The Bibliographical Society of Canada ☙ La Société bibliographique du Canada

Marie Tremaine Medal Announcement

The Awards Committee of the Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) is pleased to announce that the 2025 Marie Tremaine Medal for excellence in bibliography has been awarded to Dr. I. S. MacLaren.

Dr. MacLaren spent his career at the University of Alberta investigating how the writings that explorers and travellers kept while prosecuting their routes evolved into print-published books. Furthermore, his contributions possess a vitally Canadian dimension. Nearly thirty of his scholarly articles and two books – The Ladies, the Gwich’in, and the Rat (1998) and Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Art, Life and Times (2024) – concentrate on the evolution of explorers or travellers into authors, and the evolution of their writings from logbooks, field notes, or letters into books. His most recent work, Paul Kane’s Travels in North America, itself constitutes a signal achievement in Canadian scholarly publishing.

Greta Golick Award 2025

The Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) is pleased to announce that Antoine Fauchié has been awarded the 2025 Greta Golick award.

Antoine is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rouen Normandy (France). His thesis focuses on the publishing industry and examines the links between technology, publishing, and literature within the framework of publishing studies and book history.

Emerging Scholar Prize 2025

The Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) is pleased to announce that Jay Ritchiehas been awarded the Emerging Scholar Prize for 2025.

Jay is a PhD Candidate in English at McGill University and a Wolfe Fellow in Scientific and Technological Literacy. His research, funded by a SSHRC CGS Doctoral Scholarship and the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, has been published in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. His creative work has appeared in Maisonneuve, SAND, and The Malahat Review, as well as on CBC and at the PHI Centre. He is the author of the poetry collection “Listening in Many Publics” (Invisible Publishing, 2024), a finalist for the QWF’s A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry.

BSC 2025 conference program and registration

The 2025 conference of the Bibliographical Society of Canada will take place 5-6 June at George Brown College (St. James Campus) in Toronto.

The conference program has been finalized and may be found on the BSC website. To register for the conference, please visit the Congress 2025 website.

Call for Papers: 2025 Conference of the Bibliographical Society of Canada

Call for Papers
2025 Conference of the Bibliographical Society of Canada
5–6 June, George Brown College, Toronto

New Histories of the Small Press

Small-press and independent publishing are major phenomena in the history of printing and the production of literature. As the largest publishing companies rationalize production, merge into conglomerates, shore up their market dominance, and compound their profits, hundreds of little publishing operations spring up in imitation or in opposition to them, to enable everything that capital neglects, from self-expression and local representation, to resistance and experiment. Small presses enable creativity, but not without risk: they promise individual and regional self-awareness at a cost. Small presses are alternately celebrated for their independence and disdained for their lack of financial resources. They seem to play a key part in many authors’ careers.

Call for applications for the Marie Tremaine Fellowship

The Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) invites applications for the Marie Tremaine Fellowship.

Deadline for application: January 20, 2025.

The Marie Tremaine Fellowship is offered in memory and through the generosity of Marie Tremaine (1902-1984), the doyenne of Canadian bibliographers. The Fellowship was instituted in 1987 and is offered annually to support the work of a scholar engaged in some area of bibliographical research, including textual studies and publishing history and with a particular emphasis on Canada. The amount of the Fellowship is $2,000.00. The recipient of the Marie Tremaine Fellowship also receives a free one-year membership in the society.

Tremaine Medal 2025: Call for nominations

The Awards Committee invites nominations for the Marie Tremaine Medal, offered by the Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) for outstanding service to Canadian bibliography and for distinguished publication in either English or French in that field. The Tremaine Medal is accompanied by the Watters-Morley Prize, a $500 scholarly award. This prize was created and endowed in 2003 by William and Beth (Watters) Morley and funds a cash prize to be given to the recipient of the Tremaine Medal. The prize honours William Morley (Tremaine Medal winner 1977) and the late Reginald Eyre Watters (Tremaine Medal winner 1979). The prize amount is $500.

Appointment of New Reviews Editor (French) of the Papers/Cahiers

The Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) is pleased to announce that Ms. Marie Chartrand-Caulet has been appointed Review Editor (French) of the Society’s peer-reviewed journal, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada.

Ms. Chartrand-Caulet is a master’s student at the Département des littératures de langue française, de traduction et de création at McGill University. Her dissertation project focuses on the evolution of the word “nègre” through dictionaries, and she is preparing a doctoral project on the use of certain punctuation marks in literature. She is involved in several university committees, notably as president of her student association in 2023-4, and organized the 28th edition of the Interuniversity Student Literature Conference. She has several years of experience as a research assistant, specifically on large literary and cultural databases. She is currently collaborating on a “data paper” providing a portrait of contemporary Quebec publishing houses and novels. Ms. Chartrand-Caulet may be contacted at: comptes_rendus@bsc-sbc.ca.

Call for book reviews for volume 62 (2025) of Papers/Cahiers

We are seeking book reviews for volume 62 (2025) of Papers/Cahiers. Book reviewing with us is an opportunity to get familiar with the latest scholarly works in the multidisciplinary areas of book studies and to get your name out there. Book reviews should be between 750 and 1000 words in length.

Our selection policy: We welcome reviews on books published within the last four years that will assist readers of Cahier / Papers in selecting works for their professional use or interest. Readers are interested in bibliographical studies (enumerative, descriptive, analytical), the history of the book and publishing, printing and print culture, intimate writings (diaries and correspondences), book formats and related media (artists’ book, digital books, comic strips, etc.), and the circulation and acquisition of printed productions. A range of geo-historical contexts and perspectives are welcome in book studies, including Canadian, Quebecois, Franco-Canadian alongside Indigenous, diasporic, and international voices.

Graduate Student Merit Award Winner for 2024

The Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) is pleased to announce that Sarah Dorward has been nominated for the BSC-SbC’s Congress Graduate Student Merit Award, which includes a grant of $500.