PLEASE NOTE: This page represents a past Bibliography Week program. Details about the 2025 program coming soon! As organizers strive to stick to the same schedule each year, you may find past calendars helpful in making plans in advance of the coming year’s program release.

Bibliography Week

January 23–28, 2023

Online Event
Speaking Texts: Recordings, Preservation, Accessibility, and Indigeneity

This panel brings together scholars who will explore bibliographical analysis of oral culture, textual transcription, and capture and preservation of recorded sound from a variety of perspectives and help us to think through how we might do a bibliography of sound and oral culture.

Online Event
BIPOC, LGBTQ+, Disabled, and Spanish-speaking Bibliographers: Bibliography Week Meet-Up

Hosted by Vice President Megan Peiser, PBSA Editor Jesse Erickson, Council member María Fernàndez, and BSA member Kate Ozment, this event provides an opportunity to connect BIPOC, LGBTQ+, Disabled, and Spanish-speaking bibliographers.

In-Person Event
Bearing a Resemblance: The Pissareff Quran in the Rare Collection Books at the Butler Library

The Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s Bibliography Week lecture will be presented by Avinoam Shalem. An early Quran, allegedly considered the copy by the third caliph, Uthman bin Affan (murdered in 656 CE), is traditionally said to have been carried by Timur from Iraq to Samarqand. It was taken by the Russians in 1869, and “returned” by them to Bashkortostan and then Tashkent in the 20th century, but before it left Russian hands, it became an object of study for Russian scholars and was reproduced in fifty copies by Dr. S. Pissareff.  Professor Shalem will discuss the history of the Quran, and the curious status of the 1905 Pissareff facsimile, residing in the grey zone between reproduction and copy.

In-Person and Online Event
Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press: Tools, Data, and Methods for Researching Secret Printing

A panel of Carnegie Mellon scientists and scholars – Christopher N. Warren, Max G’Sell, and Grolier Club member Samuel Lemley – will present the Grolier Club Bibliography Week lecture. At the heart of this talk is the recognition that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment developed out of a long and complex tradition of press controls and licensing in Europe and the colonies, and that this amendment’s framers understood a lesson sometimes under-appreciated by scholars: that press controls had long pushed certain kinds of printing underground.

In-Person and Online Event
Materialities of Contemporary Latin American Publishing

This panel examines how actors associated with publishing have reimagined books as material objects in contemporary Latin America. While often situated on the periphery of global publishing markets, the region is a center of innovation where a range of projects—independent, state-funded, radically anti-capitalist, or a mixture of these—have proposed alternative ways of making, reading, and circulating books. Reception follows. Livestream the presentation at https://youtu.be/5s8qLPcbuPk – no registration required.

Cover for Rex Stout’s A novela assassina, (Editora Mérito, 1953).

In-Person Event
BSA & NYSL Members and Friends Mixer

Join us 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.

In-Person and Online Event
The 2023 BSA Annual Meeting and New Scholars Program

Attend the Society’s Annual meeting with a keynote lecture, “Toward a Bibliography of Birchbark Booksby Dr. Kelly Wisecup. The 2023 New Scholars Program begins at 2pm Eastern.

“Chicago in my Grandfather’s Days.—By Chief Pokagon.” Simon Pokagon, The Red Man’s Greeting. Ayer 251 .P651 P7 1893Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.

In-Person Event
Better Read Than Dead Garage Sale

Brooklyn used booksellers Better Read Than Dead open up their (literally) underground warehouse for a two-day weekend sale, Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 6pm. Thousands of antiquarian, collectible, and plain old paperback books – alongside prints, periodicals, pamphlets, and more – will be for sale. Local antiquarian and ephemera dealers Dividing Line and Fugitive Materials will be the special guest dealers set up on the premises as well. The sale will be held in the Book Garage, 539a Greene Avenue in Brooklyn, around the corner from Better Read Than Dead’s bookstore inside Burly Coffee at 90 Kosciuszko Street.

Details No registration required.
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Online Event
Aristotle's Masterpiece: Reflecting On The Material Text

The NYAM Bibliography Week lecture will be presented by Mary E. Fissell, PhD. Aristotle’s Masterpiece, first published in 1684, was a steady seller into the 20th century, advising readers about sex and babies. Over the course of writing a book about the Masterpiece, Professor Mary Fissell looked at hundreds of copies. In her talk she will reflect on the relationship between evidence drawn from the material text, and that of readership from other sources.

Online Event
American Printing History Association (APHA) Annual Meeting

The APHA annual meeting program will include officers’ reports, the election of board trustees, awards to individuals and institutions for their distinguished contributions to printing history, and the announcement of the 2023 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship in Printing History.