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Everyone is welcome to come along on Monday 1 June to the next Book History Research Group seminar at Senate House, London. Melanie Bigold from Cardiff University will be talking about the eighteenth-century antiquarian George Ballard: details below. No need to register! This year's Open University/Institute of English Studies Book History Research Group seminar series is 'Paper, Pen and Ink 2: Manuscript Cultures in the Age of Print'. More details at http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/book-history/research-seminar-series/paper-pen-and-ink-2 Monday 1 June 2015 Venue: Room G34, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1E 7HU. Tel. 0207 8628675 Melanie Bigold (Cardiff University) ''Artefacts of the Written Word': Antiquarian Collections, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Ephemera in the Bodleian's Ballard archives' George Ballard (1705/6-1755) is a largely forgotten individual, but his extraordinary manuscript collections, correspondence, and printed Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752), are testament to a productive and diverse life of writing. Ballard's antiquarian interest in and preservation of all manner of 'artefacts of the written word' - whether manuscript, print, or monumental inscription - can be found in the 74 volumes of manuscripts held in the Bodleian and dozens more letters and manuscripts in the British Library. It is a collection about collections, collecting, manuscript production and circulation, collaboration, and the creation of textual lives. He has much to tell us, therefore, about how eighteenth-century scholars conceptualized textuality and the research and writing of texts and lives. Melanie Bigold is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. Her research interests encompass women writers of the long eighteenth century; women's literary history; Restoration and eighteenth-century drama; life-writing; and a number of areas of book history (including collecting, marginalia, readers, and manuscripts). She has published a monograph on Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn, and Elizabeth Carter (Palgrave, 2012), and transcribed and edited manuscripts for The Slave Trade Debate (Bodleian, 2007). She is currently working on a joint biography of George Ballard and Elizabeth Elstob, and leading a project on marginalia and provenance in the Cardiff Rare Books collection. -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302). The Open University is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.