Date/Time
Date(s) - 30 Mar 2015
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Monday, 30 March,
Penn Workshop in the History of Material Texts.
5:15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center
on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
Elizabeth Frengel
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
“Endpapers: When Extra-Literary Becomes Part of the Literary”
Endpapers, slipped discreetly between a book’s binding and text block, are
easy to overlook. They developed from a practical need: to protect
illuminations from the wear of hardwood boards that served for the covers
of medieval books. Not much to look at, early endpapers were made from
materials that binders had at hand, such as manuscript waste or blank
sheets of parchment. Over time, binders and publishers began to experiment
with these sheets, using marbled and decorated papers for artistic effect
and later putting advertisements, elaborate designs, genealogies, and
landscapes on endpapers. Some endpaper designs are integral the book’s
narrative, such as E. H. Shepard’s map of the “100 Aker Wood” featured on
the endpapers of A. A. Milne’s 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh.
This seminar will, through material example, examine the development of
endpapers from the fifteenth century to the present. Participants will look
at a broad range of endpaper designs and discuss the relationships these
paratextual materials hold with the texts that they envelop.
*Elizabeth Frengel is the research librarian at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book &
Manuscript Library. She curated the exhibition “Under the Covers: A Visual
History of Decorated Endpapers,” which was on view at the Beinecke Library
from January to April 2014. She has presented papers on the endpaper
designs of E. H. Shepard and Beatrix Potter.*
All are welcome! Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards
should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the
library building.