The 2026 Annual Meeting

About the Annual Meeting ↑

The BSA Annual Meeting features the New Scholars Program, a keynote lecture, and synchronous panel presentations in the morning. Details about the panel presentations and New Scholars program will be shared in November 2025.

Registration for the Annual Meeting is required, opening November 2025.

The 2026 Keynote by Dr. Nora C. Benedict ↑

Erle Stanley Gardner and the Case of the Mexican Pirates

In this paper I examine the central role of piracy in the development of the Latin American publishing industry by focusing on the materiality of illicit editions. Using the case of pirated Erle Stanley Gardner novels by Mexico’s Editorial Diana, I analyze their physical features to show how abstract legal and economic conflicts manifest in tangible objects. I contend that these publishers were not simply evading copyright laws but actively exploiting their international limitations and ambiguities. By leveraging intimate local knowledge, a publisher could register a title to create a veneer of legitimacy, establish a domestic paper trail, and strategically block other competitors from publishing the same work. Drawing on correspondence between Gardner, his agents, and publishers, as well as a detailed study of the books themselves, I argue that such practices demonstrate how piracy has not only shaped the circulation of global literature in Latin America, but also become a constitutive feature of its publishing ecosystem.

About the speaker: Nora Benedict is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Digital Humanities at the University of Georgia. Her research centers on Latin American literature, book history, and questions of access and maintenance surrounding both digital and print cultures. She is the author of Borges and the Literary Marketplace (Yale UP, 2021) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges (Oxford UP, 2024). Her work has also appeared in journals such as Hispanic Review, Book History, Studies in Bibliography, and Modernism/Modernity. Beyond her research on Borges, her second monograph in progress, Bound Together: Global Interdependence in the Latin American Book Market, 1940–1970, examines how international publishing firms directed their energies toward Latin America, what kinds of strategies they employed, and which areas they targeted as they began to enter the market and forge collaborative alliances.

About the Meeting Venue: Location & Access ↑

The meeting will be held at Convene, 75 Rockefeller Center in New York City. Registration is required for attendance; all registrants will receive a QR code by email the evening before and the morning of the event for access to the event space. Should you have any concerns about security protocols in the building, please feel welcome to contact the BSA office by email at any time.

About our in-person program

This year’s program will be presented to our in-person audience only, with recordings of the New Scholars talks, the keynote lecture, and the business meeting made available on YouTube in February 2026. Sign up for our email newsletter to be the first to know when recordings have been released!

Health safety protocols

• Read about Convene’s Covid standards and safety protocols.

• Masking is encouraged but not required.

• In alignment with our host venue’s policy, we strongly recommend staying up to date on vaccinations at all times. Proof of vaccination will not be required for entry.

Detailed Program Schedule ↑

We warmly invite you to attend the full day’s events on 23 January. This year the program will start at 10 am with three synchronous panel presentations. The Editors of PBSA will host a brown-bag lunch session starting at noon, with the New Scholars program beginning at 1 pm.

Lunch for all attendees will be provided at no additional charge.

Details about the morning sessions and the New Scholars Program speakers will be announced later in November.

Schedule of Events, Friday 23 January

• 10 to 11:30 am, Bibliographical Mysteries: synchronous panel and workshop sessions

• 11:30 am to 1 pm, lunch

  • 12 to 12:45pm, PBSA brown bag session

• 1 to 2:30 pm, New Scholars Program

• 2:30 to 3 pm, Coffee Break

• 3 to 5 pm, Keynote Lecture and brief business meeting

• 5 to 6:30 pm, Reception

Bibliographical Mysteries - Morning Sessions from 10 to 11:30am ↑

The BSA Events Planning Sub-Committee invited our community of bookmakers and sellers, collectors, conservators, curators, educators, librarians, scholars, and students to submit proposals for a session centered on bibliographical mysteries, both those we have been able to solve and those that remain enigmatic. We are pleased to present the following panels during the morning session of the upcoming annual meeting.

Find a list of sessions scheduled from 10 to 11:30 am below; full panel descriptions and speaker bios will be announced in the News section of the website.

Bibliographical Lore

• Tale, Text, and Matter: A Medieval Japanese-Mâché Statue
  Yueying Li

• Resequencing the Voynich Manuscript
  Lisa Fagin Davis

• The Bloody Book: A Morbid Curiosity from LSU Special Collections
  Brandon Layton

Purloined Letters

• The Case of the Missing Type: Investigating Logonomia Anglica (1619)
  Erika Giddens & Samantha Foster

• Stalking the Wild Fur Trade: Bibliographic Control of Modern Trapping Literature
  Nathan E. Bender & Eric Rossborough

• (Re)discovering Facsimiles and Forgeries
  Anne Peale

Mysterious Publication Histories

• Two Library Mysteries: Tchicaya U Tam’si at Widener and Beinecke, 1958-2025
  Alexander Baert Young

• H.D. in the POOL, and the Bibliographical Mystique of 1926-1933
  Meredith Ivey Santaus

• The Mysteries of Sally Wood’s Julia: A Transatlantic Case Study of an Early American Novel
  Tom Hillard

Attendees will be asked to select one panel when they register for the meeting; doing so helps us ensure that we place panels in spaces large enough to accommodate the audience.

PBSA Brown Bag Presentation: “Exploring Exhibitions as Bibliographical Work” ↑

Join PBSA editors for this roundtable discussion about library exhibitions as sites of bibliographical inquiry. The session will feature brief remarks from Shira Buchsbaum (Grolier Club), Clara Drummond (Northwestern), and Molly Schwartzburg (Harvard) about the questions raised in their own work creating exhibitions of books, followed by a roundtable discussion about how such bibliographical inquiry might be reflected in journals and broader conversations around bibliography.

This roundtable will take place from 12pm to 12:45pm, leaving everyone with plenty of time to make it to the New Scholars program!

Registration - Coming Soon! ↑

Registration is required for the Annual Meeting. Check back in November for more information, including the registration form.

2026 BSA Bibliography Week Sponsors ↑

Thank you to the sponsors who make our event possible!

• Session Sponsors:

  • Exploring Exhibitions as Bibliographical Work: Philip Salmon & Company Rare Books

• Folio Sponsors:

  • The University of Chicago Press, Journals Division

• Quarto Sponsors:

  • Modern Language Association