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Gutenberg, Morgan, and Greene: Building the Bookman’s Paradise
October 22, 2023 @ 2:00 pm PDT
Sponsored by The Book Club of Washington
Online Sunday, October 22, 2 PM PDT
What bibliophile could resist an introduction to the early history and development of the private library of J. Pierpont Morgan? John McQuillen elaborates on the rich scope of his talk: “Morgan had an exemplary eye for collecting significant Western literary works—Gutenberg and Aldus, Shakespeare and Dickens—but it was his librarian, Belle Greene, who helped to focus Morgan’s broad collecting practices towards the creation of a truly exemplary library. Miss Greene steered the library through the Great Depression and both World Wars and continued to build on Morgan’s vision of an outstanding repository of the history of the written word.”
John McQuillen is the Associate Curator of Printed Books & Bindings at the Morgan Library & Museum. In 2012, he earned a PhD in Art History and the Book History and Print Culture Collaborative Program from the University of Toronto. John specializes in incunabula and Early Modern book history and has published on 15th-century provenance studies, medieval/Early Modern library history, incunable herbals, and early book portraits in the paintings of Hans Holbein. For the Morgan, John has curated exhibitions on William Caxton, Martin Luther, J.R.R. Tolkien, 18th-century French royal bookbindings, Hans Holbein, and early printed herbals (on view from 6 October).