Dr Stephen Bernard, an academic visitor to the Faculty, has won the highly prestigious, international, biennial MLA Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters with his first book: The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). The edition is also available through oxfordscholarlyeditionsonline.com.
The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons is a revised and expanded version of Dr Bernard's doctoral thesis, which was supervised by Professor Abigail Williams. It charts Jacob Tonson the elder and younger's interactions with each other and with the prestigious authors they published, such as John Dryden, William Congreve, and Joseph Addison. In 2019, the Oxford Bibliographical Society will be publishing Dr Bernard's The Letters of Jacob Tonson the elder: Bodl. MS Eng Letters, c129, which will mean that, for the first time, all of the Tonsons' correspondence will be in print. This is a significant achievement for those who teach and study the history of the book at Oxford University.
The Award will be presented to Dr Bernard at a special ceremony in New York in January.