The 2026 Annual Meeting: Morning Panels Announced
Earlier this fall the BSA Events Planning Sub-Committee called for proposals for the morning panels at the 2026 Annual Meeting on the subject of bibliographical mysteries, both those we have been able to solve and those that remain enigmatic. The Sub-Committee, chaired by Clara Drummond of Northwestern University, received excellent responses to the call and has organized them into the three panels described below.
The three morning panels will run concurrently from 10am to 11:30 am on Friday 23 January 2026, and are included as part of the regular Annual Meeting registration.
Bibliographical Lore ↑
Tale, Text, and Matter: A Medieval Japanese-Mâché Statue presented by Yueying Li
This talk focuses on a unique textual artifact, a paper statue made of handwritten letters from premodern Japan. The statue is traditionally linked to a tragic love story from a medieval Japanese tale, Heike monogatari (ca. 12th century): Yokobue, a serving woman, fell in love with a warrior beyond her rank, but their match was disapproved by his family. Both lovers in the end renounced the world and never met again; Yokobue became a nun at Hokkeji temple in Nara and transformed his letters into a small paper statue.
An extant statue at the same temple appears to give material form to this legend. Yet a fundamental bibliographical question remains: does the statue originate from the fictional tale, or did the tale inspire the creation of the artifact? While the letters are now illegible, the object raises further questions about authenticity and provenance: were the papers truly the warrior’s letters, or later additions? When and how did the statue become linked to the narrative? The statue presents a material-text puzzle that speaks directly to core bibliographical concerns: provenance, composition, and the transformation of textual content into a physical object, In this sense, it functions as a “bibliographical cold case”: tangible evidence that resists straightforward interpretation.
This presentation examines the statue as a site where literary narrative and material text intersect. I highlight how the physical artifact generates questions about authorship, textual transmission, and the boundaries of what counts as a textual object. I also consider ways the audience might explore the mystery further, including imaging techniques, material analysis, and comparative study of manuscript fragments. By showing how written texts survive in unexpected forms, this case illustrates the interpretive and analytical opportunities created by material evidence.
Resequencing the Voynich Manuscript presented by Lisa Fagin Davis
My 2020 analysis of the handwriting in the mysterious and still-unread Voynich Manuscript (presented at BSA 2020 and published in Manuscript Studies V.1 (2020), 164-180) concluded that not only was the manuscript written by five different hands, but the interaction of those hands in the manuscript strongly indicates that the manuscript is misbound and has been for centuries. If the manuscript’s bifolia are indeed bound out of order, the inability of a century’s worth of code-breakers and linguists to decipher the manuscript may be explained - how can you read a book if the pages are out of sequence? Combining material evidence with novel linguistic, material, and computational analytics undertaken in collaboration with linguists, imaging specialists, and computer scientists, I will present a radical and potentially game-changing hypothesis about the original structure of the manuscript.
The Bloody Book: A Morbid Curiosity from LSU Special Collections presented by Brandon Layton
LSU Special Collections holds an eighteenth-century book purportedly stained with the blood of French Revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. This paper will examine the book’s provenance, authenticity, and next steps for investigation.
About the presenters:
Yueying Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Japanese Literary and Cultural studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose scholarly interests include vernacular narratives from 11th-century Japan as well as the visuality and materiality of pre-modern Japanese manuscripts and paleography.
Lisa Fagin Davis is the Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of American. She also teaches at Yale University, the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science, and Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. She has catalogued medieval manuscript collections at Yale, Penn, the Walters Art Museum, Wellesley, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Boston Public Library, and several private collections. She has published widely in the fields of codicology and paleography–including the monumental Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Vol. IV (with R.C. Babcock and P. Rusche, 2004) and The Gottschalk Antiphonary (2000)—and is currently undertaking a detailed study of the Voynich Manuscript at Yale.
Brandon Layton is an instructional librarian at Louisiana State University Special Collections. He holds a Ph.D. in history and previously taught at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee.
