The Reader for the 2014-15 series of Sandars Lectures is Richard Beadle, Professor of English Literature and Palaeography at the University of Cambridge, under the title “Henry Bradshaw and the Foundation of Codicology”.
The dates and titles for the lectures are as follows:
Wednesday 25 February
A shot at Henry Bradshaw: the bibliographer as sleuth
Wednesday 4 March
Bradshaw’s method
Wednesday 11 March
Bradshaw’s guides: close encounters with manuscripts
The lectures are free to attend and will take place in the Milstein Seminar Rooms at Cambridge University Library, beginning at 5pm.
The Sandars Readership in Bibliography is one of the most prestigious honorary posts to which book historians, librarians and researchers can be appointed. Instituted in 1895 with a bequest of £2000 by Samuel Sandars of Trinity College (1837-94), the Readership culminates in a series of public lectures each year.
The list of past Readers forms a guide to the authorities in the fields Sandars specified (bibliography, palaeography, typography, bookbinding, book illustration, the science of books and manuscripts, and the arts relating thereto), with past speakers including M.R. James, A.W. Pollard, Seymour de Ricci, Geoffrey Keynes, J.C.T. Oates, Edward Gordon Duff and many more of the writers and researchers whose work is now part of the canon. Subjects discussed have ranged from books for nineteenth-century Australian readers to the literature of medieval canon law, from the bibliography of Rousseau to Irish children's books.