Sponsored by The Grolier Club
Whodunit, you ask? Carolyn Wells—82 times between 1909 and 1942. Yet she is all but unknown today, unless it’s for her bibliomystery classic, Murder in the Bookshop (1936). In the early 20th century, she was an immensely popular author, excelling at country house and locked-room novels of detection and becoming one of the original grande dames of mystery. She also wrote in other genres—children’s, young adult, poetry, humor—totaling 180+ books over her career. Some were adapted into silent films by Thomas Edison, and some became bestsellers.
The writer Rebecca Rego Barry, author of the new biography The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells (Post Hill Press), embarked on a full-scale investigation to find out who Wells was and how she had fallen so far off the literary map. Barry’s undertaking started with an enigmatic bookplate found in a first edition of Walden that belonged to Wells, who was a serious book collector. The paper trail then led to Rahway, New Jersey, where she was born and is buried; to New York City’s Upper West Side, where Wells spent her final 25 years; to the Library of Congress, where her world-class collection of rare books now resides; and to many other public and private collections where exciting discoveries unfolded.
Rebecca Rego Barry lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her articles about books, history, and collecting have appeared in Literary Hub, CrimeReads, Smithsonian, The Guardian, Financial Times, and elsewhere. Her first book, Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fascinating Finds in Unlikely Places (2015), developed from her longtime editorship of Fine Books & Collections magazine. She is currently the director of communications at The Raab Collection.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-lecture-rebecca-rego-barry-on-the-vanishing-of-carolyn-wells-tickets-782331774397?aff=ebdsoporgprofile