Purloined Letters ↑
The Case of the Missing Type: Investigating Logonomia Anglica (1619) presented by Erika Giddens & Samantha Foster
When the first edition of Logonomia Anglica by Alexander Gill was printed in London in 1619, it was incomplete. The book was intended to serve as a pronunciation guide, but the printer, John Beale, did not have all the necessary type to print the special characters required for indicating pronunciation. Each of the extant copies was clearly completed by hand, bearing numerous manuscript accent marks and special characters. By the printing of the second edition in 1621, Beale had acquired all the necessary type, eliminating the need for manuscript emendation.
The last major research effort dedicated to Logonomia Anglica (1619) was completed in 1972 by Bror Danielsson and Arvid Gabrielson, who published detailed bibliographic descriptions of the seven copies known at the time. Since then, four more copies have been discovered, including the Lilly Library’s recent acquisition of two copies, which had been privately owned until now. Fifty years of technological advancements allow us to communicate with institutions across the globe and to examine high-resolution images of the unique copies, side-by-side.
After completing initial comparisons of the copies held at the Lilly Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library, we are left asking so many questions. How many copies were originally printed? Who made the manuscript corrections, and what was the process for completing all the copies? Why did they choose to produce the first edition this way, knowing so much labor would still be required after it left the press, instead of finding a way to print the book completely, as they did for the second edition? The goal of our research is to pick up the cold case from the 1970s, using 21st-century technology and methods to uncover the peculiar circumstances of this book’s printing.
Stalking the Wild Fur Trade: Bibliographic Control of Modern Trapping Literature presented by Nathan E. Bender & Eric Rossborough
The McCracken Research Library, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, has been acquiring and cataloging publications of the modern North American fur trade. This is a largely underground community literature, with few major commercial publishers offering recently authored texts. Instead, much of the fur trapping literature from the 1960s forward has come from self-published authors, privately printed and distributed within the trapping community network. As such it qualifies as a folk-literature, created by its own practitioners for their own use. Our bibliographic project is entering original cataloging into OCLC/WYLD to further the bibliographic control of this wild underground literature. Web searching, emails, mailings and telephone calls have been necessary to contact people to verify authorship and determine dates and geographic location of printers/publishers. Available bibliographies on sporting literature, economic conditions in rural areas, used book websites, and book lists from trapping equipment vendors have all been used to find relevant titles. Site visits to state and local sporting group conventions and oral histories have been used to develop personal connections. It is worth noting that the American fur trade did not die after 1840 with the decline of beaver top hats, and the modern American fur trade community feels directly linked to their forebearers.
(Re)discovering Facsimiles and Forgeries presented by Anne Peale
Over the past six months, I have located more than half a dozen examples of facsimiles in the broadside and newspaper collections of the Chapin Library at Williams College, many of which had gone unnoticed when first cataloged. These single-sheet items entered the collections over the course of several decades, no two from the same source. Many questions have arisen: how were these materials produced, and when? Were they intended by their creators simply to be high-quality facsimiles, or was there intent to deceive? How did they previously escape notice of staff and researchers? And how can we document these impostors in a way that is sensitive to the needs of institutions, private collectors, and our colleagues in the book trade?
This session will begin with a hands-on examination of several of the single-sheet facsimiles and forgeries I have identified in the collections at Williams. I will then share a selection of resources, online and print, which I have used to research facsimiles and forgeries of 18th-century American broadsides and pamphlets in our collection. I would welcome discussion of how participants have chosen to document facsimiles and forgeries in their own holdings, institutional or otherwise.
About the presenters:
Erika Giddens (she/her) is currently the Reference Associate at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC., where she welcomes researchers of all experience levels to engage with special collections. She earned her MLS with a specialization in Rare Books and Manuscripts from Indiana University and is especially interested in the history of books, printing, libraries, bookselling, and the early modern period.
Samantha Foster (she/her) is currently a Rare Books Cataloger at the Lilly Library at Indiana University - Bloomington. She holds an MLS with a specialization in Rare Books and Manuscripts from Indiana University. She loves discovering bibliographic peculiarities and making them discoverable to others. Her interests include descriptive bibliography, early modern and colonial Spanish-language materials, and women’s diaries.
