Bibliography Week

What is Bibliography Week, anyway? Join members of the BSA Membership Committee for an overview of this mainstay in the book world, taking place at the end of January each year.

During this Zoom meeting, hosts will provide an overview of the program and help attendees prepare for a week of bibliographical events in New York City. We’ll cover the week’s events (virtual, hybrid, and in-person only) and NYC travel basics like weather and local transportation and leave plenty of time for your questions.

Open to the public. Registration is required.

The Bibliographical Society is delighted to participate remotely in Bibliography Week by inviting participants to join a lecture by Alan Nelson on ‘The printed-book catalogues of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872): eccentric publications of an eccentric man’. Sir Thomas Phillipps’s catalogues of his vast library of printed books, published chaotically 1819-1871, have experienced a similarly chaotic afterlife.

Please register to attend online: https://bibsoc.org.uk/event/lecture-alan-nelson-the-printed-book-catalogues-of-sir-thomas-phillipps-1792-1872/

In this year’s annual Rendell Lecture, Glen Miranker will discuss both the intangible values and the tangible insights that are inherent in some of the holograph manuscripts, letters, notebooks, and marginalia from his collection of Sherlock Holmes material.

“When authors put pen to paper, their handwritten text—plus insertions, strike-throughs, and other scribbles—reveal both a special aura and provide valuable clues for devoted readers, bibliographers, historians, and biographers alike,” Miranker said. “The up-close exploration of manuscripts can bring unparalleled understanding of its life and times and the community—agents, reviewers, illustrators, bookbinders, editors, printers, publishers, booksellers, collectors—with whom authors interact.”

Glen Miranker is one of the foremost collectors of Sherlockian books and has served as a bibliophilic consultant and lecturer for numerous institutions, including the Toronto Reference Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Newberry Library.

Open the public. Registration is required. Separate links for in person and online attendance can be found below.

Register to attend in person here.

Register to attend virtually here.

Join exhibitors offering books, maps, ephemera, and more for sale at the Bibliography Week Showcase. The Showcase takes place in conjunction with Bibliography Week at L’Alliance New York located at 22 East 60th Street, just across from the Grolier Club. Check back in January for more information, including a list of dealers.

Open to the public.

Paper Jane marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen (1775–1817). Now arguably the best-known author in the English language after Shakespeare, that was not always the case—when she died at the early age of 41, Austen was relatively unknown, having published only four novels anonymously (“by a Lady”). The exhibition is organized chronologically, measuring the novelist’s growing fame at fifty-year intervals (1825, 1875, 1925, 1975, and 2025) through a kaleidoscopic mix of 110 objects, including rare first editions, manuscripts, popular reprintings, movie posters, illustrations, theater playbills, and other paper ephemera, all drawn from the collections of Sandra Clark, Mary Crawford, and Janine Barchas. In addition to showcasing rare first and early editions of Austen’s novels, the exhibition explores the profound influence of the Austen family on the writer’s legacy. An accompanying catalogue, published by the Grolier Club, will be available in December 2025.

Open to the public. Registration is required.

Join BSA for a guided tour—led by the curator, Amanda Wunder—of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library’s current exhibition, Spanish Style: Fashion Illuminated, 1550-1700. Registration is required and attendance is limited to 25 participants.

Attendees will also have the option to purchase the exhibition catalogue at a special discounted price of $25.

The exhibition features sixteen rarely seen manuscript letters of nobility illuminated with miniatures showing men, women, and children dressed in the latest courtly styles. These brilliantly colored family portraits, painted in painstaking detail, reveal how upwardly-mobile families manipulated their appearances and used their clothes to climb the social ladder in the Spanish Empire.

Spanish Style: Fashion Illuminated, 1550-1700 is curated by Amanda Wunder, a specialist on early modern Spanish art and culture, and author of Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV (2024).

The books printed during the first printing revolution were first called incunabula by Hadrianus Junius in a passage in his book entitled Batavia, published posthumously in 1588, in which he referred to a period “inter prima artis [typographicae] incunabula,” meaning in the first infancy of the typographic art. Later Cornelius à Beughem applied the term incunabula specifically to books printed in the 15th century in a sale catalogue entitled Incunabula typographiae, published in 1688. The incunabula of the second printing revolution also fall into a specific time period but are identified by a more complex set of parameters.

This lecture will be delivered by Jeremy Norman.

Open the public. Registration is required. Separate links for in person and online attendance can be found below.

Register to attend in person here.

Register to attend virtually here.

Join BSA at the New York Society Library for a gathering in the Members’ Room. This is an opportunity to meet your fellow members of both the BSA and the Society Library, learn more about our organizations and the many resources we have to offer to the broad community of book people. This is a free event but registration is required.

The BSA Officers and members of the Council warmly invite you to attend the Society’s Annual Meeting on 23 January 2026! This year the program will start at 10 am with panel presentations on the topic of Bibliographical Mysteries. The Editors of PBSA will host a brown-bag lunch session, “Exploring Exhibitions as Bibliographical Work,” starting at noon, with the New Scholars program beginning at 1 pm. The Keynote Lecture, titled Erle Stanley Gardner and the Case of the Mexican Pirates, will be delivered by Dr. Nora Benedict, Associate Professor of Spanish and Digital Humanities at the University of Georgia.

Details about the panel presentations and the New Scholars Program speakers are available in the News section of the BSA website.

The American Printing History Association cordially invites you to attend our Annual Meeting on Saturday 24 January 24 at 2 PM Eastern. The 2026 Annual Meeting will be held in a hybrid format, allowing for both in-person and virtual attendance.

In-Person Location: 307 West 38th Street, Studio 1505 (15th Floor), New York City (between Eighth and Ninth Avenues) (reservation required, please RSVP here)

Virtual Attendance: The meeting will be streamed live via Zoom (reservation required to receive login codes, please RSVP here)

The meeting is free and open to the public. It will take place in person in New York City and virtually via Zoom.