Today’s blog is a promotional one for ‘The Early Dance Circle Annual Lecture, 2020’ which will take place on
Friday 28 February 2020 at 7.15 p.m.
Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House,
20 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH
Last year their guest speaker was one of our fellow Pen and Sword,author, Mike Rendell and this year’s speaker will be the dancer, dance Historian and archivist at New College, Oxford, Jennifer Thorp.
The high seas of British publishing have always been choppy. Of course, publishing piracy is not a thing of the past by any means. Last March, Katy Guest wrote about the modern problem in The Guardian, reporting the boast, ‘I can get any novel I want in 30 seconds.’ It’s estimated that 17% of e-books are consumed illegally. Katy found the recurring claim that there was nothing wrong in the practice because, “Reading an author’s work is a greater compliment than ignoring it.”
In 1706 English dancing-masters were introduced to the new concept (for London) of dances recorded in notation and manuals in English on how to read them. That year John Weaver, with the encouragement of two significant patrons, sold copies of his influential Orchesography and A Collection of Ball-Dances … by Mr Isaac through the Strand bookshop of Paul and Isaac Valliant. They did him an honest and successful job but inadvertently signalled to less scrupulous printers that there was money to be made in such publications, by fair means or foul. This talk looks at the ways in which some of the eighteenth-century dance materials that we cherish today came into being and survived – if they did?
The dance publishers that Jennifer Thorp will tell us about, like authors today, might stoutly disagree! Come along to the EDC Annual Lecture this year and hear more about the 18th century form of publishing piracy and its consequences. You’ll be very welcome!
For further information or to reserve your free place, please contact: secretary@earlydancecircle.co.uk or 020 8699 8519 . A suggested donation is £5.00.
All Things Georgian 