Death of a Bookman: The Publishing Misadventures of Charles Rideal
April 27 @ 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm PDT
Sponsored by the Book Club of Washington
The Annual Meeting encompasses a brief business meeting followed by a special presentation. A keepsake created for the occasion will also be featured and light refreshments served. The business portion includes electing officers, approving new board members, and presenting the Monroe Award and student book collecting awards.
This year’s speaker is Dr. Solveig C. Robinson, who will be presenting “Death of a Bookman: The Publishing Misadventures of Charles Rideal”.
In January 1900, the New York Times reported that Charles Rideal, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a “[man] of ideas and enterprise,” had established the Abbey Press to publish “fine and high-class works.” Not quite 30 years later, the paper reported Rideal was dead in federal custody. What had happened?
This talk will trace the publishing misadventures of Rideal (1858–1929), an author and publisher on both sides of the Atlantic. Active in London in the 1890s, he conducted two small publishing houses and served as editor of a range of periodicals, from a leading nursing journal to magazines dedicated to palm-reading and lady bicyclists. And then, under shadowy circumstances, he abandoned London and decamped to New York, where he began to recreate the literary world he had left behind. Initially successful, Rideal’s new life also took a terrible turn, leading to arson, assault, fraud, and ultimately death in prison.
Dr. Solveig C. Robinson is an Associate Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University and has been the Director of the Publishing & Printing Arts Program at PLU since 2001. She is the author of The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture (2014) and A Serious Occupation: Literary Criticism by Victorian Women Writers (2003) and numerous peer-reviewed and invited articles.
For more information and to register, follow this link: https://www.bookclubofwashington.org/events-1/annual-meeting-with-presentation-by-solveig-c-robinson