Benjamin Albritton on California Bindings
2025-10-20 19:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by FABS
The FABS Bindings Zoom Group welcomes Benjamin Albritton for a talk on California Bindings.
Stanford University Special Collections has many exceptional items in its care and Benjamin Albritton, Rare Books Curator, has selected a group of volumes related to the development of fine binding practice in California in the first half of the 20th century. The particular focus of this presentation will be two groups of fine bindings in Stanford’s collections: binders associated with The Bookbinders’ Guild of California first exhibition in 1902; and bindings displayed at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. These two collections provide a snapshot of binding practices and influences at two key periods in the development of the craft in California, and Ben is eager to share these examples with us and encourage a dialogue about how to make these and other binding-related materials in Stanford’s collections more accessible to the broader community of practitioners and researchers.
To join the list for links and announcements, contact Jennifer Larson: info@fabsocieties.org

Golden Slumbers: California’s Dormant Fine Press Scene
2025-10-23 18:00 - 19:15 (America/Los_Angeles)
Sponsored by The Book Club of California.
Building on themes from his book, Dreaming on the Edge: Poets & Book Artists in California, Alastair Johnston explores overlooked figures in the history of printing in the Golden State. Johnston’s work was the first in 80 years to assess the impact of small and fine presses on the culture of California, challenging the long-held notion that the state’s printing was dominated by just three figures: John Henry Nash and Edwin and Robert Grabhorn. Johnston argues that it’s time to move past this “printerly atavism” to uncover a spirit of innovation and creativity that mirrors the pioneering drive of 19th-century railroad barons and 20th-century tech giants. For Johnston, a true fine press isn’t merely about good printing—that’s a given—but about being innovative, creative, and original.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Alastair Johnston, author, scholar, and co-founder of Poltroon Press.
Lieberman Lecture | Enduring Impressions: Private Presses & Their Legacies | American Printing History Association 2025 Conference
To register to attend online: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yH92wGJ0S2ePmgo1UUDILA#/registration

With Maternal Ferocity: Reclaiming Secular Yiddish Children's Literature
2025-10-23 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by The Grolier Club

Based on her new book Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, Yiddish scholar Miriam Udel will reflect on her efforts to reclaim and revivify the corpus of secular Yiddish children’s literature published in Eastern Europe and the Americas during the 20th century. She will consider the relationship between the texts, many of which have been preserved digitally, and the vulnerable books-as-objects, focusing especially on the collection of children’s books “rescued” from the Buenos Aires Jewish community after the AMIA bombing attack in 1994.
Miriam Udel is associate professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture and the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature and Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque and editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature.
Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-lecture-with-maternal-ferocity-tickets-1661304890649?aff=ebemoffollowpublishemail&ref=eemail&utm_campaign=following_published_event&utm_content=follow_notification&utm_medium=email&utm_source=eventbrite

Miniature Book Society Conclave
2025-10-25 08:00 - 2025-10-26 17:00 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by The Miniature Book Society
Miniature Book Society Conclave
The Miniature Book Society will hold a two day Virtual Conclave on Saturday and Sunday October 25 and 26, 2025. The two days will feature zoom presentations by miniature book artists and publishers, guest speakers, a Collector’s Showcase, and a timed online auction of miniature books hosted by PBA Galleries. The winners of the annual MBS Awards and the MBS Distinguished Book Award Competition will also be announced. Registration forms are on the MBS website – $60 for non-members and $45.00 for MBS members. We are pleased to announce that the 2026 MBS Conclave will be held in Berlin, Germany.
Register here:
https://mbs.org/

