February 19, 2001

Dear Fellow Members,

I am writing--as I do at about this time every year--to give you the details of the Society's annual meeting. It will take place on Friday, March 23, at 4:00 p.m. in the McGregor Room of Alderman Library. Following a brief business session, we will hold another in our alternate-year series of programs featuring short papers by current or recent Virginia graduate students who are working in the general area of bibliographical and textual studies. The program will consist of the following three papers:

• R. Carter Hailey, "The Vellum Copies of Robert Crowley's Piers Plowman"
• William J. Hughes, "The Editing of John Donne"
• Karen Wikander, "The Textual History of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country"

In the business part of the meeting, preceding the papers, we shall vote on the re-election of Ruthe Battestin to the Council, for a term ending in 2008. As you know, Ruthe has been active in Society affairs for many years. The Society has benefited greatly from her work on committees and from the key role she played in obtaining financial support from the President's Contingent Fund. We are fortunate that she is willing to stand for re-election.

We are continuing a pleasant tradition of holding our meeting during the Virginia Festival of the Book. The meeting is listed in the Festival's official roster of events, which we hope will cause interested nonmembers to attend. And we hope that our out-of-town members will find more reasons to come to Charlottesville at that time, since there will be many programs in addition to the Society's meeting to attract them. One such program will be a lecture by Steven E. Smith, Special Collections Librarian at Texas A&M University, on the history of the Hinman Collating Machine; it will take place at 4:00 p.m. in the McGregor Room of Alderman Library on Thursday, March 22. It is sponsored by the Society along with Rare Book School and the university's Department of English. The actual title of the talk is "The Stars and the Bard: Pluto, William Shakespeare, the Beer-Can Launcher, and the Invention of the Hinman Collator"; the library's collator will be demonstrated after the lecture, and a reception will follow.

Among the events in the life of the Society during the past year, the first one I want to mention is the retirement last April of our long-time Secretary-Treasurer Penelope Weiss. She had held this position since 1986 and during that period worked with great devotion on behalf of the Society. All of us in the Society owe her our profound thanks, and we extend to her our best wishes for the future. I am delighted to report that her successor is Anne Ribble, who has now been on the job for ten months and has made herself indispensable to the Society. Anne and her husband Fred Ribble have long been supporters of the Society; and the Society in 1996 published their book Fielding's Library: An Annotated Catalogue, which has been one of the most praised of the Society's publications.

Another event was our biennial book-collecting contest for students. The winners, announced in December, were Jason Goldsmith (first place, on Jorge Luis Borges), Cristina Maria Cervone (second place, on medieval literature), Paul Gaffney (third place, on J.R.R. Tolkien), and Barbara Wallace (honorable mention, a general collection). The winners were interviewed on the radio (WINA), and selections from their collections were displayed in the main lobby of Alderman Library during December.

An annual occurrence that is always eagerly awaited by the bibliographical world is the appearance of a new volume of Studies in Bibliography. David Vander Meulen, the editor (and also the Society's Vice President), produced another outstanding volume of Studies this past year, one that fully lives up the standard set by the long run of preceding volumes. We (and the bibliographical world at large) owe him and his assistant Elizabeth Lynch our gratitude for all the work that goes into making this happen.

Each year's new volume of Studies is distributed by the University Press of Virginia, but all the Society's other publication in print (including earlier volumes of Studies) are available from Oak Knoll Books. Let me remind you that members of the Society who identify themselves will be given a 10% discount. If you don't receive Oak Knoll catalogues and would like to, just write to 310 Delaware Street, New Castle, Delaware 19720; or phone 302-328-7232 or 1-800-996-2556; or fax 302-328-7274; or email oakknoll@oakknoll.com. Oak Knoll's catalogue can also be browsed at www.oakknoll.com

The Society functions smoothly because of its loyal Councilors and staff, and I want to thank them here, on behalf of all of you. I've already mentioned Anne Ribble, Elizabeth Lynch, and David Vander Meulen, who do many more things for the Society than their titles would imply. And I've tried to suggest our indebtedness to Ruthe Battestin. But the other Councilors have all been actively helpful as well: our thanks to Kathryn Morgan, David Seaman, Terry Belanger, and Karin Wittenborg. Finally, we are most grateful to the Alumni Board of Trustees for their continuing support of the Society from the President's Contingent Fund.

With thanks and best wishes to all of you.