Hidden in the bookshelves: Una Dillon and the ‘formidable’ women booksellers of London, 1930s-1960s.

Samantha Rayner, Professor of Publishing and Book Cultures, Department of Information Studies, delivers her Inaugural Lecture.
This lecture will look at the contribution Una Dillon and her contemporary women booksellers made to the British book trade in the 1930s-1960s. It will explore how bookselling developed during this period, and highlight some of the histories which, as in Una Dillon’s case, are now literally hidden behind the bookshelves of the bookshop she created.
About the speaker: Samantha J. Rayner is Professor of Publishing and Book Cultures in the Department of Information Studies at UCL, and is also Vice Dean for Wellbeing for the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, and a Research Fellow at the Institute for English Studies. She is General Editor for an Elements series on Publishing & Book Culture with Cambridge University Press, and co-Director of the Bookselling Research Network and the Bloomsbury CHAPTER (a collaboration with the IES). She researches bookselling, publishing, and book history topics, as well as reading for wellbeing / bibliotherapy; she also has strong connections with Arthurian and medieval research.
Inaugural Lecture Series 2021-22
This lecture is part of the 2021/22 series for UCL's Faculty of Arts & Humanities and Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences. The series provides an opportunity to recognise and celebrate the achievements of our professors who are undertaking research and scholarship of international significance, and offers an insight into the strength and vitality of the arts, humanities and social sciences at UCL.