Announcement:
On 1 December Professor Simon Eliot joined the Institute from the University of Reading to take up the first Chair in the History of the Book to be established in the UK. Professor Eliot has also just been appointed General Editor of The History of Oxford University Press, a four-volume work that will cover the period 1478-2000 and which is due to be published in 2012-13. Apart from his work on the History, Professor Eliot will be actively developing the new  Rare Book School currently planned by the cross-sectoral partnership of the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies. He will  promote research in the International History of the Book  and take forward plans for the development of a virtual museum devoted to the history of communication. 

Professor Eliot is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a visiting professor in Book History at the Open University. He is also Director of the MA in the History of the Book and Associate Director of the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies hosted by the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He was president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) 1998-2001. He was previously Professor of Publishing and Printing History at the University of Reading and Director of its Centre for Writing, Publishing and Printing History.

He is editor of the journal Publishing History and general editor of monograph series History of the Book - On Demand Series (HOBODS). He is co-director of an Open University/British Library project - The Reading Experience Database (RED) - the aim of which is to collect the historical evidence for reading in the British Isles 1450-1945. He is also an advisor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and editor of the journal Publishing History. His publications include a comprehensive microfilm edition of the Publishers' Circular 1837-1900 (1988), Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800-1919 (1994) and a forthcoming book on Sir Walter Besant and the professionalisation of authorship.

If you wish to contact Professor Eliot, you may contact him at the Institute by post or by email at: simon.eliot@sas.ac.uk.

Publications

Simon Eliot, `Patterns and Trends and the NSTC: some initial observations' Part I, Publishing History, XLII (Autumn 1997). ISSN 0309-2445.

Simon Eliot, `Patterns and Trends and the NSTC: some initial observations' Part II, Publishing History, XLIII (Spring 1998). ISSN 0309-2445.

Simon Eliot and W.R. Owens (eds.), A Handbook of Literary Research (London: Routledge, 1999). ISBN 0 415 189593, ISBN 0 415 198607.

Simon Eliot, 'Author, publisher and literary agent: making Walter Besant's novels pay in the provincial and international markets of the 1890s', Publishing History, XLVI (Autumn 1999). ISSN 0309-2445. 

Simon Eliot, `Sir Walter Besant: a Bibliography' for The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Third Edition (CBEL3), Volume 4 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). ISBN 0 521 39100 8.

Simon Eliot, ' "Mr. Greenhill, whom you cannot get rid of ": Copyright, Legal Deposit and the Stationers' Company in the 19th Century', a chapter in Libraries and the Book Trade edited by Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote ( Winchester : St Pauls Bibliographies, 2000), pp. 51-84. ISBN 1873040 60 1.

Simon Eliot, 'The Business of Victorian Publishing' in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, edited by Deirdre A. David (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 37-60. ISBN 0 521 64150 0, ISBN 0 521 64619 7.

Simon Eliot, ' "Hotten, Rotten, Forgotten"?: An Apologia for a General Publisher' in Book History ( Pennsylvania : Penn State Press, 2000), pp.61-93. ISBN 0-271-02050-4.

Simon Eliot, 'The Centre for Writing, Publishing and Printing History at the University of Reading ' in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 2000 ( Detroit : Gale Group, 2001), pp. 361-64. ISBN 0-7876-2522-1.

Simon Eliot, 'Books and their Readers - Part 1'(chapter 1, pp.5-39), 'Books and their Readers - Part 2' (chapter 8, pp.197-228) in The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Idealisms, edited by Delia da Sousa Correa ( London : Routledge, 2000). ISBN 0 415 23826 9.

Simon Eliot, 'Books and their Readers - Part 3', 'Books and their Readers - Part 4' in The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Idealisms, edited by Dennis Walder ( London : Routledge, 2001), chapters 8 and 15.

Simon Eliot, 'Sir Walter, Sex and the SoA' in Re-constructing the Book edited by Maureen Bell, Simon Eliot, Lynette Hunter and James West ( Burlington , VT : Ashgate, 2001), pp.100-11. ISBN 0 7546 0360 1 Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission, edited by Maureen Bell, Shirley Chew, Simon Eliot, Lynette Hunter, James L. W. West III (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), ISBN 0 7546 0360 1 

Simon Eliot, 'Never Mind the Value, What about the Price?; Or, How much did Marmion cost St. John Rivers?' in Nineteenth -Century Literature, Volume 56, Number 2 ( Los Angeles : University of California Press , September 2001), pp.160-197.

Simon Eliot, ' "To you in your vast business": Some Features of the Quantitative History of Macmillan 1843-1891' in Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition, edited by Elizabeth James ( Basingstoke : Palgrave, 2002), pp. 11-51. ISBN0-333-73517-X. 

Simon Eliot, 'Electronic Catalogues, Electronic Registers, Electronic Texts - and a Gentle Warning' in Electronic Publications in Libraries ( Krakow : Jagiellonian University Press, 2002), pp.121-134.

Simon Eliot, 'Very Necessary but not Quite Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History' in Book History ( Pennsylvania : Penn State Press, 2002), pp. 283-293.

Simon Eliot, 'Two Catalogues, Three Projects - and a Tentative Proposal' in Digital Access to Book Trade Archives ( Leiden : Academic Press Leiden , 2002), pp. 69-83.

Simon Eliot, 'Continuity and Change in British Publishing, 1770-2000' in Publishing Research Quarterly , Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 2003), ( New Jersey : Transaction Periodicals), pp. 37-50.

Simon Eliot, 'Format, Copyright, Price: Some Material Vectors in Literary Culture' in Novoje literaturnoje obozrenie [ New Literary Review ], ( Moscow : No 73, June 2005), pp.360-66