UI Center for the Book Annual Nancy Brownell Lecture in the History of the Book, Ann Blair Harvard University

How Renaissance Scholars and Printers Decided on the Size of Books

Printing in early modern Europe made few technical constraints on the size of books which could range from very large to small in format and in length. Commercial and cultural factors were the crucial factors in determining the size for books in various genres. In particular strong partnerships between learned authors and printers in the sixteenth century helped establish norms for the publication of books in Latin. I will focus on the publication patterns of the famous humanist Erasmus with his Basel printers, and of the naturalist Conrad Gessner in Zurich.

Ann Blair is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University where she teaches book history and early modern European cultural and intellectual history. Her research focuses on the working methods of scholars and authors ca. 1500-1700.

She has studied for example: practices of reading and note-taking, of composing and using reference works and finding devices (in Too Much to Know: managing scholarly information before the modern age, 2010), paratexts (in the Panizzi lectures of 2019 and L’Entour du texte: la publication du livre savant à la Renaissance, 2021), and the role of amanuenses (in a book due out in July of this year: In the Scholar’s Workshop: hidden histories of collaboration and authorship). She has also co-edited various volumes, most recently: New Horizons for Early Modern Scholarship (2021) with Nicholas Popper, and Information: a historical companion (2021) with Paul Duguid, Anja Goeing, and Anthony Grafton.