Audio of Past RBS Lectures Now Available Online


We are very pleased to announce that audio recordings of more than 100 Book Arts Press/Rare Book School lectures from the past four decades are now available online at www.rarebookschool.org/lectures. Along with most lectures from the past several years, those now converted from the original cassette tapes include talks by Sue Allen, Nicolas Barker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, as well as:

  • Graham Pollard, “The Scope of Bibliography” (27 November 1973), the earliest lecture for which we have a recording
  • Leona Rostenberg, “The Library of Robert Hooke: A Microcosm of the Restoration Book Trade” (12 April 1982)
  • Edwin Wolf 2nd, “Rare Book and Research Libraries: Creating an Image” (12 July 1983), the first lecture during a summer Rare Book School session
  • Lawrence Witten, “Microcomputers in my Rare Book Business” (15 August 1984)
  • D. F. McKenzie, “Orality, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand” (23 January 1984); “From Book to Text: Pushing Bibliography On?” (27 January 1986)
  • Nearly all of the annual Sol. M. and Mary Ann O’Brian Malkin Lectures

To listen, simply click the linked title (in red) of the past lecture. Additional audio will be added later this year; if you have particular requests please send them to Jeremy Dibbell at jeremy.dibbell@virginia.edu. If we have a recording of the lecture, we’ll make every effort to post it. We are also exploring other options for making these recordings available (whether through iTunes or similar services), and will have more information on that as we firm up those plans.