As a photographer in the fifty-seventh year of his serious effort, David Wing will describe how his camera found its subjects, what his working mind is like today, and how his accumulated work has “aged” in his intellect and in his heart. Accompanied by a large number of slides, Wing will talk in detail about how his […]
Before there was such a thing as “California,” there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of […]
With climate breakdown heating up and desertification looming over the horizon, Obi Kaufmann leads curious adventurers on a voyage into the sage-and-ocher landscapes of the American West’s world-famous desert regions this fall in his revelatory and sumptuously illustrated new volume The Deserts of California: A California Field Atlas. As philosophical as it is geophysical, this journey […]
The Poison Book Project investigates potentially toxic pigments used in the manufacture of Victorian-era bookcloth. Lead scientist Dr. Rosie Grayburn will situate the use of English bookcloth colored with highly poisonous emerald green pigment and other toxic pigments within a broader historical context; recommend safe handling and storage practices for emerald green bookbindings; and report […]
After resigning from his sales position at William Doxey’s bookstore in San Francisco’s famous Palace Hotel in 1897, a young Paul Elder opened his own shop two blocks away. Elder’s goal was a bookstore with a carefully crafted ambience, reflecting his embrace of the California Arts & Crafts Movement. Elder’s own publications were often designed […]
After resigning from his sales position at William Doxey’s bookstore in San Francisco’s famous Palace Hotel in 1897, a young Paul Elder opened his own shop two blocks away. Elder’s goal was a bookstore with a carefully crafted ambience, reflecting his embrace of the California Arts & Crafts Movement. Elder’s own publications were often designed […]
Paul Chrzanowski’s presentation explores “books that Shakespeare might have read.” He donated his collection of nearly 150 early English books to the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. The earliest printed work is Cordyal of the four last and final things, a book printed in 1479 by William Caxton, England’s first printer. The donation includes […]
The Orange and the Dream of California takes a lively, literary, and extraordinarily visual look at the symbiotic and highly symbolic relationship between the Golden State and its “golden apple.” Untold thousands of adventurers and health-seekers came West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, lured by postcards of orange blossoms juxtaposed to snow-capped […]
The Cambridge University Library recently purchased a previously unknown notebook kept by Isaac Newton’s chamber-fellow, John Wickins, in the years around 1680. It is possible to identify the contents of the notebook as being previously unknown compositions and correspondence of Isaac Newton, which shed light on many aspects of his work and his engagement with […]
Letterpress print your own broadside on the Book Club’s Colombian hand press with Li Jiang, Lemoncheese Press. A limited number of broadsides will be printed. Registration required.
Approximately twenty-five printed books and ten manuscripts have been located from before 1640 which bear the florid inscription: “Will and Walke aright. Will: Walker,” usually appearing on the title-page of a printed book, or on the first or last leaf of a manuscript. This talk will attempt to identify the author of the inscription and […]
Active between 1957 and 1972, The Situationist International (S.I.) was a revolutionary alliance of artists, intellectuals, architects and political theorists that is hailed as the “last avant-garde” of the 20th century. One of the organization’s core concepts is that of détournement, which can be understood as the subversion of established cultural commodities as a means […]