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 […]
Book Club of California
29 posts
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 […]
Sponsored by the Book Club of California. Freedom to Discriminate shows the connection between two defining features of modern America that are rarely thought of together: the creation of residential segregation in every city in the country, and of a conservative counter-idea of American freedom in the 1960s – of freedom […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California. The Oscar Lewis Awards were established by the Book Club of California in 1994 in honor of Oscar Lewis (1893-1992), author, historian, and club secretary. Join us as we recognize this year’s honorees for their contributions to the Book Arts and to Western […]