A N N U A L  M E E T I N G

The Annual Meeting of the Society takes place in New York City each year on the Friday after the fourth Thursday in January. The 2012 Annual Meeting will take place on Friday, January 27 at the Grolier Club (47 E. 60th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues).

A short business meeting, including the reports of the officers and committees, is followed by an address by an invited speaker and a reception. The meeting is preceded by a panel of New Scholars.

The meeting and all talks are free and open to the public, who is cordially invited to attend.

The Annual Meeting is part of a series of events known as Bibliography Week. In addition to the annual meeting of BSA, this includes the annual meeting of the American Printing History Association (APHA) and a variety of lectures and exhibitions on book-related topics at various New York institutions.

Report on the 2011 Annual Meeting

The Society's Annual Meeting took place on Jan. 28, 2011 at the Grolier Club in New York City.

Annual Address

Carol Clark, William McCall Vickery 1957 Professor of Art History & American Studies at Amherst College, gave the Annual Address, entitled "Haunted Paintings in the World of Print: Charles Deas (1818-1867)."

Prof. Clark explored the echo of Deas’s art in the printed world of his own time and beyond. She considered the way different writing forms—brief descriptions, critiques of celebrated paintings, pleas for information about “lost” works, and fiction commissioned to respond to his pictures—created a verbal echo of the art that was lost. Engraved and lithographed reproductions, too, stood in for key works, Long Jakes and The Death Struggle, until the paintings themselves resurfaced in the second half of the twentieth century.

She concluded with a consideration of six of the almost forty paintings now known to survive, focusing on the published record of starkly changing interpretations, and contextualized these works within Charles Deas’s life and decade-long career, which ended abruptly with his 1848 commitment to an insane asylum. Although he lived another twenty years, his life and art were forgotten soon after his commitment, the works he had successfully exhibited in St. Louis and New York City having been lost, destroyed, or stashed in attics.

Fellowship Awards

The Fellowship Committee announced the following awards:

The Katharine F. Pantzer Senior Fellowship in Bibliography and the British Book Trades ($6000)

Earle Havens (Johns Hopkins University), "Illicit Printing, Book Smuggling, and Scribal Publication by the Elizabethan Catholic Underground, 1558-1603."

Jeremy Dibbell (Massachusetts Historical Society), "Books in Bermuda: The First Two Centuries."

The BSA-Mercantile Library Fellowship in North American Bibliography ($2000)

Laura Helton (New York University), "Cataloging the Race: Dorothy Porter and African American Bibliographical Practice."

Hester Blum (Penn State University), "Arctic and Antarctic Circles: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration."

The Reese Fellowship for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas ($2000)

Lise Jaillant (University of British Columbia), "'Highbrow,' 'Middlebrow,' or 'Modern? Random House, the Modern Library, and the Academic Market, 1925-1955."

Madeleine Thompson (Indiana University), "Elkin Mathews and the 'First Edition Mania,' 1890-1930."

Fu Liangyu (University of Pittsburgh), "British Science Books that were Translated in China during the Nineteenth Century."

Abhijit Gupta (Jadavpur University), "A History of the Baptist Mission Press in Serampore, India."

Joad Raymond (University of East Anglia), "An Edition of John Milton’s Latin Defences."

St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize

Andrea Krupp accepted 2011 St Louis Mercantile Library Prize in American Bibliography for her book: Bookcloth in England and America, 1823-1850.

Funded by the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, an institutional member of the Society, this prize encourages scholarship in the bibliography of American history and literature. 

BSA Council Class of 2014

BSA membership unanimously approved the Nominating Committee's choices for BSA's Council Class of 2014:

     Douglas F. Bauer
John Crichton
Joan Friedman
Gregory A. Pass