London Rare Book School | Short Courses
LRBS short courses take place in a variety of locations throughout the year. We offer intensive courses taught over three days, one-day courses focused on specific topics or library collections, and workshops held in London and elsewhere. Course fees with discounts for students vary according to the duration of the course. Bursaries to support those who would otherwise be unable to attend are available for some courses.
Please see below for a list of courses on offer in 2025.
PLEASE NOTE: This list will be updated as additional courses are confirmed. Check back regularly for more information.
LRBS Short Courses
29th & 31st January 2025 | Digital Editing: Dr Christopher Ohge
This short course surveys the traditions and principles of scholarly editing and textual scholarship, complemented with hands-on workshops on the fundamentals of creating digital editions, including a rigorous overview of the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines.
22nd March 2025 | Medieval Book Production and the Collections of Salisbury Cathedral: Prof Michelle Brown
This special study day, will provide an introduction to the Medieval manuscripts of Salisbury Cathedral, one of the most beautiful of British cathedrals. It will also serve as an introduction to the history of book production in medieval England, through study of the different types of evidence that can be excavated through the study of surviving books, documents and fragments in a single repository.
25th-27th March 2025 | Print and the ascent of magic: Dr Pragya Dhital
This course will consider the role played by print in ‘democratizing literary magic’, in the words of historian of witchcraft, Owen Davies. But it will also deal with how its practitioners have been persecuted and prosecuted, studied and described.
1st-4th April | Provenance in books: recognising, reading and interpreting: Dr David Pearson
This course is run in collaboration with Shrewsbury School and will be held at the School’s historic Taylor Library. Provenance evidence takes many forms and the primary aim of this course is around developing a personal toolkit to identify and interpret it, as found in books before 1900.
23 May | Magazines, Art and Experiment: Dr Gill Partington
Using the unique UCL special collections, this one-day course examines the rich history of the magazine as an experimental and avant-garde form. We will explore the graphic and literary innovations of Modernist journals (BLAST, Dada, Cabaret Voltaire), artists’ magazines of the 1960s and 70s (Aspen, 0-9, Schmuck), as well as more recent radical experiments in periodical publishing. The day focuses on hands-on study, giving students an opportunity to engage with some of the most iconic and ground-breaking magazines of the past century.
