A. Knight Collection Research Forum, Day 1: Introductions

A research and lecture series, A. Knight at the Phoenix Public Library celebrates the contributions of book collector, businessman, and civic leader Alfred Knight to the Phoenix community. 

This first session is an informal introduction of our visiting scholars, an overview of the Alfred Knight collection (and Phoenix Public Library holdings), and an initial discussion of further plans for research and events. 

Scholars, students and those with interest in the history of the book are invited to attend. Public events in the 2024 series include a lecture and two informal research discussions.

About the collection

Alfred Knight willed his large collection of books and objects to “the people of Phoenix,” now housed in the Rare Books Room of Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix. The collection is strong in Shakespeare, bibles, and Renaissance astronomy, but it also includes modern first editions (Dickens, Conrad, Kipling, Jane Austen, James Joyce), and a huge collection of individual leaves from various periods, cultures, and regions.

About the series

The Department of English at ASU, in association with the Phoenix Public Library, presents this two-day research and planning event aimed at investigating the Alfred Knight collection and planning future research initiatives based around it. To facilitate our thinking, we are delighted to welcome four outstanding scholars of book history: Claire M. L. Bourne, Zachary Lesser, Tara Lyons, and Aaron Pratt.

Each day will feature an afternoon event with our visiting scholars, open to all interested faculty, graduate students and book enthusiasts, held in Ross-Blakley Hall at ASU in Tempe. Our visitors will discuss highlights from the collection, and as a group we will plan future research projects. This is an opportunity to meet four of the most significant Early Modern book historians in the world – and to discover a little-known, but incredibly rich resource located in Phoenix.

About our visiting scholars

Claire M. L. Bourne is Associate Professor of English and Helena Rubenstein University Endowed Fellow in the Humanities at The Pennsylvania State University. Bourne’s work pays close attention to the visual qualities of printed texts – especially typography: “Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England” (OUP: 2020). Punctuation marks come alive in her writing, and on her website. She is also the editor of “Shakespeare / Text” (Arden Shakespeare: 2021), and hit the headlines recently when she and Jason Scott-Warren (University of Cambridge) identified Milton’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio.

Zachary Lesser, the Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the General Editors of the Arden Shakespeare Series, is a force of textual nature. His book “Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619” (Penn Press: 2021) argues that the First Folio was not the first planned collection of Shakespeare’s plays, and takes readers on a tour of publishing intrigue and deception, ghostly images on blank pages, stab-stitching, and libraries all over the world. Lesser is jointly responsible for two electronic resources which are exemplary in the way they use digital tools to make information and texts available to scholars: DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks and the Shakespeare Census (which now logs the Phoenix folios, folio fragments, and quartos).

Tara Lyons is Associate Professor at Illinois State University, where she teaches early modern literature, book history, and bibliography while also serving as Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her scholarship challenges often-repeated “facts” about book history, overturning commonly held myths – and rediscovering evidence of lost books and contexts. She has received grants from the Huntington, Folger, and Bodleian Libraries as well as from the Bibliographical Society of America — funding that has allowed her to keep her nose in old books and eyes on manuscript archives. Lyons had something of an annus mirabilis in 2023, publishing four highly significant articles. She promises more fun myth-busting in her in-progress monograph on Collected Plays.

Aaron T. Pratt is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Pratt is the person who persuaded Yale Library to collect VHS horror videos (“Horror and Exploitation on VHS: The History of Home Video Comes to Yale,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2015, 14.3, 332-35) while also selling (and buying for his own collection) Early Modern books. He curated The Long Lives of Very Old Books – a major exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center in Fall 2023, and he too has been looking at questionable practices in book-selling: “Through the First Folio, Darkly: When is a ‘Perfect’ Copy Perfect?” Shakespeare Quarterly, 2023, 74.4, 396-404. He is known as “the stab-stitching guy,” and to find out why, and what it is, you’ll need to read: “Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature,” The Library, 7th series, 2015, 16.3, 304-28.

About our host scholars

Brandi Adams is an assistant professor of English at ASU and a member of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Responsible for the Hayden Library’s acquisition of The Roman Actor, Adams’ interests include book history, history of reading, early modern English drama, and premodern critical race and gender studies. After serving as an undergraduate program manager for MIT, she began researching the early history of artificial intelligence, early modern automata and how studying literature can have a significant and positive impact on computing to her interests. Her research and reviews appear in Shakespeare, Shakespeare Survey, The Cahiers Élisabéthains, and Early Theatre, and in volumes including Shakespeare/Text. In addition to hosting this series, she is researching and writing her first monograph entitled Representations of Books and Readers in Early Modern English drama (1580-1640).

Jonathan Hope is a Professor of English at ASU. His work lives at the intersection of language and literature, using techniques from linguistics to explore literary texts, and literary texts as evidence for the linguistic history of English. With publications like “Who Invented 'Gloomy'? Lies People Want to Believe about Shakespeare” (Memoria di Shakespeare), it’s clear that Hope means for his scholarship to lay-to-rest many misconceptions about the English language and its most famous users. At ASU Hope teaches graduate-level classes in digital humanities and British experimental writing, and undergraduate classes on Shakespeare, pre-1800 literature, and Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. He also facilitates a graduate poetry workshop. Recognized for his digital humanities work, Hope was director of the NEH-funded Early Modern Digital Agendas, a series of advanced summer institutes held at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Hope also recently authenticated a fragment of the Shakespeare Third Folio along with sharing his expertise on an unknown copy of “A Yorkshire Tragedy.”

Scholars in image at top, left to right, first row: Brandi Adams, Claire Bourne, and Jonathan Hope. Second row: Zachary Lesser, Tara Lyons, and Aaron Pratt.

Image of Alfred Knight bookplate courtesy of Phoenix Public Library.