Academic Background

D.Phil. 1990 (Oxford); MA, Bibliography and Textual Criticism 1975 (Leeds); MA, Library Science 1974 (U of Iowa); MA, English Literature 1973 (U of Iowa); BA, English Literature 1971 (UC Santa Cruz).

Research Interests

History of the book: currently working on bankruptcy in the 18C book trade. History of newspapers. History of libraries.

Selected Publications

Benjamin Collins and the Eighteenth-Century Provincial Newspaper Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

The Works of William Congreve, 3 vols., ed. D.F. McKenzie, prepared for publication by C.Y. Ferdinand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

An Accidental Masterpiece: Magdalen College’s New Building and the People Who Built It (Oxford: Magdalen College, 2009).

‘Provincial Newspapers and the Book Trade’, in Michael Suarez and Michael Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), vol. 5.

‘Library Administration 1475 to 1640’, in Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1. 565–91.

‘The Mystery of Cookery and the Art of Wheedling: What Magdalen Undergraduates Read in the Eighteenth Century’, Magdalen College Record, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford, 2006), 127–36.

‘The Economics of the Eighteenth-Century Provincial Book Trade: the Case of Ward and Chandler’, in Maureen Bell et al. (eds.), Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 42–56.

‘Constructing the Framework of Desire: How Newspapers Sold Books in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 157–75.

‘Magdalen College and the Book Trade: The Provision of Books in Oxford, 1450–1550’, in Arnold Hunt, Allison Shell, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), The British Book Trade and Its Customers (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1997), 175–87.

Contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (printers, booksellers, and William Congreve); The Oxford Companion to the Book.