Jill Shefrin - Teetotum Home

Jill’s research focuses on the use of printed pastimes & teaching aids in early modern & nineteenth-century education, particularly for girls, & she has published & lectured extensively on educational ephemera.

She has been studying early children’s books & pastimes since 1975. A librarian with the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books from 1980 to 1996, she has since been an independent historian & bibliographer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Senior Research Associate in Arts at Trinity College, University of Toronto and Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Play & Recreation, University of Greenwich.

She co-organized the conference ‘Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain’ at Cambridge University in 2005 & co-edited Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain (Ashgate, 2009), both with Mary Hilton.

More recently, she co-organized the conference ‘Enduring Trifles: Writing the History of Childhood with Ephemera’ at the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University (2011) with the Curator, Andrea Immel.

She has taught the Children’s Books course at the University of London

Rare Books Summer School since 2008 & is a member of the Advisory

Committee for the Grolier Club’s forthcoming ‘One Hundred Famous Children’s Books’ exhibition (New York, 2014-2015), curated by Chris Loker.

Her most recent book, The Dartons: Publishers of Educational Aids, Pastimes & Juvenile Ephemera, 1787-1876 (Cotsen Occasional Press, 2009), has been awarded the Justin G. Schiller Prize (Bibliographical Society of America) & the F.J. Harvey Darton Award, (Children’s Books History Society). It has been nominated for the International Bibliographical Prize (International League of Antiquarian Booksellers).

Jill has curated numerous exhibitions & written several exhibition catalogues. She also has experience cataloguing private collections & indexing descriptive bibliographies.

She is currently engaged in a study of English ‘school pieces’ (ca.1660-1860) & an examination of the practice of teaching children with pictures before 1850.