A Journey in Bookplates: The Art and Life of California Designer Beulah Mitchell Clute
2025-10-27 18:00 - 19:15 (America/Los_Angeles)
Sponsored by the Book Club of California.
Come along on a collector’s journey as Claudia Smukler takes you through the fascinating world of bookplates, also known as ex-libris. The term ex-libris refers to all marks of provenance in a book, including stamps, labels, and names written on the inside cover. Book owners have been doing this for centuries. The bookplate is a subset of ex-libris, specifically a printed edition, often a relief or intaglio print that may include an image or motif with special meaning for the owner. It can be pasted inside their favorite books—or not. The most artistic ones serve as the currency for friendly exchange between designers and collectors.
Studied up-close each miniature print reveals a multi-faceted story. Ms. Smukler will share visual highlights from her personal collection that include selected works by the accomplished bookplate designer, Beulah Mitchell Clute (1873-1958). She will present additional bookplates about California and the West and some contemporary prints that express a new spirit of revival for this centuries-old art form.
A bookplate broadens the history of a book as it is passed along from the owner to another reader, and then another. The life of a book—especially one with a bookplate—has many stories it can tell.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Claudia Smukler, visual artist, writer, publisher, and collector
To register for the online event: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-X8RV5oRRHmtH6e8ctQIoA#/registration

The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes, Newly Translated
2025-10-27 18:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by The Grolier Club

The debut of a new English translation of Yiddish novels starring the fictional Viennese detective Max Spitzkopf.
In early 1900s pulp fiction, the Viennese detective Max Spitzkopf was an undefeated foe of villains and passionate defender of the Jewish people. When he is summoned, no matter how dangerous or seemingly hopeless the case, justice is assured. The super-sleuth deploys physical bravery, intellectual ingenuity, and stealthy disguises to outwit criminals and restore moral order to the world. For the Yiddish Book Center’s White Goat Press, Mikhl Yashinsky has translated the complete series of 15 Spitzkopf mysteries into English for the first time. Yashinsky will lecture on how these volumes were written, disseminated, lauded by 20th-century literary figures including Isaac Bashevis Singer, and recovered for contemporary readers.
New York-based Mikhl Yashinsky, a translator, playwright-lyricist, singer-actor, and teacher, has taught Yiddish at Columbia, the University of Michigan, and Tel Aviv University. He co-authored an award-winning Yiddish language textbook, In eynem (White Goat Press), and his translation of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska’s memoirs, The Mother of Yiddish Theatre, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.

Livestream here: https://www.youtube.com/live/PUsYQkJSchM

Registration for Virtual Event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-lecture-the-yiddish-sherlock-holmes-newly-translated-tickets-1612617374979?aff=ebdsoporgprofile
If you are a Grolier Club member, please register yourself and your guests via the Club website. Do not register via Eventbrite.

100 Objects From the Collections of the YIVO Institute
2025-10-30 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by The Grolier Club

A celebration of a new book, 100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
A pair of ruby red slippers. A medieval manuscript. A Yiddish folk medicine prescription. These and 97 other objects comprise a new centennial coffee-table-book, 100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which chronicles modern Jewish history through 100 objects from the YIVO Archives and Library. This gorgeously illustrated book highlights unique manuscripts, photographs, objects, and other ephemera with accompanying essays by 57 leading scholars. Join the book’s editor, YIVO’s Director of Collections Stefanie Halpern, for a discussion that highlights how this book traces YIVO’s role in documenting key moments in modern Jewish history and culture through its 100 years of collecting.
Stefanie Halpern is Director of Collections at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a Masters in Archival Studies from Clayton State University. Halpern has published on archival theory and practice, Yiddish theater, and Jewish performance, and was the assistant curator of the MCNY exhibition “From the Bowery to Broadway: New York’s Yiddish Theater.”

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-lecture-100-objects-from-the-collections-of-the-yivo-institute-tickets-1661309855499?aff=ebdsoporgprofile
If you are a Grolier Club member, please register yourself and your guests via the Club website. Do not register via Eventbrite.
Support
We appreciate your interest in the Grolier Club’s programming on the art and history of the book. For over 130 years we have offered our exhibitions and lectures to the public, free of charge. If you have enjoyed these offerings, and would like to support that tradition, and help ensure that it continues, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Grolier Club.

