Date/Time
Date(s) - 27 Mar 2017
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Zachary Lesser (Penn) will discuss “Million Dollar Xeroxes: Early Modern Bibliography between UMI and EEBO.”
Zack writes:
> In the late 1960s, the University of Pennsylvania contracted with University Microfilms, Inc., then a subsidiary of the Xerox Corporation, to produce xerox copies of the entire STC microfilm collection as bound books, at a cost of about $1.5 million in today’s money. These books were housed in the “STC Seminar Room” in the rare books library at Penn, before being moved in the early 2000s to New Jersey to a long-term storage facility. In this paper, I undertake a bibliographic and media-historical analysis of these Xerox books, comparing them to the microfilm that underlies them and to the EEBO project that made them seem redundant. What kinds of books are these? What kinds of scholarly work did they enable? Why were they perceived to be so necessary, and then so expendable? Through this investigation, I try to theorize our scholarly relation to the archive of early modern printed material on which we rely for our historicism.
Zachary Lesser received his PhD in English Literature from Columbia University and his BA in Renaissance Studies and Religious Studies from Brown University. Before coming to Penn, he taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His teaching and research interests focus on Shakespeare and early modern drama, the history of material texts, bibliography and editing, early modern political and religious debate, and digital humanities. Professor Lesser is a general editor of The Arden Shakespeare <http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/academic/academic-subjects/drama-and-performance-studies/the-arden-shakespeare/> (fourth series), along with Peter Holland and Tiffany Stern. He is the author of Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text <http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15298.html> (Penn Press, 2015), which won the Elizabeth Dietz Award in 2016, presented annually by SEL: Studies in English Literature to the best book in Renaissance studies; and Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade <http://www.amazon.com/Renaissance-Drama-Politics-Publication-Readings/dp/0521039991/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311279856&sr=8-1> (Cambridge University Press, 2004), which also won the Dietz Award <http://www.sel.rice.edu/Content.aspx?id=68> in 2006.