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 […]
The Book Club of California
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Sponsored by The Book Club of California The untold, multifaceted story of one of the most adventurous and prolific landscape painters of the American West. California Impressionist Tilden Daken (1876–1935), famous in his day, painted in every California state park and national park in the West—from the redwood forests to […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California Across North American and European imaginaries, the Amazon River Basin has figured as both a region rich in “natural resources” ready for the taking, and, consequently, a geography of lands and peoples in need of saving. Both Amazonian exploration and salvation have been […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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” […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]