February 27, 1996

Dear Fellow Members,

My annual letter comes to you somewhat earlier than in the past because the date of the annual meeting this year is a month earlier. It will take place on Friday, March 29, at 4:00 p.m. in the McGregor Room of Alderman Library. This change of date was made so that our meeting can fall during the Virginia Festival of the Book, now an annual Charlottesville event.

The Festival, which takes place from March 28 through 31, consists of numerous talks, readings, workshops, book-signings, book sales, exhibitions, and receptions. Holding our meeting during the Festival not only will increase the representation of the historical study of the book at the Festival but also, we hope, will encourage more out-of-town members to come to Charlottesville for the meeting, since they can take in other events at the same time. Among the Festival events that may be of interest to Society members are two that occur on the same day as our meeting: at 2:00 that afternoon there will be a discussion of scholarly editing at Jefferson Hall, presented by members of the Washington Papers and Madison Papers projects; and that evening an antiquarian book fair opens at the Senior Center. A full schedule may be obtained by getting in touch with Victoria Sours at 804-924-3296 or vfob@Virginia.edu; it is also available at this Web site: http://monticello.avenue.gen.va.us/Tourism/VABook

At our session on the 29th, following a brief business meeting, the program will consist of short papers by three graduate students, along with a demonstration of the Society's home page on the World Wide Web. As you know, in 1994 we inaugurated the idea of presenting, at the annual meeting, graduate students' reports on work in progress; and the success of that meeting encourages us to repeat the plan this year. A number of excellent proposals were submitted to the program committee, and those finally selected are the following:

• Frank E. Grizzard, Jr., "A Collector's Progress; or, Why I Have 500 Copies of the Same Book"
• Elizabeth A. Jordan, "Imposing a Canon: The Curious Printing of Bell's Poets of Great Britain"
• Andrew M. Stauffer, ""Byron's Monumental Epitaph for His Dog"

The Grizzard paper is based on the author's collection of editions of Pilgrim's Progress from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries--a collection that earned him one of the Society's book-collecting prizes for 1995. The Jordan paper will analyze the printing of the eighteenth-century publisher John Bell's famous collection of British poetry. And the Stauffer paper will examine the textual history of Byron's poem commemorating his dog Boatswain.

This program clearly reflects the variety and vitality of the work currently being undertaken by UVA graduate students in bibliography and textual criticism. The speakers will be introduced by David L. Gants, another graduate student and Library Assistant at the Electronic Text Center, who will also comment on and display the Society's Web page. For your future reference, the address of that Web page is: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva.html

In the business part of the Society's meeting on the 29th, we shall vote on the re-election of Karin wittenborg to the Council. Her term expires this year, and the Nominating Committee proposes that she be re-elected for another seven-year term. As University Librarian at UVA, she is well known to many members of the Society, and she has been an active and valuable member of the Council.

As you all know, the Society's primary activity is scholarly publishing, and I want to repeat my annual thanks to Ruthe Battestin, chair of the Publications Committee, and David L. Vander Meulen, the Society's editor, for their role in helping to maintain the Society's outstanding tradition as a publisher. Ruthe deals with monographic proposals and David with submissions of articles for Studies in Bibliography and with the series of Occasional Publications.

The latest volume of Studies {the forty-ninth), published this month, once again offers a diverse array of articles on printing, publishing, and textual history, along with discussions of descriptive methodology and textual theory. Four new book publications are likely to be available within the coming year: the eighth (and final) volume in G. Blakemore Evans' 3 distinguished series of editions of Shakespearean Prompt Books; Thomas L. McHaney's edition of the manuscript of Faulkner's Mosquitoes; Frederick G. Ribble and Anne G. Ribble's Fielding's Library: An Annotated Catalogue; and a collection of my essays, Literature and Artifacts.

All the Society's previous publications that are still in print are listed at the back of the latest volume of Studies. You will notice that among them are the first three of the Society's recently inaugurated series of Occasional Publications: my biography of Fredson Bowers (with a checklist of his writings by Martin Battestin); Donald D. Eddy and J. D. Fleeman's handlist of books to which Samuel Johnson subscribed; and a facsimile and transcription of the surviving portion of Johnson's translation of Sallust, here published for the first time and edited by David Vander Meulen and me. These publications are available directly from the Society, as our new publications will also be.

Some of the Society's publications are distributed by the University Press of Virginia, and we are currently offering a number of them to members of the Society at the remarkably low sale price of $5 each. An order blank, listing the titles (which include volumes 15-45 of Studies), is enclosed. This sale will last through the end of August.

I want to thank Penelope Weiss, our Secretary-Treasurer, for her continuing loyal and effective service on behalf of the Society. All the Council members, each of whom has served on one or more committees during the year, also deserve our warm thanks. And I take this opportunity of thanking all of you for your support. Let me encourage those of you who are not Contributing Members to consider joining that group (listed at the back of Studies), and I hope all of you will suggest to persons interested in bibliographical matters that they join the Society.

On behalf of the Council, I send you all good wishes.