[The following is a call for papers and programme for a two-day symposium to take place on November 26-27, 2026 at Université Caen Normandie.]
Early almanacs, Alison Chapman writes, displayed a remarkable sensitivity to both time and place.Marketed as reference-books on the movements of the planets and stars, they were often calculated for precise geographical locations, and supplied valuable information on harvest fairs and other local events. Most early modern almanacs were sold unbound, which reduced costs and allowed them to be rolled up « fit for one’s pocket », making them quintessentially mobile objects. As they flooded the eighteenth-century market, almanacs, albums, gift books appeared in a variety of forms and sizes to appeal to different sections of the readership.
As such, their mobility considerably increased, generating an intense circulation of text and image across countries and continents. The Swiss Hinkende Bote thus inspired numerous successful imitations on both sides of the Rhine while Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732-1758) became a fixture in European annual periodical publications.
At a time when transport networks were developing quickly, annuals were increasingly designed for a mobile readership, articulating a new aesthetic of immediacy and responding to the new constraints of time and space. In On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (2006), Tim Cresswell underlines the “interface between mobile physical bodies on the one hand, and the represented mobilities on the other.” With their complex, hybrid, fragmented, and interrelated contents, Victorian pocket books and almanacs not only reflected the acceleration of people’s lives but also structured it. The immense success of such publications—an estimated 1.8 million annuals were published between 1823 and 1861, Harry E. Hootman reports —also made them the ideal means to propagate ideologies or perceptions, as in the case of the Anti-Slavery Almanach published between 1836 and 1843 by the American Anti-Slavery Society. In the imperialistic context of the era, the circulation of these pieces functioned as a "contact zone", that is, a social space "where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other".
Within the same period, comic illustrated gift books thrived. Largely aimed at the Christmas market, publications like Thomas Hood’s Comic Annual (1830-1839; 1842) or George Cruikshank’s Comic Almanack (1835-1853) sustained the popularity of small-scale wood-engravings while attracting the attention of aesthetes and connoisseurs whose travels accelerated the worldwide dissemination of nineteenth-century graphic art.
The object of this two-day symposium at Caen Normandie University is to look at the manifold routes that annual publications (almanacs, pocket books, gift books, and other ephemera) and their respective contents travelled during the long nineteenth-century (1780-1914).
Bibliography
Bordelon, David. "Transatlantic Dickens; or, Travels Through Nineteenth-Century Book History in America." Book History 23 (2020): 99-129.
Capp, Bernard. Astrology and the Popular Press. English Almanacs, 1500-1800. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Chapman Alison A. “Marking Time: Astrology, Almanacs, and English Protestantism.” Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2007): 1257-1290.
Cresswell, Tim. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. London: Routledge, 2006.
Darnton, R. “What is the History of Books? Revisited." Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 3, (2007): 495-508.
Delamaire, Marie-Stéphanie and Will Slauter, eds. Circulation and Control. Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century. Open Book Publishers, 2021.
Fraser, Gordon. Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Gilpin, Richard. "The Stationers' Company and its Almanacs." The Stationers' Company, 2020.
Goddu, Teresa A. "The Antislavery Almanac and the Discourse of Numeracy." Book History 12 (2009): 129-155.
Hootman, Harry Edward. British Literary Annuals and Giftbooks, 1823-1861. PhD thesis, 2004.
Jacob, Priyanka Anne. "The Pocket-book and the Pigeon-hole. Lady Audley's Secret and the Files of Victorian Fiction," Victorian Studies 61, no. 3 (2019): 371-394.
Jung, Sandro. “The Illustrated Pocket Diary. Generic Continuity and Innovation, 1820– 40.” Victorian Periodicals Review 45, no. 1 (2012): 23-48.
McKitterick, David. Readers in a Revolution. Bibliographical Change in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Nicholson, Bob. "'You Kick the Bucket, We Do the Rest!' Jokes and the Culture of Reprinting in the Transatlantic Press." Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 3 (2012): 273-86.
Palmeri, F. “History, Nation, and the Satiric Almanac, 1660-1760.” Criticism 40, no. 3 (1998): 377-408.
Pigeon, Stephan. "'Steal it, Change it, Print it': Transatlantic Scissors-and-Paste Journalism in the Ladies’ Treasury, 1857–1895." Journal of Victorian Culture 22, no. 1 (2017): 24- 39.
Pratt, Mary-Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, 1991: pp. 33–40.
Raven, James. London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748 - 1811. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
Smyth, Adam. “Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern England.” English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (2008): 200-244.
Waters, Catherine. Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850-1886. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Winship, Michael. "The Transatlantic Book Trade and Anglo-American Culture in the Nineteenth Century," in Kind, Steven and Susan S. Williams (eds.), Reciprocal Influences. Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America. Columbia, OH: Ohio State UP, 1999: 98-122.
Zazzera, Elizabeth Della. "Translating Revolutionary Time: French Republican Almanacs in the United States," Book History18 (2015): 75-102.
Keynotes
Ideas Matter: Reconstructing How Ideas Move Across Time, Geography, and Culture
Dr. Gordon Fraser, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Manchester
What happens to a piece of scientific knowledge when it leaves the printing press and ventures out into the world? When state actors, hopeful inventors, and everyday readers encounter the same print artifact, they rarely see the same thing. This keynote invites listeners on a methodological journey through the unpredictable lives of technical texts—moving beyond standard histories of readership to explore how specialized, heavily circulated genres attempt to tame, standardize, and discipline open political domains.
Together, we will look across nineteenth-century archives—from popular almanacs to mechanical diagrams and patent office records—to investigate how creators try to control discourse, and why their ideas so frequently escape their control. By following the productive friction between top-down technical standardization and the surprising, decentralized ways people actually used texts, this talk maps out new pathways for understanding scientific print culture as both an instrument of control and an enduring site of human contestation.
