The 32nd annual conference on book trade history took place on Friday 26 and Saturday 27 November 2010 at the Warburg Institute, Wolborn Square, London.  It was organised as usual by the indefatigable Robin Myers together with Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote and supported by the ABA. There were 66 attendees and although this included a sprinkling of booksellers most came from research libraries and the academic world.

Given the subject of the conference, the location could not have been more appropriate. Based originally on the private library of Aby Warburg, the Institute relocated to London in 1934 from Hamburg to escape from the Nazis and in its original Trust deed states that it is “dedicated to the study of the classical tradition in Western Culture”.  It's influence on the cultural history of this country has been incalculable, transforming the study of art and intellectual history through such luminaries as Fritz Saxl, Rudolf Wittkower, Frances Yates and Ernst Gombrich. We were treated to an introduction to the library by Professor Jill Kraye, the Warburg’s librarian. She explained the unique classification system of the library, which devotes floors of the building to the themes of Image, Word, Orientation and Action. It follows “the law of the good neighbour” whereby books are placed in conjunction with each other so that in looking for one you may be inspired in a serendipitous way by the other. Diana Parikian, who was at the conference, summed up the Institute rather eloquently as a “Theatre of Memory”. It might also serve as a model for the book shop of our dreams! 

There were four lectures on the first day interspersed with coffee and an excellent lunch. David Butterfield, the Rowse Research Fellow at Christ’s College Cambridge, spoke about Latin and Greek verse composition in England, making the interesting observation that pre-1800 these were mostly original compositions and post-1800 almost entirely translations into Greek or Latin from English.  Freyja Cox-Jensen looked at the distribution and circulation of classical texts in Europe in the 16th and 17th century and showed that English presses represented only 5% of the European activity in the printing of classical texts at that time. She stressed how the presses in England concentrated on bringing out works in translation and remarked that Robert Burton, for instance, abandoned his original idea of writing his Anatomie of Melancholy in Latin when he realised what a restricted market for it there would be.  

After lunch and a tour of the library we were treated to an elegant, if specialised, examination of late 16th century Latin writers from Wales by Ceri Davies, Professor of Classics at Swansea University. The day was brought to a close by Jos van Heel, Curator of the Historic Collections of the Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum in the Hague who guided us through the considerable technical difficulties experienced by printers in the 16th and 17th century in trying to reproduce facsimiles of classical texts. The delegates then repaired to the Dr Williams’s Library across the road for a welcome reception of wine and nibbles.  

The following morning we assembled after coffee to listen to Dirk Imhof give a fascinating talk on the workings of the great Plantin Press in Antwerp under Jan Moretus I from 1589-1610. Dirk Imhof is Curator of Rare Books and Archives at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp and, as such, has a unique knowledge of the archival sources there. These are remarkably comprehensive with details of wages, distribution of books, sales to countries in Europe, print runs and warehouse problems and so on. We learnt that the standard booksellers’ discount at the Press was 25% and the crucial importance to the Press of sales generated by the twice-yearly Frankfurt Fair.  We were given a vivid picture of the working of a major 16th century printing press, helped by the survival of the extraordinary detail of the daily journal of the Press’ activities.

Nicholas Poole-Wilson entertained and instructed us with an urbane talk about the classics and fashion among English book collectors. He distinguished between books for the Drawing Room and those for the Study, observing the red morocco and fine printing often hid poorly edited texts. He pointed out that bibliographical Grand Tours by aristocrats from England pre-dated those for the visual arts and instanced a number of 16th century libraries that were built up in this way. The cult for the classical text only really got going at the end of the 17th century, however, and with it the love of red morocco in England with the increased availability of goatskin. He traced the accumulation and dispersal of classical libraries up to the Roxburghe sale and beyond and finished his talk with what felt like a more private interlude on the publishing of neo-Latin verse in the late 18th and 19th century, which neatly brought us, back to the subject matter of the first lecture.

The final lecture by Christopher Stray focused on OUP’s classical publishing in the second half of the 19th century. Stray explained how Oxford dominated the market in classics and how young Fellows would supplement their often meagre income by editing texts for so much a page. He spoke at length about the great success of Lewis and Short with the Latin-English Dictionary, of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon in its various incarnations and concluded with an examination of the Clarendon Press series and its diversity in editorial style.

In summing up, Michael Harris made the point that in successful conferences the lectures make connections between each other and that this had certainly been the case with the present event. While at times being hard-going for the non-specialist, the conference served to remind those present of the huge influence that the classical world has exerted over the development of the European intellectual and creative tradition. 

Peter Miller