Sponsored by the Caxton Club. In this program, Lauren Hewes will introduce Caxton Club members to the Stephen D. Paine Collection of American Ephemera at the American Antiquarian Society, a national research library located in Worcester, Massachusetts. The talk will include an overview of the 18,000 objects in the Paine Collection – a private collection […]
Sponsored by The Caxton Club. Have you stretched an animal skin lately? Prepared its surface to accept ink? Collected oak galls to make ink? Scribed? Added rubrics and colored initials? How about applied gesso and then adhered gold to it? Painstakingly painted on vellum? Our guest Sara Charles has. To paraphrase the movie Pulp Fiction, she […]
Sponsored by The Caxton Club. There is no vaccine. It can strike anyone. The chief occupant of the White House. A famous author. A lexicographer. A steel magnate. When it takes hold the mania begins to fester and then erupts in a messianic drive to invent a new communications method that will require everyone in […]
Sponsored by The Caxton Club Tell the truth. When you get a look at someone’s library, you do more than consider the shelving units and bookends. You take a careful look at the books themselves. Just what does this person read? Collect? Display? Now our guest, Jeremy Dibbell is going to nudge H.G. Wells aside, […]
Sponsored by The Caxton Club Our speaker will briefly discuss antique bookplates, but his emphasis will be on the contemporary art form and the fact that bookplates are in use worldwide today! Bookplates are used to mark pride in book ownership and to facilitate exchange to build collections and global friendships. James P. Keenan has […]
Sponsored by The Caxton Club. February Evening Program Book artist and letterpress printer Jessica Spring will share strange-but-true tales of her journey from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest, guided by wise mentors – and some villains – who continue to inspire another climb into the press bed. Spring began her interest in typography as a […]
Sponsored by The Caxton Club. There’s nothing like a good moral panic about how young people are spending their time to get the blood boiling – whether it’s the presence of a pool table (Trouble, right here in River City!), corrupting comic books, or the perils of Snapchat. That’s why Anthony Comstock’s 1883 conduct book Traps […]
Sponsored by The Caxton Club. February Evening Program In this program, Ed Potten and Elizabeth Savage will introduce Caxton Club members to an entirely new way of understanding woodblocks: as blocks of wood, which are organic materials that can be carbon-dated. The talk will introduce carbon-dating in book collector-friendly terms, survey our proof-of-concept project to […]
Sponsored by The Caxton Club. Horace Walpole wrote a letter in which he coined the word serendipity. The Royal and Ancient Gold Club of St Andrews got on course. A 22-year-old George Washington leads an ambush that triggers the French and Indian War. Louis XVI is born. What will become Columbia University is chartered in […]
Sponsored by The Caxton Club May Evening Program Japanese color prints and woodblock-printed books are beloved as works of art and literature. Less attention has been paid to those woodblock-printed images of the Meiji era (1868–1912) which purported to depict the news, especially events of the First Sino-Japanese (1894–95) and Russo-Japanese (1904–05) Wars. This […]
Sponsored by the Caxton Club. May Midday Program From the aptly named Wynkyn de Worde to creators of Zines, Adam Smyth unspools the story of books by illuminating the lives of eighteen fascinating characters. Entertaining, enlightening, engaging, and alliterative, his book puts a fresh perspective on some familiar names while introducing others you may not […]
Sponsored by the Caxton Club June Midday Program Young Lochinvar is come out of the west … which is great, because that leaves plenty of room for us to head to Seattle to enjoy a virtual visit to the University of Washington’s superb book arts collection, which includes historical and modern pieces encompassing all aspects […]