One of the fields we include in our records for publishing, printing, and bookselling businesses in the WPHP—our firm records—is for the addresses where they operated. Sometimes this is straightforward: one individual working at one location for the duration of their career. Other times, however, it is decidedly less so. There are booksellers running multiple shops at the same time, printers moving locations every year or two for fifteen years, publishers working with various combinations of partners and at various addresses over a number of months and years, and any number of other complex bu ..read more

Do you believe in ghosts? In this spirited (ha ha) Halloween episode, Kandice and Kate encounter a ghost of their very own in circulating library owner and author Mary Tuck’s Durston Castle; or, The Ghost of Eleonora (1804). Every year, in anticipation of October, we scour the WPHP for suitably spooky titles—previous Halloween episodes have featured badly behaved monks, rogue banditti, haunted castles, lost (and found!) parents, and pages upon pages of moralizing in the mountains (we’re looking at you, Catherine Cuthbertson’s four-volume Romance in the Pyrenees). Often satirical and rarely sca ..read more

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthl ..read more

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthl ..read more

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthl ..read more

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthl ..read more

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Organized by Dr. Andrew McInnes and his incredible team of research assistants, “New Romanticisms” was a four-day Romanticist extravaganza with five plenaries, more than one hundred panels, the stunning environs of Edge Hill University, an ingenious coffee cart, and the occasional visit from Buster, the campus cat. The call for papers “invite[d] explorations ..read more

What do the medieval period and the Romantic period have in common? Well, at the very least, badly behaved monks. In Episode 4 of Season 3 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren team up with David Coley and Matt Hussey and their podcast, The Canterbury Fails, for our first-ever crossover episode.  This is, in the words of our friends at The Canterbury Fails, "A late medieval music theory complaint and literally the best most bonkers depraved monk freak show mock-gothic novel paired with a gin-soaked tea (do re mi!) and repugnant Jolly Rancher retro-cocktail ..read more

This August, the WPHP has been sharing the Spotlights that make up our newest Spotlight Series, “Down the Rabbit Hole: Researching Women in the Book Trades.” Over the course of the month, posts from Research Assistants Sara Penn, Julianna Wagar, Amanda Law, and, as of this coming Friday with the last post of the Series, Belle Eist, have focused on women who worked in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century book trades.  In this month’s episode, “Working for the (Wo)man”, you’ll hear from our Research Assistants themselves about their Spotlights and the women they researched: the feuding me ..read more

If you’ve ever taken an undergraduate English class on the Romantic period, you have probably encountered Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A widely read and controversial writer of political treatises, fiction, travel writing, and other works during her lifetime, she has been variously vilified and mythologized since her death in 1797, and has long been a staple in the literary canon. But can we ever really know Wollstonecraft? In the newest episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by Professor E.J. Clery, General ..read more