If you’re in town for the NY Book Fair, ABAA member Jeremy Norman currently has an exhibition on display at the Grolier Club.
“A Count With Taste, and Sticky Fingers” surveys the life and infamous career of Count Guglielmo Libri, “one of the most audacious book thieves in history.” (You can read a NY Times review of the exhibition at the link.) It will be on display until May 25 in the second floor gallery.
Elizabeth Barret Browning & Robert Browning on the balcony at Casa Guidi, by artist Penny Green (© Penny Green; image via Culture24)
Maggs Bros. Ltd., a prominent London antiquarian book firm, currently has an exhibition on display that links contemporary art with antiquarian materials. After visiting a group exhibit in which artists were invited to create pieces inspired by a British museum, Maggs director Robert Harding had a brilliant idea– why not replicate a similar project at Maggs, allowing artists to create unique pieces inspired by the bookstore’s wonderful holdings?
Why not indeed! Sponsored by the Arts Council England, Maggs is pleased to announce Maggs Beneath the Covers, an exhibition that displays twelve artists’s creative responses to rare books and manuscripts they encountered in Maggs’s vast inventory. This means, of course, that Maggs invited these artists to visit and examine the usually private contents and workings of their business, “an unprecedented opportunity for artists (more…)
Chicago’s Newberry Library is celebrating its 125-year anniversary with a wonderful exhibit, The Newberry 125, and a number of special events. The Newberry 125 showcases 125 unique items from the library’s holdings that “best represents the Newberry’s mission, its record of collection development, and the community of learning it has engendered throughout a 125-year history.”
Founded by a $2.2 billion endowment in 1887, the Newberry was established as a free, public library in Chicago with the mission to”provide relevant research and learning opportunities for the public of Chicago and beyond.” It quickly became involved in educational programs for the public, and in 1897 the library began to focus building an exemplary collection on the humanities. In the 1940s, fellowships for advanced research and scholarly conference were introduced and they quickly became a major feature of the Newberry. The library opened four specialized research centers in the 1970s.
The exhibition is immense, housed in all three of the library’s galleries, and features a wide array of interesting items in a variety of mediums. It displays the Newberry’s “most immediately awe-inspiring and most utilized, consulted, pored over” items. The original unbound printed instantiation of Voltaire’s Candide, correspondence between a slave and his freed wife, letters from Hemingway, and the items in the gallery after the jump represent only a small portion of what the exhibition has to offer. (more…)
From our Missing Books Blog