The Centre for the History of the Book - past, present and future
Established in 1995, the Centre for the History of the Book (CHB) was active at the University of Edinburgh for 25 years.
The aim of the interdisciplinary Centre was to promote research into the production, circulation and reception of published material, from manuscripts to electronic texts.
In its lifetime, the Centre hosted visiting fellows, public lectures, workshops and seminars on all aspects of the material culture of the text, as well as running the MSc in Book History and Material Culture. It was founded by Professor Bill Bell, who was later succeeded as Director by Professor Tom Mole.
While the Centre is no longer active, you can still access a number of its resources. You can also browse the Centre's former website on the UK Web Archive - a partnership of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries, including the National Library of Scotland.
Browse the CHB website from April 2021 on the UK Web Archive
What’s next for book history at Edinburgh?
The University of Edinburgh will shortly be launching a new book history and textual editing collaboration.
The work is being led by Dr Gerard McKeever, who joined the University of Edinburgh as Lecturer in Scottish Literature in 2022.
Gerard is active in the fields of book history and library history through a large-scale, AHRC-funded study of borrowing records from Scottish libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
