History of the Book Group seminar: 'The Lives of Books'

Speaker: Professor Lydia Wevers.

The books in the Brancepeth Station Library, a subscription library used on a sheep station in New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, are filled with the marks of their readers. At least a third of the 2,000-volume library contains scholia and marginalia, which reveal a great deal about the social history of the readers. This talk illustrated what dirt can tell us about readers, reading and the lives of books.

Professor Lydia Wevers is the author of Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (2010). She is the Director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.