February 22, 2011
Dear Fellow Members,
I am writing to give you the details of our next annual meeting, which will be held on Friday, March 18, 2011, at 4:00 p.m. in the auditorium of the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections Library. Following a brief business meeting, we will hear a talk by Nicole Bouché, a member of our Council since last year and the director of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at UVa since October 2009. She has had extensive experience in all aspects of special-collections librarianship, having worked with manuscripts at the Bancroft and Beinecke libraries and as a curator of special collections at the University of Washington in Seattle, before coming to Virginia. Her knowledge of the field will be applied to the Virginia holdings in her talk, entitled “Rare, Unique, and Special: Current Highpoints and Future Directions for Special Collections at the University of Virginia Library.” Following the talk there will be a reception.
In the business part of the meeting, preceding Nicole’s talk, we shall vote on the election of one Councilor. This year it is my term that is ending. I shall be happy to continue serving on the Council for another term if the membership wishes to re-elect me.
We have scheduled our meeting, as is our long-standing practice, so that it falls during the Virginia Festival of the Book. This year’s Festival, the 17th, runs from March 16 through 20, and its roster of programs can be seen on its website, at <www.vabook.org>. We hope that the listing of our meeting there will encourage interested nonmembers who are attending the Festival to come to our meeting as well. And we hope that many of our out-of-town members will find more reasons to come to Charlottesville at that time, because there will be many events to attract them.
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Since our last annual meeting, a new volume of Studies in Bibliography, the 58th, was published. It contains eight essays, the authors of which constitute (as usual) a widely varied group: besides professors, retired professors, and independent scholars, there are representatives of librarianship, university-press editing, and the software business. Like all volumes in the series, this one makes important contributions to a broad range of bibliographical, bibliophilic, and textual studies. The fields included are textual theory, scribal practices, compositor study, textual transmission, English printing
history, American book-distribution history, book-collecting history, and the history of book-jackets. The Society is proud to be the publisher of Studies, and we (like the rest of the bibliographical world) are profoundly grateful to the editor, David L. Vander Meulen, and to his assistant, Elizabeth Lynch, for their extraordinary work in maintaining the tradition of Studies.
They also oversee the Society’s other publications, both in book and electronic form. Two forthcoming books that are on the Society’s publishing agenda are my study of the history and significance of book-jackets and a volume of Paul Needham’s essays. Our electronic publications (which also benefit from the advice on electronic matters provided by David Seaman) are available on the Society’s website, at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/> –an address that will shortly change to <www.bsuva.org>, the result of a move efficiently supervised by Elizabeth Lynch and Anne Ribble. The Society now has an enviable record of important electronic publications, which meet the same standards required for our publications in book form. The next addition to the list will be Gordon B. Neavill’s bibliography of the Modern Library. It is a major contribution to publishing history and an exemplary work of bibliographical scholarship, and we look forward to adding it to our distinguished list of electronic publications.
Each new volume of Studies is distributed by the University of Virginia Press, and the Society’s Secretary-Treasurer has a limited supply of most earlier volumes. All of the Society’s other available publications in printed form can be ordered from Oak Knoll Books. Let me remind you that members of the Society who identify themselves will be given a 10% discount. If you don’t receive Oak Knoll catalogues and would like to, just write to 310 Delaware Street, New Castle, Delaware 19720; or phone 302-328-7232 or 1-800-996-2556; or fax 302-3287274; or email <oakknoll@oakknoll.com>. Oak Knoll’s complete catalogue can also be browsed at <www.oakknoll.com>.
One more announcement: Richard Goulden (formerly of the British Library),who has been the Society’s Honorary Secretary-Treasurer for the British Isles for the past twenty years, is retiring. He was only the second person to have held this position since its creation in 1952 (succeeding Mrs. Douglas Wyllie). We are grateful for his diligence and loyalty, and we wish him well for the future.
Although I’ve already mentioned a few members of the Council, I now want to thank them all as a group for their loyal service to the Society: Ruthe Battestin, Terry Belanger, Nicole Bouché, David Seaman, David Vander Meulen, and Karin Wittenborg. I also want to give special thanks to our Secretary-Treasurer, Anne Ribble, for her expert and collegial handling of the Society’s day-to-day affairs.
Finally, let me repeat my perennial request. The Society, like all scholarly organizations at present, needs more membership support. I hope all of you will publicize the Society and the importance of its work, especially its active publication program, both in printed and in electronic form. And when membership-renewal time comes, I hope you will consider increasing the level of your membership. On behalf of the Council, I thank all of you for your support.
I look forward to seeing many of you at the annual meeting, and I send bestwishes to you all.
Yours sincerely,
G. Thomas Tanselle