Curators, researchers and collectors all recognise the importance of using evidence of the former ownership and use of books to understand the ways in which they have been read and valued.

This 5-day course is primarily aimed at creating a personal toolkit for identifying and interpreting the many ways in which provenance is manifested in books, including inscriptions, marginalia, bookplates, and bookbindings. It includes practical sessions on palaeography and reference sources, while also considering the more theoretical, book-historical context.

The course is delivered through lectures and presentations, mixed with exercises and plentiful opportunities for hands-on show and tell sessions, illustrating all these kinds of evidence with books from the Alexander Turnbull Library.

NZ$1,100.00

Prospective attendees will be notified quickly of the outcome of their application. To secure a place, successful applicants will be required to pay a non-refundable NZ$100.00 deposit by the 1 September 2024 application deadline.

Full payment is required by 1 October 2024.

David Pearson retired in 2017 from a career managing libraries and collections, mostly in London, to concentrate on his work as a book historian. He is internationally recognised as an expert on ways in which books have been owned, used and bound and his Provenance Research in Book History (new edn 2019) is a standard reference work in this field.

He delivered the Lyell Lectures in Oxford in 2018, the Sandars Lectures in Cambridge in 2023, and is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

The course is aimed at anyone who works regularly with historic books in which provenance evidence is likely to feature: librarians and curators, humanities researchers, collectors and dealers.