The next meeting of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies 2022-2023 series will take place on Friday, February 10, from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. (EST) via Zoom.
Lilla Vekerdy, Head of Special Collections at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, will deliver a talk entitled “How Do Book Bindings Get to Sing?”
Zoom link: https://wcupa.zoom.us/j/93439549048?pwd=alVCaE54RWVVeGNUdGQxbjlaQzlKQT09
Abstract:
How Do Book Bindings Get to Sing? will discuss a group of Renaissance and Early Modern books that are bound in fragments of music manuscripts from the Middle Ages. These “singing bindings” are hundreds of years older than the texts they cover. Furthermore, the texts inside are on mathematics, physics, astronomy, and one even about the Devil itself, but absolutely none is on music. Lilla Vekerdy will shed light on how and why these discrepancies happened. The volumes examined are selected from the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology.
Biography:
Lilla Vekerdy earned her two master’s degrees in Literature, Linguistics and Library Sciences in Budapest, Hungary in 1984, and completed her doctoral coursework in Medieval and Renaissance History at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri in 2005. She has been the Head of Special Collections at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives since 2008, where she oversees all rare materials in 16 library research centers, and also serves as the Curator of Physical Sciences Rare Books. Her research interest and publications are in the history of science and medicine as well as in rare book studies, and often cover the overlay of these fields.
Please join us for Lilla Vekerdy’s talk and discussion afterwards.
For further information, consult the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies website at http://wagpcs.wordpress.com/, or contact Sabrina Baron and Eleanor Shevlin at the above emails.
