Department of English

• Monday, March 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are delighted to welcome back Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania) for a talk titled: “Printers’ Waste: Fanny Hill and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.” Professor Stallybrass writes: 

This workshop is a tribute to Jim Green, who first got me interested in what the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) now catalogues as “overmarbled printers’ waste.” These waste sheets were printed but never published. I want to explore the very different reasons for why such sheets were remaindered, focusing mainly on waste from Fanny Hill and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs that was recycled in the bindings of later books. A surprising number of books with boards covered in marbled sheets from Fanny Hill were owned by Isaiah Thomas himself, the founder of the AAS. Among them are the manuscript sermon notes of Cotton Mather—with the lesbian masturbation scene from Fanny Hill pasted down on the top and bottom boards. One main question (that Jim Green raised and helped to answer) is why the waste from Fanny Hill is from the first sheets of an unpublished edition while the waste from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is from the last sheets of a published edition. 

Finally, I will look at Thomas’s financial records to explore what I now believe to be the main reason from Gutenberg onwards for the existence of printed waste, often from best-sellers (like psalm-books) and from a variety of ephemera.

Peter Stallybrass is retired and living in rural idiocy in the Connecticut Valley, tending his garden. On his occasional excursions, he has tried to keep his hand in by co-teaching with friends and former colleagues (including Lynne Farrington at Rare Book School, David Stern at Harvard, and Kathryn James and David Kastan at Yale). He is also working on BASIRA at Penn (with Barbara Ellerston and Nicholas Herman) and on erasable notebooks for the “Prize Papers Project” at the National Archives in England. Despite retirement, he continues to learn from his brilliant former colleagues in Philadelphia (especially Roger Chartier, Lynne Farrington, Margreta de Grazia, Jim Green, Zack Lesser, John Pollack, David Ruderman, Jerry Singerman, and David Stern).