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. [1] 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." [2]
The series has continued down to the present day. [3] [4]
Together with the Panizzi Lectures at the British Library and the Sandars Lectures at Cambridge University, it is considered one of the major British bibliographical lecture series. [5]
Thomas Tanner was an English antiquary and prelate. He was Bishop of St Asaph from 1732 to 1735.
A catchword is a word placed at the foot of a handwritten or printed page that is meant to be bound along with other pages in a book. The word anticipates the first word of the following page. It was meant to help the bookbinder or printer make sure that the leaves were bound in the right order or that the pages were set up in the press in the right order. Catchwords appear in some medieval manuscripts, and appear again in printed books late in the fifteenth century. The practice became widespread in the mid sixteenth century, and prevailed until the arrival of industrial printing techniques late in the eighteenth century.
Samuel Sandars was an English bibliographer, barrister and university benefactor.
Howard Millar Nixon OBE was a British librarian and historian of bookbinding. He was a librarian at the British Museum then Librarian of Westminster Abbey from 1974 until his death.
Edward Gordon Duff, known as Gordon Duff, was a British bibliographer and librarian known for his works on early English printing.
David Pearson is an English librarian who served as the Director of Culture, Heritage and Libraries at the City of London Corporation between 2009 and 2017; his brief covered London Metropolitan Archives, Guildhall Library, City Business Library, Guildhall Art Gallery, and other institutions. He retired in early 2017 to focus on his work in book history and is now a Senior Member of Darwin College, Cambridge ; Honorary Senior Research Associate of the Department of Information Studies, University College London ; and Distinguished Senior Fellow of the School of Advanced Study, University of London. A member of the Faculty of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, he teaches regularly at the London Rare Book School.
Neil Ripley Ker was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature. He was Reader in Palaeography at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford until he retired in 1968. He is known especially for his Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, which is praised as a milestone in Anglo-Saxon manuscript study.
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 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.
Christopher Francis Rivers de Hamel is a British academic librarian and expert on mediaeval manuscripts. He is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and former Fellow Librarian of the Parker Library. His book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is the winner of the Duff Cooper Prize for 2016 and the Wolfson History Prize for 2017.
Kathleen L. Scott is a codicologist specialising in 15th-century English manuscripts. An independent scholar, she is associated with the University of Massachusetts.
David John McKitterick, is an English librarian and academic, who was Librarian and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Mary Teresa Josephine Webber, is a British palaeographer, medievalist, and academic. She has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1997 and Professor of Palaeography at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge since 2018. Webber studied Modern History as an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford.
Albinia Catherine de la Mare,, known in print as A.C. de la Mare and informally as "Tilly", was an English librarian and palaeographer who specialised in Italian Renaissance manuscripts.
David Fairweather Foxon, FBA was an English bibliographer. Noted for his study of books and literature in 18th-century England, he was the Reader in Textual Criticism at the University of Oxford from 1968 to 1982.
Anthony Robert Alwyn Hobson, FBA was a British auctioneer and historian, specialising in the history of books.
Peter George Beal, FBA, FSA was a British manuscript expert and indexer.
James Patrick Ronaldson Lyell (1871–1948) was a solicitor, author, book collector, and bibliographer. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and at University College London.
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.