Maureen Bell Author & Editor

D.F. McKenzie was the leading bibliographer of his generation, and his Panizzi Lectures on 'Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts' revolutionized Anglo-American approaches to bibliography and the history of the book. He was a most stimulating and influential teacher: at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he was Professor of English Language and Literature 1969-87, and in Oxford, as Lyell Reader in Bibliography and as Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism. He was the driving force in the planning of the multi-volume Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, in progress, and his major edition of Congreve, close to completion at his death, is being seen through its final stages by Christine Ferdinand (married to McKenzie in 1994) and is shortly to be published by Oxford University Press. The McKenzie Trust was established after his death to promote excellence in teaching and research and there is an annual McKenzie Lecture in Oxford in June. Maureen Bell was formerly a schoolteacher and librarian, and met McKenzie for the first time in 1987 when he acted as external examiner for her PhD thesis on women in the seventeenth-century book trade. As Leverhulme Fellow at the Institute of Bibliography, University of Leeds (1990-2) she worked on the quantification of English printing 1475-1700 and, with John Barnard, published The Early Seventeenth-century York Book Trade and John Foster's Inventory of 1616 (1994). She has published widely on women in the seventeenth-century book trade and was contributor and Assistant Editor to volume IV of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Director of the British Book Trade Index on the Web, funded by the AHRB. Currently Reader in English Literature and Head of the Department of English at the University of Birmingham.