On 24 March Peter Campbell will be in conversation with Julian Bell, another painter and writer about art, at the London Review Bookshop.

Under this splendid title, a conference on the ‘norms, formats, supports’ of publishing (in a wide sense) was held a couple of weeks ago in Bordeaux. After a thousand design conferences devoted to the ‘new’ and the ‘innovative’, it was refreshing to come across one devoted to things that don’t change – or only change every now and then. It was refreshing too to find discussion that recognized the political embededness of this fundamental, sometimes invisible aspect of designing.

Last month the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing – SHARP – held its annual gathering over several days (11–15 July) in The Hague. The hosting was shared between the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague and the University of Leiden. Both are now active in the field of book history. At Leiden one can do an MA in Book and Digital Media Studies, while the KB manages the Bibliopolis project, an online history of the printed book in the Netherlands. The event offered a now familiar conference mix of a few highly polished and interesting plenary lectures by star performers, a huge number of short (twenty-minute) talks mostly on highly specific topics and in which empirical digging usually outweighs critical thought, plus quite a bit of enjoyable schmoozing at receptions and refreshment breaks.

Robin Kinross is giving a talk with this title at the Information Design Histories conference at Coventry (UK), 10 December 2003 (Communication Research Institute of Australia), in which, among other things, he will argue against arguments that he presented at the first Information Design conference, held at Cranfield (UK) in 1984. The title of that earlier talk was ‘The rhetoric of neutrality’.

At the ATypI conference in Rome last week, three Hyphen authors spoke. Robin Kinross gave a talk around the themes of his book Modern typography, ten years on from its first publication; he is now limbering up to revise and expand the text for a new edition. In another strand of discussion, Eric Kindel and Fred Smeijers presented their ‘historical action research’ into the making of stencil letters for the production of books.

Robin Kinross is contributing to the ‘Marking the text’ conference at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, England, 3—6 September 1998. The topic of his talk is ‘Judging a book by its material embodiment’.

Following the publication of his book, David Wild has been invited to deliver a plenary lecture at a conference on ‘Modern architecture: an incomplete project’, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, 9–11 October 1998.