rosenbach Fellowship in Bibliography was devoted to the fifth annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies." [4]
The university's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center in collaboration with their Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts are the current location of the lectures.
The first Rosenbach Fellow was Christopher Morley in 1931 [5] whose lectures were published as Ex Libris Carissimis in 1932. [6] Many of the lectures have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, including Morley's, which was also part of the anniversary collection of the Press. [7] Other lecturers have included:
Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach was an American collector, scholar, and dealer in rare books and manuscripts. In London, where he frequently attended the auctions at Sotheby's, he was known as "The Terror of the Auction Room." In Paris, he was called "Le Napoléon des Livres". Many others referred to him as "Dr. R.", a "Robber Baron" and "the Greatest Bookdealer in the World".
Robert Choate Darnton is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France.
The Rosenbach is a Philadelphia museum and library located within two 19th-century townhouses. Established as a testamentary gift in 1954. The historic houses contain the donated collections of Philip Rosenbach and his younger brother Dr. Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach.
George Parker Winship was an American librarian, author, teacher, and bibliographer born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard in 1893.
Elizabeth Lewisohn Eisenstein was an American historian of the French Revolution and early 19th-century France. She is well known for her work on the history of early printing, writing on the transition in media between the era of 'manuscript culture' and that of 'print culture', as well as the role of the printing press in effecting broad cultural change in Western civilization.
William Joseph "Dard" Hunter was an American authority on printing, paper, and papermaking, especially by hand, using sixteenth-century tools and techniques. He is known for, among other things, the production of two hundred copies of his book Old Papermaking, for which he prepared all aspects: Hunter wrote the text, designed and cast the type, did the typesetting, handmade the paper, and printed and bound the book. A display at the Smithsonian Institution that appeared with his work read, "In the entire history of printing, these are the first books to have been made in their entirety by the labors of one man." He also wrote Papermarking by Hand in America (1950), a similar but even larger undertaking.
Roger Chartier,, is a French historian and historiographer who is part of the Annales school. He works on the history of books, publishing and reading. He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Fredson Thayer Bowers (1905–1991) was an American bibliographer and scholar of textual editing.
Randolph Greenfield Adams was an American librarian and historian, director of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for 28 years.
Curt Ferdinand Bühler was an American librarian and expert of early books who published mainly on the art and history of books printed during the fifteenth century. He took degrees from Yale University and Trinity College, Dublin. After post-doctoral studies in the University of Munich (1931-1933), he worked as a rare book curator at the Pierpont Morgan Library from 1934, was appointed Keeper of Printed Books in 1948, and remained with the Morgan Library until his formal retirement in 1973. His own collection of manuscripts and early printed books was bequeathed to the same library.
Brian Stock is an American historian. He is a historian of modes of perception between the ancient world and the sixteenth century. He was Rouse Ball Student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Senior Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, before joining the graduate faculty of the University of Toronto, where he taught history and literature until 2007. He is a Canadian and French citizen.
The Panizzi Lectures are a series of annual lectures given at the British Library by "eminent scholars of the book" and named after the librarian Anthony Panizzi. They are considered one of the major British bibliographical lecture series alongside the Sandars Lectures at the University of Cambridge and the Lyell Lectures at Oxford University.
The Sandars Readership in Bibliography is an annual lecture series given at Cambridge University. Instituted in 1895 at the behest of Samuel Sandars of Trinity College (1837–1894), who left a £2000 bequest to the University, the series has continued to the present day. Together with the Panizzi Lectures at the British Library and the Lyell Lectures at Oxford University, it is considered one of the major British bibliographical lecture series.
The Lyell Readership in Bibliography is an endowed annual lecture series given at the University of Oxford. Instituted in 1952 by a bequest from the solicitor, book collector and bibliographer, James Patrick Ronaldson Lyell. After Lyell's death, Keeper of the Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, Richard William Hunt, writing of the Lyell bequest noted, "he was a self-taught bibliophile and scholar of extraordinary enthusiasm and discrimination, and one who deserves to be remembered not only by Oxford but by the whole bibliographical world."
The McKenzie Lectures are a series of annual public lectures delivered by "a distinguished scholar on the history of the book, scholarly editing, or bibliography and the sociology of texts." The lectures are held in Oxford at the Centre for the Study of the Book. The series was inaugurated in 1996, in honour of Donald Francis McKenzie (1931–1999), upon his retirement as Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism, University of Oxford.
Donald Pizer was an American academic and literary critic who was regarded as one of the principal authorities on the American naturalism literary movement. He was the Pierce Butler Professor of English Emeritus at Tulane University, and the author of numerous books on naturalism. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962.
Edwin Wolf II was an American librarian and collector who was one of Philadelphia’s most prominent bookmen during the 20th century.
Paul Needham is an American academic librarian. From 1998 to 2020, he worked at the Scheide Library at Princeton University. A Guggenheim Fellow and Bibliographical Society Gold Medallist, Needham has delivered the Sandars Readership in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge, the A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Lyell Lectures at the University of Oxford. His focus is on incunabula, the earliest printed books in Europe.
Michael F. Suarez, S.J. is Professor of English and Director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He is editor-in-chief of the largest digital humanities project in the world: Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. He is a Jesuit priest.
Peter D. McDonald was born in Cape Town in 1964 and educated in South Africa and England. He is a Fellow of St. Hugh's College and Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford.