If you are in a library, looking at a book, what do you really need to know about its beginnings? Do you need to know how, or why, it arrived in its current location? Many readers do, of course, engage in some form of provenance research – whether because they are explicitly interested in a past…
Read MoreAuthor: Alice Wickenden
Alice Wickenden is finishing a collaborative PhD with the British Library and Queen Mary, University of London, titled ‘Hans Sloane’s Library and its Material Connections’. She works on bringing theories of collecting and institutional practice into conversation with the material book in order to understand what it means to talk about a library as a distinct sort of collection. Alice has forthcoming work in Publishing History.