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Material Texts: Randall McLeod (University of Toronto), “The Librarynth”

  • Monday, September 16, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections on the 6th floor of the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center


Professor McLeod writes:

While the ink on them is still wet, printed sheets can set off their text, faintly in mirror image, onto other sheets, and those sheets can repeat the message, now reversed again and even more faint, onto yet other sheets. You have heard of “Follow the Money”? In this talk, I'll Follow the Offset into hidden corners of the Librarynth. You come too.

In mid-career, I switched from English authors (Holinshed, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Keats, Hopkins, Arnold, Shaw) to the continental printers Aldus Manutius and Robert Estienne (his Hebrew Bibles). The discipline of analytical bibliography allows me to work happily with books in any language. Interested in stop-press variants, I devised the low-tech McLeod Portable Collator. In recent work, I focus on offsets and blind impressions.