This conference takes a fresh look at the printed material too often regarded as trash - either by its contemporaries, who regarded it as disposable, or by the academy which until recently has tended to treat such items as beneath contempt.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
Professor Brian Maidment
'To drive away the heavy thought of care' - the early history of the trade in scraps, 1820-1840

SPEAKERS:
-Diana Patterson, Parliamentary rubbish
-Judith Davies, A week is a long time in politics: how a short, sharp poster campaign in 1857 helped to overturn centuries of aristocratic domination in Dudley
-Helen S. Williams, Printing in procession: printers’ participation in nineteenth-century public events
-David Osbaldestin, Yesterday’s tomorrows: a throwaway history of ephemera studies
-Jim Mussell, Ephemera belongs to the dead: affect, print, and memory
-Sue May, Trading on fear of purgatory: a mass printed ticket to Tudor popularity
-Annemarie McAllister, ‘My friend, do me the favour of reading this’: trash or tract?
-Karel van der Waarde, Medicines information leaflets: are we just printing waste or are we really supporting patients?
-David Atkinson, Bellman’s sheets: between street literature and ephemera
-Iain Beavan, Chapbook woodcuts: ‘unfit for purpose’?
-Francesca Tancini, Virtually indestructible: the ephemeral life of Victorian picture-books for children
-Elaine Jackson, ‘I’d rather be good bad than bad good’
-Berta Ruck writing ‘bad’ romance for women’s magazines
-Tony Quinn, Fifty years too early: George Newnes and The Million, a penny colour magazine for the masses
-Karen Attar, From dross to gold: Augustus De Morgan’s sale catalogues
-Annette Hagan, The chapbook collection of Sir Walter Scott
-Marine Furet, The archaeology of her desk: reading the ephemera in Angela Carter’s archives