What I Can Do For You

I am open for opportunities to catalogue your library's holdings, or your personal collection, of manuscripts and fine books. 

• Collection Development

Let me bring my twin professional experiences as a rare booksdealer and a Special Collections professional to you as you develop your collection of rare & antiquarian books or medieval manuscripts. With an eye for the unusual, the miscatalogued, and the historically important, I have been tracking auctions and book vendors for interesting & international pieces for interesting & international people since 2019. Recently, Mobilis Books, my bookstore, has homed items in the collections of Lambeth Palace Library and Kew Gardens, as well as private collectors from as far away as New Zealand and Japan, to across Europe, and North America.

• Cataloguing

For libraries and special collections, I have catalogued a range of items from film (John Boorman's personal projection prints and an Indiana filmmaker's entire corpus) to medieval manuscripts (the University of Kentucky's collection). 

In 2017, I learned to TEI code through the Digital Rolls and Fragments Workshop hosted by the Beinecke Library at Yale University. In 2020, I presented the John Rylands Library with a TEI code for MS French 5. 

For private booksellers, I have worked on medieval to modern material. Projects have included Books of Hours in Latin, French, and Occitan, decretals, science, and law books. Recently I have been working on 19th and 20th Japanese woodblocks. In addition to cataloguing these items, I have experience pricing them. 

• Collection Promotion 

It is my life's goal to be an advocate for old books and libraries. To that end, I am happy to assess your collection and champion it by way of blog posts, networking your collection (connecting scholars with your holdings), and other forms of social media outreach. Here is an example of a short blog post intended for a more scholarly audience that I wrote on a twelfth-century binding fragment in an Ottonian Gospel book (Manchester, John Rylands Library, Latin 98). 

I am also happy to use my 10 years of pedagogical and research training, coupled with my background as an experimental filmmaker, to put together short YouTube segments to explain or highlight items in your collection. 

• Online exhibitions

Using the platforms of either Omeka (an online exhibition publishing platform) or Google Sites, I can build online exhibitions to feature your holdings. 

• Transcription/ Translation

My transcription and translation services are backed by years of coursework and practice. 

I have studied the practice of transcribing medieval documents in France, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S.-- from seminars, workshops, and classes at the the École nationale de Chartes (2014), the Abbey of Montecassio (2015), the University of Virginia (2016), Yale University (2017), the University of London (2018), and the University of Manchester (2019). In 2017, I taught a workshop at Indiana University on the conventions of paleography and transcription and then led a group of graduate students in a Transcribe-a-Thon.

With coursework from Indiana University in the theory of translation, followed by a published translation of a selection Jules Verne's work in the Trinity College Dublin's journal of translation, I have theoretical and practical translation experience. I primarily work in French to English, but can also work in Italian, Spanish, German, and Latin to English.