Princeton’s Influential Bollingen Series
Sponsored by The Grolier Club
This talk will explore how Princeton University Press’s Bollingen Series, founded in 1940 and now being rereleased, published hundreds of works by the likes of Coleridge, Jung, and Nabokov and shaped American intellectual thought and cultural life.
The Bollingen series, founded by Paul and Mary Mellon in 1940, is one of the most distinguished and unique ventures in the history of American publishing. While the original aim was to make available in translation The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, over the years the Bollingen series published the collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Paul Valéry, as well as Wilhelm Baynes’s translation of The I Ching or Book of Changes; Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; and works by D. T. Suzuki, Erich Neumann, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Isaiah Berlin, Gershom Scholem, E. H. Gombrich and Kenneth Clark, among other luminaries. Collectively, these 275 books have had an enormous impact on American intellectual thought and cultural life and continue to resonate across many disciplines. In many ways, the countercultural movement of the 60s is unthinkable without the Bollingen series. This talk by Brigitta van Rheinberg, Associate Director, Princeton University Press, will cover the origins, evolution, scope, history and enduring legacy of the Bollingen series. Princeton University Press is now republishing the volumes in a unified format, making the entire series available for a new generation of readers. The lecture will also explore the challenges of working with literary estates and executors. It will be moderated by collector, writer, and Grolier Club member Dennis Schaefer.
Brigitta van Rheinberg is the Associate Director and Director of Global Development of Princeton University Press. She has been at the Press for over 30 years in various roles, including sales, special sales, international rights, and editorial. She was the Press’s History Publisher for over 25 years, publishing major books in American, European, and World History, and from 2006-2016 she led the Press’s Editorial Program as Editor-in-Chief. Brigitta holds a PhD in History from Tübingen University in Germany. Dennis Schaefer is a Ph.D. Candidate at Princeton University and a past fellow with the Weimar Klassik Foundation and the Prussian Heritage Foundation.