City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry
2025-11-03 18:00 - 19:15 (America/Los_Angeles)
Sponsored by The Book Club of California.
California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city.” This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region’s rich natural environment.
Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.
An in-person and virtual presentation by James Michael Buckley, author, urban planner, and historian.
To register to attend online, click here.

Margaret Armstrong's Book Covers
2025-11-05 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by Ohio State University Libraries with The Aldus Society
Margaret Armstrong was one of the most celebrated and prolific book cover designers of the late 19th and early 20th century, with more than 300 known designs published over her 40-year career. Madison Good, of The Ohio State University’s Thompson Library Special Collections, will discuss Armstrong’s career, highlights of her work, and some of the Armstrong books held in Ohio State’s special collections.
Register here: https://library.osu.edu/events/the-book-covers-of-margaret-armstrong

Lauren Hewes on American Ephemera before 1900
2025-11-05 18:30 - 19:30 (America/Chicago)
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 built between c.1975 and 1997 and recently donated to AAS – and an explanation of the Society’s larger ephemera holdings. Hewes will discuss how libraries decide what qualifies as “ephemera” and how researchers have used pre-1900 ephemeral objects in their projects.
Lauren Hewes is the vice president for collections and Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts. She manages and oversees the Society’s acquisition, cataloging, conservation, curatorial and readers’ services departments. She is also the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts and builds and cares for the Society’s extensive collections of prints, broadsides, ephemera, and photographs, working with the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC), AAS fellows, and outside scholars to make connections between American history and the visual resources of the Society. Lauren has previously held positions at the Print Council of America, the National Park Service, and Shelburne Museum, and she has published widely on American printmaking and portraiture. She has a BS from Ithaca College and an MA in art history from Williams College.
Register today.
Zoom presentation is free and open to all.
Zoom begins at 6:30PM CT/7:30 PM ET. Preregistration required, click here to register.
Please forward this notice to anyone who may find it of interest.
Even if you can’t attend at the scheduled time, if you’re interested, please register. After the program, we’ll send an email to all registrants, asking if you’d like a link to the complete recording. That way you can see the program even if you couldn’t attend live, ran into technical issues, or simply wanted to watch it again.

New Light on Medieval Manuscript Culture
2025-11-07 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by The Grolier Club

A new look at medieval monastic manuscript culture.
Andrew Jotischky, Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London, will speak about the manuscript culture at the heart of his recent book, The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History (Yale University Press, 2024). His talk will be followed by a conversation with Gillian Adler, President of the New York Medieval Society.
Andrew Jotischky, Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London, specializes in medieval religious culture, including monasticism, pilgrimage, and devotion. His other books include The Carmelites and Antiquity, Crusading and the Crusader States, and The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Medieval World.
Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/live/4_dHv6J8FFM

Registration for virtual event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-lecture-new-light-on-medieval-manuscript-culture-tickets-1612617966749?aff=ebdsoporgprofile
If you are a Grolier Club member, please register yourself and your guests via the Club website. Do not register via Eventbrite.

The Binfords & Mort Story: Publishing Books About Oregon, 1930-1983
2025-11-10 18:00 - 19:15 (America/Los_Angeles)
Sponsored by The Book Club of California.
In 1891 while still teens in Portland, Oregon, Maurice and Peter Binford started an influential career as publishers. They went on to found the Binfords & Mort publishing company focused on Pacific Northwest literature. This talk will explore how this mostly forgotten company, once the largest publisher west of the Mississippi, cast a large shadow over regional literature, literary societies, recreation, and civic engagement in the Pacific Northwest.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Jeremy Skinner, author, archivist, and Library Director for Curry Public Library in Gold Beach, Oregon
**The Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Lecture on the History of the Book Trade in California and the West**
To register to attend the online event, click here.

