This panel interrogates early modern stationer signs by situating them within topographical and cultural contexts of the period. Before the advent of numbered street addresses, wooden signboards fixed in the frontages of printing houses and bookshops signaled sites of literary and social exchange. These signs did double duty: they were simultaneously public-facing trade emblems and paratexts in the title-page imprints of books they authorized. As uniquely biblio-visual arguments, then, they worked in concert to broadcast a stationer’s stock, specialization, and geopositioning in the book trade.

This panel seeks papers that consider the iconography of printing house and bookshop signs, their role in building stationer reputations, and their relationships to works they “signed off” on and which were wholesaled under their auspices. How did a sign’s visual rhetoric appeal to different readerships? In what ways could clusters of signs in neighborhoods like St Paul’s Cross Churchyard and the Royal Exchange affect commerce, mood, and the public’s perception of that milieu? What connections existed between the material sign and its paratextual representation on the title-page, or even the inner contents of books impressed with that signage? What legacies or “afterlives” did certain signs possess in the book trade? How did these housemarks translate to and find new meanings in other trades, provinces, and transnational settings? Ultimately, this panel aims to move beyond the frontage and title-page to examine the shop sign as a multivalent object of book history

Interested participants are invited to submit the following items to Andreas P. Bassett (andreas.bassett@sjsu.edu) by Wednesday, July 30, 2025:
- Paper title (15-word maximum)
- Paper abstract (200-word maximum)
- Short cv (2-page maximum)
- PhD or other terminal degree completion date (past or expected)

Accepted papers will be notified no later than Monday, August 4.