Notes on Contributors
Karen Attar
is the Curator of Rare Books and University Art at Senate House Library and a Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, both University of London. Best known for editing the Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland (2016), she has written widely about Senate House Library, its collections and its history, including two articles specifically about its incunabula. She catalogued the library of Augustus De Morgan, wrote about it for The Edinburgh History of Reading (2020), and is an academic advisor for Brill’s project to digitise it.
Robert L. Betteridge
has had a long career at the National Library of Scotland where he is the Rare Books Curator for Eighteenth-century Printed Collections. With a background in cataloguing, one of his final tasks in his previous role was to catalogue the Library’s collection of incunabula. He has presented papers and published a number of articles on the Advocates Library’s and National Library’s history, collecting and collections, largely with a late 17th and 18th-century focus. He has curated major Library exhibitions on Robert Burns, the 1715 Jacobite Rising and the Scottish Enlightenment.
Elma Brenner
is a Research Development Specialist at Wellcome Collection, London, and an associate member of the Centre de recherches archéologiques et historiques anciennes et médiévales at the University of Caen, France (UMR 6273 – CNRS). Her research explores health, religious culture and the history of the book in medieval France and England. She has authored Leprosy and Charity in Medieval Rouen (2015) and co-edited Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture (2013), Society and Culture in Medieval Rouen, 911–1300 (2013) and Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages: From England to the Mediterranean (2021). She is Co-editor of Social History of Medicine.
Laura Cooijmans-Keizer
is Special Collections Curator at Edinburgh Napier University, having pre- viously worked at the Universities of Liverpool and Edinburgh. She holds postgraduate degrees in Book History and Material Culture (University of Edinburgh), and Archives and Records Management (University of Liverpool). Whilst initially focusing her research interests on the medieval manuscript cultures of the Low Countries, Iceland and the UK, her experience of working with historical collections expanded her interests to include the material cultures of subsequent periods, with a particular focus on the history of early printing.
Sarah Cusk
has catalogued early printed books at a number of libraries and institutions, including the Newberry Library in Chicago, the National Portrait Gallery, Hughenden Manor (Disraeli’s house), and Dr Johnson’s House. She is currently the antiquarian cataloguer at Lincoln College, Oxford. Her research interests include early sixteenth-century donations to Oxford colleges, the Bridgewater library and its purchase by Henry Huntingdon, and the library of the seventeenth-century Oxford philologist Thomas Marshall.
Anette I. Hagan
has worked as a Rare Books Curator at the National Library of Scotland since 2002. Responsible for early printed collections to 1700, her specialist areas also include chapbooks and Gaelic and Scots publications to 1900. She has published on various aspects of book history such as the library at St Benedict’s Abbey at Fort Augustus, the spread of Scottish printing, editions of a seventeenth- century prophecy and the contemporary news coverage of the 1715 Jacobite Rising. She is Reviews Editor of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Journal.
Elizabeth Henderson
is Rare Books Librarian at the University of St Andrews. Her previous research has explored various aspects of the libraries of Scottish universities in the late medieval and early modern period, especially donations. Currently she is working on developing a database of Scottish book collectors and their collections in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is particularly interested in early modern collectors of medieval and antiquarian material.
Sheila Hingley
retired from full-time work as Head of Heritage Collections in Durham University Library at the end of 2014. She had moved to Durham in 2002 after serving for twelve years as Canterbury Cathedral Librarian. Her previous posts had been in the House of Commons Library, Durham Cathedral Library and the Society of Antiquaries. She has published papers on libraries and book ownership in the early modern period. Her current research is on the books printed 1450–1540 belonging to Durham Cathedral Priory and coincides with contracted work cataloguing the early printed books at Ushaw College.
Ester Camilla Peric
is a Phd candidate at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples. Her doctoral research concerns printed catalogues as precious sources to investigate printers’ output and marketing strategies, with a special focus on the dynamics of loss and survival of sixteenth century editions. Among her other research interests are the history of book trade in the fifteenth century, which is the subject of her first monograph, Vendere libri a Padova nel 1480: il Quaderneto di Antonio Moretto (Udine: Forum, 2020), as well as analytical bibliography and printing techniques.
Jane Pirie
is a History of Art graduate of the University of Aberdeen. She is Curator (Rare Books) in the department of Museums, Special Collections and Archives where she has worked for nearly thirty years. In addition to curating the printed collections, she specialises in provenance and bindings. Jane has recently contributed to a new history of the University of Aberdeen, exploring how the collections there were established over 525 years, and is currently researching the work of Francis Van Hagen, a seventeenth century Aberdeen bookbinder.
Sian Prosser
has been Librarian and Archivist at the Royal Astronomical Society since 2014. After a language degree at the University of Glasgow and an MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds, she joined the French Department of the University of Sheffield for an AHRC-funded PhD on the medieval manuscripts of the Roman de Troie. Her first library post was at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, followed by posts at University of Warwick Library. She completed the MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL in 2011, returning to study for the HE Certificate in Astronomy 2017–2019.
Andrea Vilcsek
is a book conservator and researcher of bookbinding history at the National Széchényi Library (Budapest, Hungary). She graduated as a literary historian from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and as a publishing editor from the University of Pécs. She has also completed a professional course in conservation-restoration of paper and books. After working a few years as a conservator in the commercial book-market, she joined the book conservation department of NSzL in 2016. Her main interest is the stylistic analysis of bookbindings, especially of cover decoration and binding techniques.