FABS Handpress Era Zoom Group: David Levy on Hoyle
2025-11-10 19:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by FABS
David Levy will present “The Earliest Hoyles: what a bibliographer can learn from examining multiple copies.” From 1742-1747 there were three authorized publishers of Hoyle’s pamphlets on popular games of the day. Each publisher had a characteristic binding, from a richly tooled deluxe morocco at the high end, to drab paper wrappers at the bottom. The bindings reveal much about how the pamphlets were sold and who read them. To receive a link contact Jennifer Larson at info@fabsocieties.org.

A Black Bibliophile Tradition in Philadelphia
2025-11-12 18:30 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by The Grolier Club
Jordan Ross will explore the collecting habits of African American bibliophiles in Philadelphia during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Bibliophiles and organizations examined will include William Still, Robert Purvis, Robert Adger, William Bolivar, and the American Negro Historical Society of Philadelphia.
To register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-lecture-a-black-bibliophile-tradition-in-philadelphia-tickets-1661331470149?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

Sara Charles on The Medieval Scriptorium – Making Books in the Middle Ages
2025-11-14 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Chicago)
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 will go Medieval on us.
But worry not. Her talents are all for good – particularly as they inform her wonderful book, The Medieval Scriptorium (Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2024). In it she brings to life the grueling, creative, smelly, artistic, earwax-laden, glittering, backbreaking, world of creating books fully by hand.
This talented book historian will be joining us from the University of London, where she is co-editor of Historical Research and Journals Manager for University of London Press. She has appeared at Canterbury Cathedral in the documentary series History Hit, presents fascinating how-to videos on YouTube, shares content on teachingmanuscripts.com and continues to create illuminated manuscripts that are breathtakingly beautiful.
Great news! You won’t have to find and sharpen a quill, dip it ink you’ve made yourself, and copy dense text in order to register. You can sit in your comfy chair, login, and register online. No squinting required.
To register for this online event, click here.

Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books
2025-11-16 14:00 - 15:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Sponsored by the Book Club of Washington.
Author Eric Marshall White will share his fresh insights into Gutenberg’s life and accomplishments, including correctives to old legends and conjectures.
Dr. White’s presentation about his recently published book Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books will focus on what we really know about Gutenberg and how we know it, with thoughts on how we teach the subject within a more global history of books.
About our speaker
Eric Marshall White, PhD, Scheide Librarian and Assistant University Librarian for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, joined the Princeton University Library staff in 2015. Until 2020, he served as Princeton’s Curator of Rare Books, building on 18 years of experience as Curator of Special Collections at Southern Methodist University’s Bridwell Library in Dallas. He was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, earned his doctorate in Art History from Boston University, and later received a Master of Library Science degree from the University of North Texas. He is a leader in the study of early European printed books and the material and historical evidence of their use and survival. His publications include more than fifty scholarly articles, major exhibition catalogues, and two books: Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books (2025), and Editio princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible (2017), which won SHARP’s DeLong Prize as the year’s outstanding book in the field of book history.
This is an online event – to register for this online, click here.

