Judi Loach will be presenting her paper, ‘Just “A Little More Nonsense”: Emblematic Production and the Private Presses of Interwar London’, at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 13 March 2012. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.
Abstract
The Private Press section of the university’s recently acquired Rare Books Collection includes many books from small, relatively unknown presses, especially ones active in the inter-war period. These—often quite slender—books were issued in small print runs but are important today as material evidence that can illuminate our understanding of the influential sector of society—upper class yet somewhat bohemian—that produced them. This paper looks at one such book in detail, and shows how its ’emblematic’ manner of production reveals similarities in thinking by those using handpresses, regardless of the historic period in which they operate. Image taken from Cardiff Rare Books Collection.
About the speaker
Judi Loach is a cultural historian and Interdisciplinary Research Professor in the Humanities at Cardiff University. While training in architecture and architectural history, she worked as a freelance journalist and commercial researcher, at a time when printing and publishing were beginning to undergo radical transformations due to the electronic revolution. A couple of years in commercial publishing followed, during which she also trained as a printer’s ‘devil’ on handpresses. She read her PhD in architectural history and theory at Cambridge, with a year away in France taking a higher degree in French literature while continuing PhD research in numerous provincial libraries and archives, thus sustaining the combination of academic theory and material research. Her love affair with books and buildings seems to be ongoing.
Cardiff Book History 