Nathan E. Bender (M.A., M.L.S.) is a special collections librarian/archivist who has formerly served as head curator at the University of Idaho, Montana State University, West Virginia University, and the McCracken Research Library (Buffalo Bill Center of the West), and as a special collections librarian at the University of Oklahoma. He currently serves on the editorial board of The Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Journal, and the governing board of Wyoming Libraries Database. A former book reviewer for Library Journal, his ongoing bibliographic interests include the Montana and Wyoming Native American press, printed Native American language materials, and Buffalo Bill dime novels. Author of The Art of the English Trade Gun in North America, and Historic Bottle and Jar Closures, he also publishes on material culture history and folklore in peer-reviewed formats.
Eric Rossborough is Associate Librarian & Senior Cataloger for the McCracken Research Library, Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. Eric began his career at Harvard Law School, and later worked at the Getty Center in Southern California during the 1990s, developing extensive experience in bibliographic cataloging and library systems. Before his tenure in Cody, Eric cataloged rare books at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Eric writes articles for the Center of the West website, exploring Western artists, mountain men, and Wyoming history. His interest in modern fur trade literature came about after he conducted an oral history interview with legendary trapper Slim Pedersen, who gave us several books he’d written.
Anne Peale is the Chapin Librarian at Williams College, where she curates a collection of rare books and manuscripts for use in undergraduate instruction and research. Trained as a book historian, she received an MSc in Material Cultures and the History of the Book and a PhD in Geography from the University of Edinburgh. She is the recipient of an M.C. Lang Fellowship in Book History, Bibliography, and Humanities Teaching with Historical Sources from Rare Book School, and leads more than fifty hands-on instruction sessions each year for Williams students and other groups. Her research interests include 19th-century publishing and special collections pedagogy.
Mysterious Publication Histories ↑
Two Library Mysteries: Tchicaya U Tam’si at Widener and Beinecke, 1958-2025 presented by Alexander Baert Young
Two mysteries surrounding the books of Congolese poet Tchicaya U Tam’si (1931-1988) await in US academic libraries. At Harvard, a rare copy of the first edition of Tchicaya’s third book (A triche-coeur, Editions Hautefeuille/Caractères, 1958) proves to be unique: its front flyleaf bears the inscription in black ink “Pour Monsieur Bataille, l’hommage respectueux de l’auteur. Tchicaya.” This copy circulated in Widener Library for decades until my work with Harvard librarians led to its transfer to Houghton Library in 2025. How did this presentation copy find its way into the stacks at Harvard, and who was this Monsieur Bataille? To verify Tchicaya’s handwriting, I consulted letters from Tchicaya to Langston Hughes, held at Yale’s Beinecke Library. These disclosed a second mystery. When Tchicaya sent his CV to Hughes in 1963, the Congolese poet listed two editions of his fourth book, Epitomé: not only the award-winning 1962 edition published in Tunis (and commonly assumed to be the first edition), but also a 1960 edition published in “Brussels-Frankfurt.” What accounts for this lone reference to a lost first edition of Tchicaya’s fourth book? Was this a printed book, or was it a duplicated document, likely mimeographed, perhaps distributed at the Frankfurt Book Fair? While the identity of Monsieur Bataille and the true first edition of Epitomé may remain mysterious, these two cases offer clues about artisanal letterpress paperback publishing, duplicated documents in literary history, and twentieth-century rare books in library collections.