Manuscript Mondays: Dr. Deborah Parker on Belle da Costa Greene's Travels in Europe
2025-11-17 20:00 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by The Manuscript Society
Manuscript Monday – A FREE Webinar provided by The Manuscript Society
Date: Monday, Nov. 17, 8pm EST
Guest Presenter: Dr. Deborah Parker
Host: Gerald “Jay” Gaidmore, The Manuscript Society
Pre-recorded presentation followed by a LIVE Q & A with Dr. Deborah Parker.
Title: A Sensuous Education: Belle da Costa Greene’s Travels in Europe
Register: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_R6GTHnAsSzynS-6EdE-D6Q
Overview: In 1905, Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950) was hired by J. P. Morgan to work in his growing library in New York. When the library was opened to the public in 1924 Greene became its first director, but even before this she had played a central role in shaping its holdings of rare books and manuscripts. Parker’s talk will explore Greene’s relationship with members of the European book trade and the impact of her activities on the international market for rare books and manuscripts.
Presenter: Deborah Parker is Professor of Italian, Emerita at the University of Virginia. Her research and teaching focus on Italian and visual and print cultures in the medieval and early modern eras. Her books include Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance (1992), Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet (2000) and Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing (2011). Her most recent book, Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters (2024) was published by Villa I Tatti -The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Parker co-authored “Belle Greene and Literature,” for the exhibition catalogue for the Morgan Library exhibition, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy. She has given talks on Belle Greene for Villa I Tatti, the Rare Book School, Book Club of California, Caxton Club, and the Beinecke Library. Notices and podcasts have appeared in Humanities Watch, Fine Books & Collections magazine, and the New Books Network.

Raffaella della Olga on her exhibition "Typescripts"
2025-11-18 18:30 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by The Grolier Club

About this event

Italian-born, Paris-based artist Raffaella della Olga will speak with Clark Art Institute curator and historian Robert Wiesenberger about her works on view in the exhibition “Typescripts” opening Nov. 22.
Raffaella della Olga (b. 1967) uses modified typewriters and multicolor ink ribbons on various materials—including tracing paper, photo paper, and even sandpaper—to make unique artist’s books, each addressed to a different conceptual or technical problem. Seeking refuge from the wordiness of her former life as an attorney and the chaos of shuttling between multiple languages, she modifies her machines to efface recognizable signs, producing instead an abstract language defined by form and color, texture and rhythm. Della Olga’s manual interventions in the typewriter—smearing and dragging across the ink ribbon, inserting fabrics and carbon paper into the carriage—join the mechanical with the gestural and give her works extraordinary presence.
Della Olga’s unique bookworks are collected by the libraries of Bard College, the Clark, the Getty, Yale, and the Metropolitan Museum, among other institutions. Robert Wiesenberger is curator of contemporary projects at the Clark Art Institute and lecturer in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art, both in Williamstown, MA.
The Typescripts exhibition catalog, designed by Christophe Boutin (Three Star Books, Paris) and published by the Clark and Yale University Press, will be available for purchase and signing at the talk.

Registration https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-conversation-raffaella-della-olga-on-typescripts-tickets-1661334168219?aff=ebdsoporgprofile
If you are a Grolier Club member, please register yourself and your guests via the Club website. Do not register via Eventbrite.
Support
We appreciate your interest in the Grolier Club’s programming on the art and history of the book. For over 130 years we have offered our exhibitions and lectures to the public, free of charge. If you have enjoyed these offerings, and would like to support that tradition, and help ensure that it continues, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Grolier Club.

David Kraemer on Jews as Citizens of the World
2025-11-19 18:30 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by The Grolier Club

Prof. David Kraemer will explore what the books produced by Jewish communities through the ages teach us about their experiences in various diasporas.
Jews have lived in homes around the world from antiquity to the present. What do the books they produced and what they said in those books teach us about the Jewish diaspora experience? in this lecture, David Kraemer will consider the evidence preserved in the JTS library’s treasures, on display, as well as testimonies from Jews in their various homes. The picture that emerges is a far richer, more affirmative one than we might guess.
David Kraemer is Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he also serves as professor of Talmud and Rabbinics. His most recent book is Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora (Oxford, 2025).
Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora (Oxford, 2025) will be available for purchase and signing.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-exhibition-lecture-jews-as-citizens-of-the-world-tickets-1661335843229?aff=ebdsoporgprofile
If you are a Grolier Club member, please register yourself and your guests via the Club website. Do not register via Eventbrite.
Support
We appreciate your interest in the Grolier Club’s programming on the art and history of the book. For over 130 years we have offered our exhibitions and lectures to the public, free of charge. If you have enjoyed these offerings, and would like to support that tradition, and help ensure that it continues, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Grolier Club.

