London’s Bibliographical Society Offers Online Lecture Series

Credit: Paul Grundy/Bibliographical Society

The King’s Library of George III, now stored in the central book tower in the British Library.

The Bibliographical Society in London has released details of its new lecture series, covering the rest of 2020 (via Zoom, starting 5.30 p.m. UK time) and into 2021 (when they hope meetings can start up again at the Society of Antiquaries in Piccadilly).

The Zoom talks are:

  • November 17, 2020: Insights into the King’s Library of George III with Adrian Edwards who looks at how the monarch established his royal library of 65,000 books and pamphlets, now stored in the iconic central book tower in the British Library (pictured above). The talk looks in particular at the king’s collection of Americana.
  • December 15, 2020: Paper for octavos: Innovation in early sixteenth-century book production with David Shaw, looking at medieval papermaking. 

In 2021 there will be talks about The Sloane Printed Books Project at the British Library (January 19); scholar-collector W.S. Lewis’s work on Horace Walpole (February 16); and the Rothschild book collection at the now National Trust-owned Waddesdon Manor (March 16), with Edward Wilson-Lee, author of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, speaking on the extraordinarily ambitious bibliographical project 'Hernando Colón and the Universal Library Machine.’

The 2020 talks are free but need to be booked online via the society’s website.