Speakers and Programming

SATURDAY, November 9, 2024
 

12:00 pm | Boston Book Fair Tour
Join Meghan Constantinou of BSA for a walk-through of the fair, meeting BSA-member booksellers. This is your opportunity to learn about the book trade, best practices, and to get to know some of your fellow travelers and members of the book trade. Newcomers welcome, limited to 10 participants.
Registration required.
 

1:00 pm | The Ticknor Society Collectors' Roundtable: Off the Beaten Track
Many, if not most, collectors happily search among the mountain peaks, focusing on the high points in their chosen area. But some, for various reasons, venture off the well-worn roads, explore lesser-known byways, and even forge new paths through uncharted territory. Hear panelists tell their stories, why they left the regular paths, what they found along the way, and what it has added to the larger historical narrative in their area of collecting. Panelists and their collections include:

Joseph Black, “Collecting to Teach Book History”

Erin McGuirl, “The Whole Earth Catalog and Its Offspring”

Gerry Preble, “The Little Magazines of the 20s and 30s”

 

2:30 pm | Subverting Expectations: the Contemporary Dimensions of a Rare Book Collection

Ruth R. Rogers | Curator of Special Collections | Wellesley College

Acquiring artists’ books for a liberal arts collection implies risk and obligation with every decision. Will it be used? Is the maker’s intent clear? Will it continue to resonate over time? These works demand skilled interpreters who will present them as a hybrid book-object that merges language, material, and visual presence as metaphors. An academic library provides outstanding opportunities to integrate artists’ books with historical collections of rare books and manuscripts—to remind the viewer that they are not separate from earlier forms of the book, but relatives in a long evolutionary line of human expression. Join Ruth Rogers as she discusses a curator’s challenge of discerning from the vast range of possibilities and imagining how one’s choices will become a permanent part of teaching and learning at their institution.

Clifton Meador. Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie. 2022


Kenneth Botnick. The Diderot Project. 2015

4:00 pm | Women as Writers, Readers, and Owners of Medieval Manuscripts

Lisa Fagin Davis | Simmons University School of Library and Information Science, Rare Book School, and the Medieval Academy of America 

From Christine de Pizan and Hildegard von Bingen to the anonymous nuns of Dalheim, many medieval women can be identified as authors, scribes, artists, and readers. What is the evidence for women's literacy and participation in the crafts of book production? How can modern scientific analyses help recover the previously-hidden stories of these women and their books? In this lecture, medieval manuscript expert Lisa Fagin Davis will introduce a few of the women who wrote, read, and owned handwritten books in the later Middle Ages and some of the modern women who treasured them, such as Boston's own Isabella Stewart Gardner. Photo Cred: Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des Trois Vertus (Paris, ca. 1405), Boston Public Library, MS f Med. 101, f. 3r


 

5:30 pm | Collecting Trash: Wastepaper in Early American Bindings (sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America)

Ashley Cataldo | Curator of Manuscripts, American Antiquarian Society

Bear, fox, skunk, raccoon, and muskrat bones. Earthenware vessels and ceramics in shards. Tobacco pipes. Clam and mussel shells. These are the typical contents of an 18th–century trash pit from New England. But there are never any books. Instead printed waste was part of the larger ecosystem of 18th century printing, binding, and bookselling. It was incorporated into the bindings of many early American books, just as it is today embedded in the very fabric of life around us. In this talk, Ashley Cataldo will introduce the many uses of printed waste in early American bookbinding, mainly drawn from the collections of the American Antiquarian Society, from the 1640 Bay Psalm Book to 19th-century printed books from Hawaii.

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SUNDAY, November 10, 2024

12:00 pm | Draw Me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick

Dan Lipcan | Ann C. Pingree Director, Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library 

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is the most persistently pictured of all American novels, and its timeless themes continue to inspire creatives of all types. Draw Me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick, now on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, is the first exhibition focused on the book arts of the hundreds of editions and adaptations published since 1851. Drawn almost entirely from PEM’s Phillips Library collection, Draw Me Ishmael explores decades of approaches to interpreting the novel visually, in book form. Dan Lipcan, curator of the exhibition, will provide an overview of the show and bring examples for the audience to examine!

 

1:30 pm | Collecting on a Shoestring Budget: Books, Sports Ephemera, and Original Art

Richard (Dick) Johnson | Curator, The Sports Museum 

Over the past six decades, Richard Johnson has collected, both as an essential part of his duties as a museum curator and as an expression of his passion to search for additions to an eclectic personal collection he started in grade school. In due course, he has assembled one of the best libraries of sports publications in America while also seeking out affordable pieces of original art by artists such as Winslow Homer, Thomas, Nast, Andre Gill, and John Held, Jr. among others. This presentation will focus on the means by which to collect in a multi-dimensional, ever-changing marketplace and, most importantly, the thrill of the hunt.

2:30 pm | Boston Book Fair Tour
Join BSA Executive Director Erin McGuirl for a walk-through of the fair, meeting BSA-member booksellers. This is your opportunity to learn about the book trade, best practices, and to get to know some of your fellow travelers and members of the book trade. Newcomers welcome, limited to 10 participants.
Registration required.