Paul Needham (librarian)

[2] He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, during his time at the Pierpont Morgan Library, which he used to fund his research on the history of bookprinting in 15th-century England.

Needham spoke to NPR about the experience of processing and preserving such a collection, including the role of library digitization for rare early publications.

[2][9] Needham is a member of the Bibliographical Society of America, the American Printing History Association, and the Rare Book School.

Post-retirement, he has remained active in bibliographic scholarship, holding the Lyell Readership in Bibliography at the University of Oxford in 2021 on the origins and texts of the Gutenberg Bible and returning to teaching at the Rare Book School.

Wilding contacted him with his suspicions that the publication was a modern fabrication, leading Needham to reanalyse it and discover that the depth of ink splotches on the page was incompatible with the book being made by a contemporary printing press.

After a copy sold on the private collector market was found to be a potential forgery, Needham assisted in investigations to discover the whereabouts of the original.

When the Houghton Library at Harvard University identified one of the books in its collection (Des destinées de l'ame) as anthropodermic in 2014, Needham attacked their coverage, which described the discovery as "[g]ood news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs and cannibals alike", as "shocking in its crudity" and argued that it was ethically necessary to remove and bury or cremate the binding.

[21] Selected works that Needham has been involved with include his publication of Twelve Centuries of Bookbindings, 400–1600 through Oxford University Press in 1979,[22] writing the preface to Johann Gutenberg and His Bible: A Historical Study in 1988,[23] his editing of A Galileo Forgery: Unmasking the New York Sidereus Nuncius alongside Bredekamp and Irene Brückle [de] in 2014,[24] and his delivery of the Sandars, Rosenbach, and Lyell Lectures in 2004, 2013, and 2021 respectively.