Sponsored by The Book Club of California Before Amazon, before big box stores, and even before mailboxes sagged under the weight of catalogs in the mid-20th century, customers and shop-owners alike turned to a wide variety of media to select their purchases, and to aspire to grander lifestyles. Trade cards, trade catalogs, advertising ephemera, and […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California Progressive school founder, collector and bibliophile Kent Bicknell will present on his Alcott Family Collection, winner of a recent prize from the New England-based Ticknor Society. Built around the lives and work of Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), her talented sister, the artist May Alcott Nieriker, and her […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California In popular mythology, the Overland Trail is typically a triumphant tale, with plucky easterners crossing the Plains in caravans of covered wagons. But not everyone reached Oregon and California. Some 6,600 migrants perished along the way and were buried where they fell, often on Indigenous land. As historian […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California When the California poet Robinson Jeffers published Tamar & Other Poems, his first major collection, in 1924, it struck reviewers as both timeless and powerfully of its moment. James Rory declared that the poems "exhibit the maturity of a remarkable talent," and the poet Babette Deutsch confessed to […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California Humans have been fascinated by animal imagery since the prehistoric era when cavemen painted images of animals on walls to symbolically capture their prey and to record their observations. With the advent of the printing press, animal imagery was used as a symbol for the press itself. For […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California Claus Spreckels (1828–1908) emigrated from his homeland of Germany to the United States with only seventy-five cents in his pocket, built a sugar empire, and became one of the richest Americans in history alongside John D. Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates. Migrating to San Francisco after the […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California Greg Sarris—tribal leader, scholar, teacher, and activist—has always kept stories, and storytelling, at the center of his ambitious life’s work. In his latest book, The Forgetters, he goes to the root of storytelling, in a loosely interwoven collection told by two “crow sisters” and inspired by creation myths […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian (1908–1913) and the first Director of the Morgan Library (1924–1948). She was also the daughter of two mixed-race parents and passed for white. In the nearly six hundred letters that Greene sent to art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California In 1939, when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation’s collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California James H. Gipson founded Caxton Printers as a small print shop in rural Idaho over a century ago. During the following decades, Caxton grew to publish hundreds of books across all genres––primarily about the American West. Gipson’s philosophy was to help writers from the West get published, regardless […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California Before the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century, books were designed, written, and illustrated by hand. Today these handmade manuscripts are highly valued, and greatly sought after by collectors and institutions around the world. This presentation addresses two aspects of illustration in […]