Walter O. Evans, "Why Collect?" The 2023 Kenneth W. Rendell Lecture, 14 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Barbara E. Mundy, "Books in the Contact Zone," Malkin Lecture, 12 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Leah Price, "Reader=Inessential Worker: Book History After Lockdown," 7 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

S. Max Edelson, "The Surveyor's Eye," NEH-SHARP Lecture, 5 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Mary Catherine Kinniburgh is the co-director of Granary Books, an independent publisher and archives/rare book dealer. As a scholar of postwar American poetry and an archives broker, her activities occur at the intersection of research and praxis, and her writing often focuses on the poetics of archival work. In particular, her research explores making sense of high volume in literary collections.

In this talk, Kinniburgh discusses her ongoing series "Messy Archivist," which explores the interstitial qualities of working on archives through prose, poetry, and images. Published by her experimental imprint TKS Books, each "Messy Archivist" is a handmade chapbook that is often organized around a keyword, such as messy, or need. For the fourth volume and this talk, the premise is surface: what might be interpreted as an archival surface, and how does our attentiveness to the relationship between surface and depth inform our understanding of archives, especially at scale? Drawing on Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s concept of “surface reading” in literary texts, the physics of surfing, what puts the “relief” in relief printing, and Kinniburgh’s experiences working on specific archives at Granary Books, this talk will contextualize the concept of surface as a lens for the information overload that necessarily comes with archival work, and a critical approach for the toolkits of fellow scholars and archivists of twentieth century American poetry and beyond.

Rezek, Joseph - "Ideologies of the Codex in Hakluyt and Smith" - NEH-SHARP Lecture, 1 Aug 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Marcus, Hannah - "Characterizing the Elderly across Formats in Early Modern Italy" - 27 July 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

McNamee, Megan - "Significance of a Concertina-Fold Almanac" - Kress Lecture - 25 July 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Roldán Vera, Eugenia - "Book Trade in the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic" - Karmiole Lecture - 13 July 22 by Rare Book School Lectures

White, Eric - "A History of the Gutenberg Bible (continued)" - Malkin Lecture, 11 July 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures