Event

Lecture | Joke Books and Book Jokes, or Folk Books and Book Folks

Thursday, September 19, 2019 17:30to19:30
McLennan Library Building Rare Books and Special Collections, McLennan Library Building 4th floor, 3459 rue McTavish, Montreal, QC, H3A 0C9, CA
The humourist: a collection of entertaining tales, anecdotes, repartees, witty sayings, epigrams, bon mots, jeu d'esprits, &c., carefully selected.  https://mcgill.ca/x/ZMm
Image by Elis Ing.

Join special guest Dr. Moira Marsh for an evening of humour and play. There is a lot of room for comic play in the realm of bibliography, some public and some esoteric. Publicly, joke books have enjoyed popularity from the ancient Greek Philogelos to today's Jokebooks by Frog found on the streets of Eugene, Oregon. On the esoteric side, academics and book people--dealers, indexers, and librarians, have their own in-group play of jokes, spoofs, and hoaxes. This talk will explore the humorous folklore of books and book people. Humorous play respects no bounds.

The talk will be followed by a light reception. RSVP Online Here.

This event is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.


Dr. Moira Marsh serves as the collection manager and liaison librarian for Anthropology, Folklore, and Sociology at the University of Indiana. She is also manager of the Modern Language Association Folklore Bibliography Project.

Her research interests of humor theory and folklore are reflected in her scholarly work; she is currently undertaking a cross-cultural analysis of the acoustics of laughter and editing a book of essays about unlaughter entitled “Not Funny, Not Fun.” Her book Practically Joking was published by Utah State University Press in 2015.

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