H.D. in the POOL, and the Bibliographical Mystique of 1926-1933 presented by Meredith Ivey Santaus
This presentation addresses a strange departure in the literary career of the modernist American poet, H.D. Though throughout most of her life H.D. was demonstrably unconcerned with the material realities of her work, she directly participated in the editing of her Pool Group’s magazine, Close Up, and its only feature-length film, Borderline (1930). Pool Group, which operated its film production and publishing enterprise under the aegis POOL, was a collaborative artistic venture born out of a ménage à trois between H.D., the English heiress and author Bryher, and the Scottish director Kenneth Macpherson. Though POOL would publish Bryher’s and Macpherson’s books, H.D.’s own works never appeared under the imprint, though there were multiple opportunities to do so. Her first novel, Palimpsest, was published through the Robert McAlmon-run, Bryher-subsidized Contact Editions, and her booklet to accompany Borderline was issued by the enigmatic Mercury Press. H.D.’s disinterest in her own archive has resulted in scant evidence about her Pool Group years, but traces appear in the papers of Bryher, Macpherson, and Sylvia Beach, as well as in the bibliographical and aesthetic details of her books themselves. The mystery surrounding H.D.’s publication history remains unsolved, and this presentation will pose salient questions about her choices: Why did she avoid the POOL designation? How involved, exactly, was she in the design of her books? Who, outside of the Pool Group, was invested in her publications? Possible avenues of inquiry will follow.
The Mysteries of Sally Wood’s Julia: A Transatlantic Case Study of an Early American Novel presented by Tom Hillard
In June 1800, Charles Peirce, in his United States Oracle newspaper printshop in Portsmouth, NH, published a small novel by Sally Sayward Wood of York, Maine, called Julia and the Illuminated Baron – thereby making her the first woman Gothic novelist in the US. An extraordinary first, Wood’s Julia soon became something of a small international phenomenon, printed in 2 further editions in London (in 1800 and 1801), and then in a (likely pirated) French translation in Paris, in 1804. Despite several years of my own investigative and archival research, in which I’ve amassed a mountain of information about Wood and her work, many mysteries remain about the story of Julia’s production and circulation: How did a widowed mother of 3, in the remote outpost of York, arrange to have a novel printed, in a time when only a couple dozen native-US novels had been published? Who was responsible for arranging not one, but two printings of Julia in England (when Wood herself never left the US)? Moreover, to what extent are the minor-to-major revisions in the London editions authorial? Even more mysterious, why is the only known extant copy of the London printing (which is actually a mixed set of one volume from each London printing) – held by the IU Bloomington libraries – cataloged with the author as “P. Barrell”? What does this reveal about its provenance? My presentation will examine these and a number of other peculiar bibliographic mysteries surrounding this important but mostly-neglected early American literary work.
About the Presenters
Alexander Baert Young is a historian and collector of 20th-century African books, magazines, records, and ephemera. As a PhD candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University, he is completing his dissertation, “Chapters from Africa’s Book Revolution: Print Culture, Decolonization, and Development in French, 1954-1999,” which combines methods from cultural history, literary studies, bibliography, and document identification to argue that the breakup of France’s colonial empire in Africa was also a book revolution that transformed global media history.
Meredith Ivey Santaus is a PhD student in the English Department at Boston University. Her research explores the print culture of 20th-century modernism and its manifestations in small and fine presses, commercial publishers, little magazines, and mass-market periodicals. Her work often interfaces with film and photography, as well as with modern theories and practices of art and religion. Her most recent work, on Stéphane Mallarmé’s Livre, will appear in a 2026 issue of English Language Notes. She also works as a bookseller with Philip Salmon & Company Rare Books, and was formerly a cataloguer with Bromer Booksellers.
Tom J. Hillard is professor in the English Literature department at Boise State University, where he teaches courses on early American literature, Gothic literature, book history, and textual scholarship. His current research explores the development of Gothic fiction in the early United States, and he is working on several related textual editing, bibliographical, and book history projects, including a new edition of Sally Sayward Wood’s Gothic novel Julia and the Illuminated Baron. He conducted extensive archival research on Wood and her work, including research travel in New England in 2022 supported in part by a BSA-ASECS Fellowship. Over the past two decades, he’s published numerous articles on the “ecogothic” in American literature; recent publications include articles on Sally Wood (in Historic New England) and on Nathaniel Hawthorne (in Nathaniel Hawthorne Review), as well as contributions to Studies in American Fiction and Gothic Nature Journal. In addition to being co-editor of the “Exhumations” textual recovery section of new journal American Gothic Studies, he is also an associate editor for the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review.