When does a collection become a collection? The Life, Times and Travels of the Punch Collection
Amanda-Jane Doran, former Head of Collections and Conservation for Punch Publications Ltd, and Curator of the Punch Collection, 1984-1998
In the 1980s the Punch Offices were in Tudor Street, running parallel to Fleet Street. They consisted of a bohemian collection of offices dotted with paintings, piles of papers and Edwardian desks and layout tables. Some staff appeared to live there. An Artist’s plans chest was filled with drawings, bank statements and clothing. I was appointed researcher to the editor, Alan Coren, a man of imposing intellect and personality in the great tradition of Punch parodists. I soon realised that the cupboards and shelves in the ‘Archive’ held manuscript letters and drawings of great significance. I speedily acquired a safe and had locks fitted to the capacious cupboards where the magazine’s art works were stored. Then the real work began.
In the Summer months of Fleet Street publishing down time, I visited the British Museum Prints and Drawings department and the Victoria and Albert Museum, scouring catalogues, making connections between the collections and friends for life with the Keepers. This enabled me to identify the collections within collections that I now cared for and create new projects to exhibit treasures of 19th century caricature and comic writing in a wider context, nationally and internationally.
The 150th anniversary of Punch in 1991 provided the focus for an enormous celebratory exhibition and academic conference, which produced a rich seam of Punch research from Richard Altick, Michael Slater, Gabor Boritt and Roy Foster. Later in the 1990s, although I was able to expand the collection with numerous acquisitions, the future of the collection itself was very much in doubt, and an escape plan was formulated with the help of wonderful colleagues at the BM, BL and V&A. My aim was always to keep the collection together, as a unique survival of archival records and collections, which I had spent many years reuniting. In terms of conserving publishing history, I am privileged to have been able to play my part.
Programme
Thursday, 26 November
10:00 - Registration, tea and coffee, Salle du Belvédère 10:30 - Welcome and introduction: Jean-Marc Fournier, vice-président recherche, Caen Normandie University
11:00 - 12:30 - Panel 1 - Print Networks, Translation and Colonialism
Chair: Françoise Baillet (Caen Normandy University)
Anamika Mohanta (Jamia Millia Islamia, India) - "The ‘Bombay Almanack’ of the 19th Century: Colonial Technology and Its Reader"
Maryam Sikander (SOAS University of London) - "The Punch Line: Circulating Images and Improvisation in the Contact Zone"
Eloise Forestier (Ghent University) - "Translation, Cultural Transfer, and Marketing: Swedish Literature Packaged as Christmas Treats on the US Market"
12:30 - 13:30 - Lunch
13:30 - 14:45 - Keynote: Dr. Gordon Fraser, University of Manchester "Ideas Matter: Reconstructing How Ideas Move Across Time, Geography, and Culture" Respondents: Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan, in person) and Sonja Lawrenson (Manchester Metropolitan, online)
14:45 - 15:00 - Break
15:00 - 18:00 - Optional library tour with Louise Daguet: conservation/bookbinding studio and exhibition of almanacs and ephemera from the local collections
19:30 - Dinner, Restaurant Le Dauphin, 29 rue Gemare 14000 Caen
Friday, 27 November
9:10 - Tea and coffee, Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines - Amphithéâtre.
9:30-11:00 - Panel 2 - Journeys and investigations
Chair: Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Melissa Hevingham (Caen Normandy University) - "The Companionable Punch: Readership and Punch's Pocket Book"
Lou Burnard (Independent Scholar) - "Pascoe's Progress: publishing and tourism at the turn of the 19th century"
Laurence Talairach (Alexandre-Koyré Center/IUF/Toulouse Jean Jaurès University) - "‘Took this pocket book into use today & as Alfred remarks found no use for it’: Margaret Gatty’s Punch Notebooks as Portable Scientific Tools"
11:00 - 11:15 - Break
11:15 - 12:30 - Keynote: Amanda Jane Doran, former Head of Collections and Conservation for Punch Publications Ltd, and Curator of the Punch Collection, 1984-1998 "When does a Collection become a Collection? The Life, Times and Travels of the Punch Collection" Respondent: Françoise Baillet (Caen Normandy University)
12:30 - 13:30 - Lunch
13:30 - 15:00 - Panel 3 - Crossing Borders and Continents
Chair: Laurence Talairach (Alexandre-Koyré Center/IUF/Toulouse Jean Jaurès University)
Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill (University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès) - "Sketching, mapping and intelligence reporting with the Joint Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission (1884-1886)"
Louise Daguet (Lead curator of the library collections, Caen Normandie University) - "Le « fonds anglais » de la bibliothèque universitaire de Caen : constitution et itiné́raire"
Declan Hickey (University of Oxford) - "The Transcontinental Musical Annual, c1830–1930"
15:00 - 15:15 - Break
15:15 - 16:45 - Panel 4 - Words and swords
Chair: Camille Hellebuyck (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Julien Hage (Caen Normandy University) - "Le Roter Kalender für Lehrling und Schüler aux éditions Wagenbach, un agenda de contre-culture militante de grande diffusion en Allemagne fédèrale (1971-1976)"
Léa Perrier (Caen Normandy University) - "España Hoy et ses avatars: Manifester et diffuser une lecture antifranquiste de l’Espagne au sein de la diaspora espagnole (1962-1972)"
Anastasia Scepi (Sorbonne University) - "1848-1849 dans le Punch’s Pocket Book, quelles influences transnationales?"
16:45 - Closing words
Created 12 October 2026