Sponsored by the Book Club of California. With some 400 members, the San Francisco-based California Camera Club was the largest photography network in the United States in the early twentieth century. In her book The California Camera Club, Carolin Görgen recaptures the lost history of this community—both women and men—and their […]
Book Club of California
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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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California. The lecturers have studied about 120 books that are entirely or partially encrypted. In this talk, they introduce the most fascinating ones. This includes the famous Voynich Manuscript, a 15th century tome that has never been deciphered, and the Rohonc Codex, a 17th […]
Sponsored by the Book Club of California In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor as live-in domestic workers across the San Francisco Bay Area. In exchange for room, board, and meager pay, Native […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California Two publications, both published by Heyday, bookend and frame Tony Platt’s talk. One book begins in a remote area of northwest California, the other in the Bay Area’s metropolis. In Grave Matters: The Controversy over Excavating California’s Buried Indigenous Past (2011, 202) Platt investigated the […]
Sponsored by the Book Club of California Community, heritage, architecture—oh yes, and stiff pours: these are the hallmarks of San Francisco’s Legacy Bars. High Spirits leads readers on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood pub crawl in search of the city’s most remarkable nightspots. Atmospheric photographs accompany descriptions of each bar’s colorful history, unique […]
Sponsored by the Book Club of California Where do significant collections come from? They start when ordinary people develop a passion for a subject or object. They begin to add more items, filling in gaps and improving examples they have. They become subject matter experts in a narrow field. Small […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California In 1891, a suffragist and social reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched a moral crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a utopian spiritualist community in northern California. Chevaillier accused the colony’s leader, the poet and prophet Thomas Lake Harris, of perverting the teachings of the Bible […]