Sam Lemley
Curator of Special Collections Director of the Posner Center for Special Collections
- Pittsburgh PA UNITED STATES
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Media Appearances
Fascinating Illustrations of 18th-century Inoculations by the Inventor of the Smallpox Vaccine
Hyperallegic online
2021-06-03
Both Edward Jenner’s inoculation methods and the illustrations he made of those he treated were groundbreaking.
4 million cards. 4,000 drawers. And a whole lot of paper cuts. A coalition of book lovers rushes to save U-Va.’s card catalogue.
The Washington Post online
2019-12-28
They’d just finished setting up projectors to create a replica of the planetarium Thomas Jefferson had envisioned spanning the University of Virginia’s Rotunda dome when Neal Curtis and Sam Lemley stopped. They looked at each other. And they decided they had to come up with a plan — immediately.
Media
Industry Expertise
Accomplishments
Scholarly Work
He also edited a volume on Shakespeare's four Folios (Penn State University Press), published in conjunction with exhibitions mounted at CMU and the Frick Pittsburgh, and in 2025 authored Rare Books & Ancestral Machines: A Handbook to the Posner Center for Special Collections (Carnegie Mellon University Press).
Scholarly Work
Lemley's scholarly work has appeared in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, The Library, Studies in Bibliography, Shakespeare Quarterly, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Hyperallergic, and other journals.
Education
The Palmer School, Long Island University
MSLIS
UNC Chapel Hill
Bachelors
Carnegie Mellon University
PhD
PhD in English Literature and an MLIS with a certificate of concentration in rare book and special collections librarianship. Lemley has held research fellowships at the Houghton Library, Princeton University Library, the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, and Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.
Event Appearances
Panel Discussion: "Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press"
Grolier Club Bibliography Week Lecture New York, NY
2023-01-26
Articles
STAB-STITCH HOLES, DECKLES, AND BROKEN TYPES: SOME NOTES ON THE FIRST OFFICIAL PRINTING OF THE US BILL OF RIGHTS (1792)
The Library2026
The first official printing of the US Bill of Rights (Philadelphia: Francis Childs and John Swain, 1792) survives in five complete copies. A sixth, fragmentary copy was offered at Sotheby’s in July 2024. This note examines the bibliographical evidence in five of these surviving copies and demonstrates that the edition comprises two issues, each distinguished by the size of its paper.
Early species descriptions of two native Virginian plants in the Histoire des plantes, nouvellement trouvées en l’isle Virgine, & autres lieux (Paris, 1620)
Archives of Natural History2025
Histoire des plantes, nouvellement trouvées en l’isle Virgine, & autres lieux is a 16-page pamphlet printed by Guillaume Macé in Paris and dated 1620. The work purports to describe newly-encountered native flora from the British colony of Virginia. Yet the status of the work in the early botany of North America remains unsettled.
Who Rpinted Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio? Get access Arrow
Shakespeare Quarterly2023
“RPINCE of DENMARK.” Who is responsible for this infamous large-letter blunder in Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio (1685, hereafter F4)—one of the most “embarrassing, excruciating, and egregious errors in English”?
Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with Computational Bibliography? New Angles on Printing Thomas Hobbes’ “Ornaments” Edition
Eighteenth-Century Studies2021
This article attributes one of the three “first” editions of Leviathanto the London printer John Richardson (fl. 1673–1703), revising Noel Malcolm’s attribution to a different printer in the recent Clarendon Edition of Leviathan. We lay out the mystery of Leviathan’s so-called “Ornaments” edition and use evidence from damaged type pieces to say why we attribute its printing to Richardson.
Printing Leibniz's Calculus: Dating and Numbering the Editions of the Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis (October 1684)
The Library2021
The textual history of the first work on infinitesimal calculus and differentiation in print—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s ‘Nova methodus pro maximis et minimis …’ in the October 1684 instalment of the Leipzig scientific journal Acta Eruditorum—remains unstudied. Consequent to this inattention, extant copies of Leibniz’s article have been assigned to a single edition and a single press, despite evidence of substantive variation among them.
Research Focus
From Stage to Page: 400 Years of Shakespeare in Print
Printed in 1623, "Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies" was the earliest comprehensive gathering of Shakespeare’s plays in print. This exhibit tells the story of the First Folio’s origins in the bookstalls of seventeenth-century London and considers the histories of three later, lesser-known folios published in 1632, 1663, and 1685. The exhibition presents a rare opportunity to see all four folios in one room, offering an extraordinary look at Shakespeare’s enduring legacy.
Cipher Discs: Renaissance Encryption Machines
Cipher discs are paper encrypting machines made up of two or more rotating dials (called volvelles) embellished with alphabets, numbers, or other symbols. The central volvelle, called the 'index', revolves to encode or decode a message.
This online exhibit—a playful experiment in shortform, interactive exhibition design—explains what cipher discs are and how to use them.