Wednesday, February 15, 2012


FYI France : Book History Workshop, Lyon, June 18-22

Once again -- 9th Edition! -- the Institut d'histoire du livre is offering you and other book-lovers you may know a chance to:

* travel to France,

* do so in the Springtime,

* do so to Lyon, fabulous city of two beautiful rivers, the traboules and bouchons and Canuts, La Croix Rousse,

* indulge, there, in your favorite past-time of noodling-around in the rarefied worlds of analytical bibliography, printed ephemera, and gold-tooled book bindings -- rare and ancient books, and the fine arts of printing them -- guided by experts, a chance to meet and exchange views with interesting peers,

* eat & drink & relax -- tripe, chocolate, sauces, les cuisines novellas and not-so,

* leave your iPhone at home...

 
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> BOOK HISTORY WORKSHOP
> Lyon, 18-22 june 2012

> For the 9th edition of its Book History Workshop, organized in collaboration with the Rare Book School (University of Virginia), the Lyon-based Institut d'histoire du livre is offering 3 advanced courses in the fields of book and printing history.

>Courses on offer this year are:

> Dominique Varry, Physical (analytical) bibliography

> Michael Twyman, Printed ephemera under the magnifying glass

> Isabelle de Conihout and Pascal Ract-Madou, French gold-tooled bindings 1507-1967: major workshops and collectors

> Fee : 450 euros for one course (4 days)
> information and inscriptions : ihl@enssib.fr



> * Physical (analytical) bibliography

> The largely Anglo-Saxon discipline of analytical bibliography offers an archaeology of the printed book. The course offers a practical introduction to the analysis and description of documents typeset by hand and printed on the common press before 1800. The aim is to familiarize students with the many ways in which books reveal how they were produced, who printed them, and where.

> Physical bibliography is an indispensable tool for scholarly editors of rare books, for historians who need to check the validity of printed sources, and for librarians and collectors requiring a full understanding of the books in their collections. It provides the means of reconstituting the genealogy of successive editions of a given text, of identifying forgeries and pirate editions published under false addresses in order to circumvent the censors, and of identifying 'manipulations' by unscrupulous booksellers, and fakes which have been put on the market at various times.

> Topics include: basic concepts and definitions; history of the theory and practice of analytical bibliography; the organization of early printing shops; precise methods of book description (in particular collation formulae); the importance of comparing different copies of the same book (variants, press corrections, cancels, re-printings); the detection of counterfeit copies, false imprints and forgeries; the identification of typical booking styles.

> Tutor: Prof. Dominique Varry. The course is in French.



> * Printed ephemera under the magnifying glass

> This course will look at printed ephemera in several different ways, though the main objective for participants is to understand and be able to identify the techniques used in the production of such documents.

> In addition to the craft processes of etching and engraving on copper, woodcut and wood-engraving, ink and crayon lithography and engraving on stone, we shall study engraving on steel, stereotyping, the electrotype process, transfer lithography, typo-lithography, different methods of color printing (from relief blocks, the Congreve process, the Baxter process, chromolithography, chromo-typography), and the application of photography to printing processes (with and without screens and on one or more colors).

> We shall also consider the design of printed ephemera, and particularly the relationship between technique, form, and use.

> At the end of each session we shall take a look at original documents of the 19th and 20th centuries (mainly French and English), including letterpress and lithographed posters, forms, bill-heads, sheet music covers, invitations, publicity of various kinds, calendars and labels.

> The course will be taught in French, but discussion is possible in both French and English.

> Tutor: Michael Twyman.



> * French gold-tooled bindings 1507-1967: major workshops and collectors

> Since the publication in 1951 of Louis-Marie Michon's La reliure française -- an excellent but sparsely-illustrated study which is now, inevitably, rather out of date -- there has been no serious study of French bookbinding as a whole.

> Isabelle de Conihout and Pascal Ract-Madoux aim in their course to fill this gap by offering a close examination of a large number of remarkable bindings from the period 1507-1967. A hundred or so original bindings (and several hundred photographic reproductions) will be presented and described. Although bindings are physically inseparable from the content which they enclose, they also have to be considered as autonomous artifacts. French deluxe bindings in particular have to be considered as works of art as much as historical objects.

> Tutors: Isabelle de Conihout, Pascal Ract-Madou. The course is in French.



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The above annonce, translated a little en américain by me and an Apple -- I think, or maybe Microsoft -- spelchecker, from the version in English posted online February 8. For the version in French, and additional details and course inscription, please consult the resources which follow:

 
* Institut d'histoire du livre, Lyon

 
-- and definitely see also, whilst (?) in Lyon --

 
* Musée de l'imprimerie de Lyon -- wonderful printing museum...

 
* ENSSIB / École Nationale Supérieure des Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques -- national library school, near one of the world's most beautiful city parks...

 
* Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon


-- a great "public" library, but not only -- in the French style, as public libraries go -- for example see also, for those with "rare & ancient" interests --

    * une bibliothèque carolingienne dont certains manuscrits remontent au xe siècle ;

    * 1 300 incunables ;

    * de nombreuses impressions lyonnaises du xvie siècle (Rabelais, Maurice Scève, etc.) ;

    * les 400 000 volumes de la collection des Fontaines des jésuites de Chantilly ; en 2002, elle est enrichie par le fonds slave des jésuites (issue de la Bibliothèque slave de Paris (le fonds Gagarine) et de la bibliothèque du Centre d.étude russe Saint-Georges (le fonds Saint-Georges)).

    * un important fonds de partitions musicales anciennes, de disques d'archives et de chansons populaires ;

    * plus de 120 000 estampes anciennes (Dürer, Rembrandt, Callot, etc.) ;

    * un fonds en langue chinoise de réputation internationale ;

    * d'importantes collections photographiques (André Kertesz, Robert Doisneau, William Klein, etc.) ;

    * près de 13 000 titres de périodiques, dont 4 000 vivants ;

    * le dépôt légal pour les 8 départements de Rhône-Alpes.




Bonne route,



Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com



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