Malcolm Noble

Terrifying Terrain, by Elizabeth Murray, 1989-90

You should at least get half your money back if they don't

A close-up of a person wearing teal gloves holding a small metal type punch engraved with an ampersand symbol. In the background, part of the person’s face is softly out of focus.

A bearded man wearing teal gloves uses a green rubber air blower to clean a small metal type punch. He sits at a desk with an open wooden case filled with neatly arranged metal punches, while a computer monitor displaying a magnified image is visible in the background.

🔎 Rare 18th-century punches used to create the original Baskerville typeface have been digitised and released online.
Designers, historians and the wider public now have the opportunity to study the physical tools that shaped modern typography.
🔗https://loom.ly/1ulLaFI

Please write these essays.

For the first time, we now know how many Black-owned bookstores exist in the U.S. The National Association of Black Bookstores has released the “first comprehensive national report” on the state of America’s Black-owned bookstores.

There has never been an official, comprehensive record of Black-owned bookstores across the United States — until now

Or about twice what Starmer admitted to having accepted in poor-quality tailoring and glasses.

Your energy bills cost more because of AI

Your PC parts cost more because of AI

Your job pays less because of AI

You're less informed, less skilled, and poorer because of AI

And NONE of it will ever benefit you worth an actual dime.

How Bookbinders Used Old Records to Help the Nazis Find Their Victims

"Bookbinders and restorers in the 1930s and ’40s used their craft to help the Nazi regime create a database that was used to persecute and kill Jews and others who were deemed racially impure, a British researcher has found."

This looks like a really important book

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/w...

Ah so we just skipped to the part where AI is now as valuable or more valuable than human life.

NEW

How Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence

How a close read of public domain documents show how MoD was commercially colonised by Palantir

By me, at FT

www.ft.com/content/5207...

#BookHistory friends, some research help please. A student I'm teaching this term wants to research the intersections of the internet novel and platform capitalism in contemporary China. Who is the @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social of East Asian literary studies? Sarah, do you know anyone?

Yes! I also try to email folks whose work I am reading and enjoying - it really helps to not feel like we're just screaming into the void.

I have a chapter in this conference collection in which I talk about shelfies showing Heartstopper to recover everyday reading histories. There are lots of interesting essays here, and it is all OA. doi.org/10.17234/978...

Nostalgia and Radical Politics, Past and Present - CALL FOR PAPERS - RHS Nostalgia and Radical Politics, Past and Present Workshop - University of Northampton, 15 June 2026. Call for papers deadline - 22 February 2026. Nostalgia, defined most simply as a wistful or sentime...

Did you read all the way through your @royalhistsoc.org newsletter? If not you may have missed my CFP! royalhistsoc.org/calendar/nos...

Call for Papers: 'Scotland and the In-Between', the annual Société française d’études écossaises (French Society for Scottish Studies) conference (Université de Lorraine, 12-14 Nov 2026).

Proposals for papers in French or English are due 28th April.

More on the blog: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6338

Cautionary tale: I asked Gemini to transcribe a 1-page PDF from The Morning Post from the early 1800s. I was interested in testing its accuracy.

It hallucinated a full transcription of book review that doesn't exist and then invented false citations when I asked where the review was from.
#AI

The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering

The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

Händel: Giulio Cesare - Elbphilharmonie Mediathek Antikes Drama in Top-Besetzung: Händels berühmte Oper mit Jakub Józef Orliński und Sandrine Piau in den Hauptrollen.

Opera friends: Cesare from Elbphilharmonie elbphilharmonie.de/de/mediathek/handel-giulio-cesare/1173

Has any lit scholar colleague yet done a piece on the Booktokification of „Wuthering Heights“ (otherwise I‘m claiming this term and will use it for … something)

Sharing the re-cat'd + previously unreported 1855 1st ed of Whitman's Leaves of Grass at Spencer @kulibraries.bsky.social ! We've had this copy for decades, but in the card cat - not in our online catalog: 📜 #bookhistory #booksky #libsky #rarebooks : kuprimo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/...

A lovely short video about this really cool cloth book!!

Academics and Epstein deadline for submissions: March 7, 2026 full name / name of organization: Academics and Epstein: Upcoming Book contact email: academics.and.epstein@gmail.com In the early stages of understanding the scope of the most horrifying criminal empire in American history, we are grappling with academia’s role in it. Several faculty members and institutions have been implicated. A few were genuinely innocent and ignored Epstein’s invitations, and some were willingly complicit in crimes against humanity. Epstein’s co-conspirators have fundamentally compromised the student-teacher relationship and the student-university relationship. In this collection, we will consider how academic policies, environments, funding structures, and toxic subcultures were vulnerable to Epstein’s manipulation. Epstein was a narcissist who collected academics like trophies because they lent credibility to his "philanthropy." He used the reputation of esteemed institutions to make himself sound trustworthy. Every academic who thought they were benefitting from a "friendship" was used as a stepping stone, an anecdote at cocktail parties, and a way to boost his own ego. Epstein threw in just enough pseudo-intellectual buzzwords (and funding) that these academics convinced themselves that he was legitimate. He slowly tested the waters of their morality, pushing boundaries of inappropriateness to see what he could get away with, and pursuing relationships with those who never said no to him. The actions of those complicit with Epstein have shattered the lives of their victims. The survivors and the families of victims are owed not just reparations, but the knowledge that 1) they have been heard, 2) their tormentors are being held accountable, and 3) the rest of us are working to make sure that this never happens again.

Imho you should focus on shunning perpetrators & protecting victims of abuse on your own campus instead of mining this monstrous scandal for a line on your CV, like, are you gonna publish with T&F? A public event and open access publication, maybe but…
call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/02/...

TrepAInning

#HistMath & #PhilMath — here's the CfP you didn't know you needed!
*FRAMING MATHEMATICS: EARLY CAREER WORKSHOP ON THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS*
Taking place at the Université Paris Cité on 10-11 September 2026. Full CfP in the poster. Please share!
🤝 @bernalessel.bsky.social 🤝

Ah thanks Jolie!

I repeat my thanks: to generous interviewees, peer reviewers, for advice from Peter Cunningham, William Richardson, and Susannah Wright on behalf of @histedsocuk.bsky.social which provided a fellowship under which I did this work. I was delighted they were willing to let me try this.

Unpacking Harold Silver’s Library: An Historian of Education and His Books This article considers the whittled-down Library of Professor Harold Silver (1928–2021), an important figure in both the history of education and educational policy in the latter part of the twenti...

I had great fun writing this article, which sits at the intersection of so many of my bibliographical and historical interests, incl. critical university studies. I mobilize affective and queer bibliographical methods for a very different project.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

But it's a good point, isn't it? When will Corbyn take responsibility and apologise for Starmer appointing Mandelson

Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!