February 20, 1998

Dear Fellow Member,

I am writing to announce the plans for our annual meeting. It will be held this year on Friday, March 20, at 4:00 p.m. in the McGregor Room of Alderman Library. Following a brief business meeting, there will be a lecture by Deborah Parker, Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia, on women in the early Italian book trade. Her published work on this subject and on Dante is well known, and her talk will fit well into our plan of presenting programs that show the range of work being done at the University on printing and publishing history and other bibliographical and textual topics. We hope our programs will help stimulate interdepartmental exchange on these subjects. Following the meeting, there will be a reception in the Book Arts Press rooms.

We have chosen March 20th so that our meeting will occur during the Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, which this year runs from March 19 through 22. We are glad to be a part of this now well-established annual event, and we hope that holding the meeting at a time when there are other bookish talks, readings, workshops, exhibitions, and receptions will encourage out-of-town members to attend. Among the programs that will be of interest to Society members is a panel on "The Art of Literary Biography," to be conducted by a member of the Society, James L. W. West III, a professor of English at Penn State, who has just published a biography of William Styron. The panel (McGregor Room, March 21, 12:00-1:30) will include another Society member, Martin Battestin, as well as Joseph Blotner, Lucinda MacKethan, and Raymond Nelson. And at 4:00 on the 21st, West will read from his Styron biography at a book-signing in the New Dominion Book Shop. You may obtain further information about the Festival from its Web site: http://www.vabook. org

In the business part of our meeting on the 20th, we shall vote on the re-election of David Seaman to the Council. As you know, he is Director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia and has played an essential role in helping the Society to embark on its program of electronic publishing. His help assured the timely completion of the major project of our anniversary year, the conversion to electronic form of the entire run of Studies in Bibliography. It and two other publications--G. Blakemore Evans's series in Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century and Emily Lorraine de Montluzin's Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1868--are now freely available through the Society's Web site (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/). (The last volume of Evans was also one of the book-form publications of our anniversary year; the de Montluzin work had previously appeared serially in Studies in Bibliography, but the database version gives additional information.) Our Web site received welcome publicity in the November 1997 issue of Libra, the University of Virginia Library's newsletter, and it has been frequently consulted during the past twelve months.

My letter to you last year at this time announced plans for our fiftieth-anniversary festivities, and we are pleased that a number of out-of-towners were able to attend the dinner. As a way of reporting on the celebration to those of you who could not attend, I enclose a brief account that I wrote for the Bulletin du bibliophile, the Parisian journal of the Association internationale de bibliophilie. One event that occurred after my piece was written is that David Vander Meulen, who spoke about the history of the society at the dinner, has been awarded the Rawlings Prize of the Albemarle County Historical Society for the version of his talk that is to be published in the Historical Society's journal. He also deserves our congratulations for the wonderful fiftieth volume of Studies, as well as for his devoted editing of Studies year after year.

A revised version of my Bulletin du bibliophile account will form the preface to the Society's next publication, a fiftieth-anniversary history, edited by Vander Meulen, to be entitled The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia: The First Fifty Years. This substantial volume (approximately 250 pages) will include the first four contributions to last year's Studies in Bibliography (a history of the Society and one of Studies, a checklist of the Society's publications, and an author index to all fifty volumes of Studies); to those pieces will be added the entertaining and informative address delivered by William B. Todd at the fiftieth annual meeting, plus complete lists of officers, councilors, contributing members, meetings, and contest winners, as well as a comprehensive index that will be remarkable for the large number of names of twentieth-century book-world figures recorded in it. Many Society members will wish to have a copy of this book, which will also be in demand from those who collect generally in the field of books about books; ordering information will be announced shortly.

With last year's letter there was an order blank for the final volume of Evans's Prompt-Books series and for Frederick G. and Anne G. Ribble's Fielding's Library. Since that time, the Society has published another major book, William Faulkner's Mosquitoes: A Facsimile and Transcription of the University of Virginia Holograph Manuscript, edited by Thomas L. McHaney and David L. Vander Meulen. Published with a generous subvention from Mrs. Linton Massey, this handsomely produced limited edition reproduces the manuscript in high-resolution photofacsimiles and provides on facing pages a transcription that shows all the alterations in an innovatively readable system. This volume was available for the many celebrations of the centennial of Faulkner's birth, including the one held in front of Alderman Library last September 25th, where a birthday cake was cut by Faulkner's great-grandchildren. An order blank for this book, showing the 40% discount available to members, appears at the end of this letter.

Another publication that will be out by the end of the year is a collection of my essays entitled Literature and Artifacts. The Society's publication program continues to be active, thanks to the capable leadership of Ruthe Battestin, who has chaired the Publications Committee for many years. She has now stepped down from that position, and we all owe her a heartfelt vote of thanks for her important contribution to the work of the Society. On the publications front, we are also greatly indebted to the hard work of Elizabeth Lynch, the Society's editorial assistant, who is arranging for our books to be included in the core lists of major book-jobbers, as well as in such electronic bookshops as amazon.com.

As always, I want to express the Society's thanks to our loyal and efficient Secretary-Treasurer, Penelope Weiss, and to all the Council members (Terry Belanger, Kathryn Morgan, Kendon Stubbs, and Karin Wittenborg, in addition to Ruthe Battestin and David Seaman) for their willingness to devote time to the Society's affairs. And I hope all of you will continue to publicize the Society and encourage persons interested in the book world to join it. On behalf of the Council, I send you all good wishes and thank you for your support.

Yours sincerely,

G. Thomas Tanselle