Andrew Carpenter: Dublin Publishers Fighting for Readers

Andrew Carpenter, a distinguished authority on 18th-century Irish print culture, recounts the entertaining spat that took place between two Dublin publishers in the 1750s, as each sought to make money out of the hot property that was Jonathan Swift. Professor Carpenter will be talking about the 18th-century book as a commercial object as well as about subscription lists, layout, annotation, textual accuracy, and the significance of pictures/images in early books.

Andrew Carpenter, who has lectured widely on several continents, is Professor Emeritus in the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin. Among his numerous publications are the landmark anthologies Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (1998), Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (2003), and (with Lucy Collins) The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics (2014). He is general editor of the five-volume encyclopedia Art and Architecture of Ireland (December 2014). His many honors include membership in the Royal Irish Academy.