FABS Bindings Zoom Group: Nora Epstein of the Newberry Library
2025-11-20 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by FABS
Presentations and discussion on the art and craft of bookbindings. Nora Epstein of the Newberry Library will speak, highlightinh some of the remarkable bindings that have made their way into the Newberry’s extraordinary collections. While exploring items such as a medieval tacketed binding and a 16c. girdle book, we will also discuss the history of bookbinding in historical inquiry and the role of collection development policy in shaping a library’s legacy.Contact Jennifer Larson at info@fabsocieties.org

FABS 19th Century Zoom Group
2025-11-20 19:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by FABS
Join the FABS 19th Century group on Zoom for congenial discussion of all things bibliophilic and 19th century. Contact Jennifer Larson at info@fabsocieties.org.

FABS Living With Books Zoom Group
2025-11-25 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by FABS
Join us and host Reid Byers to discuss the delights and challenges of the private library. This month’s topics: (1) How do we care for archives and manuscripts? (2) Ornamenta Biblioteca: What things other than books do we collect? Contact Jennifer Larson at info@fabsocieties.org

New Discoveries About Winston Churchill's Autobiography
2025-12-09 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York)
Sponsored by The Grolier Club

Dr. Gary L. Stiles, collector and Grolier member, will discuss his latest book, A Prelude to Immortality: Winston Churchill’s ‘My Early Life’ (Unicorn Publishing), which sheds light on why and how Churchill came to write an autobiography that has had global impact. The book has been continuously in print for more than 95 years in English editions and printed in 31 non-English speaking countries in 27 languages. Dr. Stiles has uncovered 62 previously unknown non-English versions. His book analyses Churchill’s unusual and effective writing approach, use of contemporary first-person narrative, and lyric poetry style that vividly portrays dramatic events. Churchill wrote the book to reinvigorate his persona in the public eye, challenge a new generation to become involved in society and politics, paint an image of a bygone era, and tell his own full educational and military saga, while generating needed income.
Dr. Gary L. Stiles is a widely published writer, physician, medical researcher, corporate executive, and student of history and art with a 40-year interest in Winston Churchill and his writings. He was the Ursula Geller Distinguished Professor of Cardiovascular Research at Duke University. His previous book subjects include the 19th-century painter William Hart and Punch magazine’s depictions of Churchill.
Dr. Stiles’ book will be available for sale and signing.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-lecture-new-discoveries-about-winston-churchills-autobiography-tickets-1661345612449?aff=ebdsoporgprofile
If you are a Grolier Club member, please register yourself and your guests via the Club website. Do not register via Eventbrite.
Support
We appreciate your interest in the Grolier Club’s programming on the art and history of the book. For over 130 years we have offered our exhibitions and lectures to the public, free of charge. If you have enjoyed these offerings, and would like to support that tradition, and help ensure that it continues, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Grolier Club.

Gabe Henry on Enough Is Enuf – Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell
2025-12-12 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Chicago)
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 the United States to unlearn something they’ve been taught (or not) since childhood.
Before it subsides it can bankrupt the infected. Expose them to public ridicule. And provide a barrel of laughs to all of us who read about it, hear about it, and watch from a safe distance.
It’s the contagion that Gabe Henry reveals in his exceptionally entertaining book, Enough Is Enuf – Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell (HarperCollins 2025). Henry, also editor of Eating Salad Drunk: Haikus for the Burnout Age by Comedy Greats, will tell the sad tale of how English was mixed in a great bowl into which was dropped Celtic, Latin, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman and then seasoned by the whims of Wiliam Caxton. And about the Quixotic missions by the great and the obscure to rationalize it, as they are consumed by the thought, “If only everyone would just listen. My scheme makes so much sense.”
Quick! Register today before our whole website is taken over by emojis!
Zoom presentation is free and open to all. To. register, click here
