Malcolm Noble

Malcolm Noble

@malcolmjnoble.bsky.social

Bibliographer & historian with broad interests, incl. business and economic hisotry, queer print, oral history, co-operative HE. he/him www.malcolmnoble.co.uk

777 Followers 506 Following 953 Posts Joined Sep 2023
9 hours ago

If, as historians @calebwellum.bsky.social & Meg Jacobs argue, the 1970s energy crises were the proving grounds for neoliberalism, what is the political economy that's likely to emerge from a new energy crisis?
🗃️

0 2 0 1
2 days ago

How I wish I had not logged on this evening.

1 0 0 0
2 days ago

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about &c

2 0 0 0
3 days ago
Post image

For #InternationalWomensDay I wrote about the history of women in Stationers' Company, sharing outputs from my
@britishacademy.bsky.social Innovation Fellowship with
@stationerscomms.bsky.social

📚 animation
📚 online exhibition
📚 finding aid of women in the apprentice registers

okt.to/ARVDHM

1 3 0 0
4 days ago
Post image

Terrifying Terrain, by Elizabeth Murray, 1989-90

948 122 0 5
6 days ago

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

1 0 0 0
1 week ago
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

211 71 3 6
1 week ago

Please write these essays.

1 0 0 0
1 week ago
Preview
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

2,463 1,075 24 76
1 week ago

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

0 0 0 0
1 week ago

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.

647 341 3 3
2 weeks ago
Preview
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...

7 2 0 0
2 weeks ago

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

1 1 0 0
2 weeks ago
Post image Post image

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...

1,806 1,023 51 23
3 weeks ago

#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?

5 4 3 1
3 weeks ago

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.

16 3 0 0
3 weeks ago
Proceedings of the Everyday Reading of Literature Symposium (PERLS) | FF Open Press - izdanja Filozofskog fakulteta u Zagrebu u otvorenom pristupu

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...

1 0 0 0
1 month ago
Preview
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...

25 14 1 2
3 weeks ago
Call for Papers: Scotland and the In-Between – BARS Blog

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

13 12 0 0
3 weeks ago

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

171 67 8 10
3 weeks ago
Post image

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

4,189 1,852 129 316
1 month ago
8 2 0 0
1 month ago
Preview
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

3 0 0 0
1 month ago

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)

19 3 1 0
1 month ago
Post image

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/...

32 4 1 0
1 month ago

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

2 0 1 0
1 month ago
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/...

19 5 5 2
1 month ago

TrepAInning

1 0 0 0
1 month ago
Post image Post image

#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 🤝

7 5 0 1
1 month ago

Ah thanks Jolie!

0 0 0 0