Bibliography Week

Drawing on a wide range of materials held in the New York Academy of Medicine’s Library that include but extend beyond conventional medical practica, Stephanie Shirilan will talk about how cross-disciplinary sources may be used to generate new analyses for the history of medicine.  Her research helps trace a history of stigma surrounding respiratory illness to a conflation of breath and grace after the Reformation that renders respiratory ease a hallmark of social and economic status and labored breathing a sign of spiritual defect or despair.

Join exhibitors offering books, maps, ephemera, and more for sale at the Bibliography Week Showcase. The Showcase takes place in conjunction with Bibliography Week at FIAF on East 60th Street, just across from the Grolier Club. The Showcase features more than two-dozen dealers displaying printed and manuscript material from the Middle Ages to the present day. Admission is free! Consult the list of dealers.

In celebration of Bibliography Week, the Hispanic Society Museum & Library will host an afternoon visit featuring rarely-exhibited objects from its extensive collections. Visitors will have a chance to see a 15th-century Book of Hours on black vellum – one of only a handful of such objects in existence. Also on view will be the Hispanic Society’s 15th-century Hebrew Bible, an early surviving edition of La comedia de Calisto y Melibea, La Celestina, printed at Burgos in [1499], a first edition of Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes, first editions of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, among others.     

The Hispanic Society Museum & Library’s renowned collection offers unrivaled resources for researchers interested in the history and culture of Spain, Portugal, and the Americas. The collections of the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books are among the most comprehensive outside Spain, containing more than 250,000 manuscripts, documents, and letters dating from the 11th to 20th centuries, along with 30,000 books printed before 1830, which include some 250 incunabula.

Read More about the Hispanic Society’s collection at www.hispanicsociety.org/library.

Join us for The Best Kept Secret: 200 Years of Blooks at Center for Book Arts, an original exhibition opening 16 January 2025. The Best Kept Secret considers 250 years of hand-crafted book-shaped objects—made by craftspeople, artists, and inventors—alongside contemporary book art. The talk by curator Mindell Dubansky will provide an opportunity to highlight the little-known craft techniques and traditions on display, as well as to present Dubansky’s observations on what these objects signal about their makers’ practical and emotional connections to the book.

Fully registered as of 20 January.

Join Bradford Morrow and Nicholas Basbanes at McNally Jackson Seaport as they discuss Morrow’s newly released novel, The Forger’s Requiem, and real-life famous literary forgeries throughout history. In a wide-ranging discussion Morrow and Basbanes will share stories behind forged books and manuscripts, which are often even more colorful than those of the originals. Booklist calls The Forger’s Requiem, “Spellbinding … spectacularly well written and fiendishly clever.”

Founded in 1884, the Grolier Club is America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and is a unique library, museum and clubhouse. It is headquartered in a 1917 Georgian Revival building designed by club member and noted architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. In the public galleries and members-only spaces, highlights include a Dutch Colonial-style tavern and a soaring Neoclassical research library with 100,000 volumes that shed light on how the printed word and image have disseminated information for millennia. Keen-eyed visitors will spot a blowfish and a secret stairway.

Curator Reid Byers will give a walkthrough tour of his Grolier Club member’s exhibition: Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Books Found Only in Other Books. Reid will highlight imaginary mysteries in this tour. The show runs in the second-floor Gallery through February 15, 2025.

Join us at the New York Society Library for a gathering in the Members’ Room. This is an opportunity to meet your fellow members of both the BSA and the Society Library, learn more about our organizations and the many resources we have to offer to the broad community of book people.

Special note for members of the Grolier Club: many Club members attend both events this evening! Attend in black tie with Executive Director Erin McGuirl, Membership Committee Chair Charlotte Priddle, and other BSA-Grolier members who will carpool to the Metropolitan Club in time for the start of cocktail hour.

The BSA Officers and members of the Council warmly invite you to attend the Society’s Annual Meeting on 24 January 2025! This year the program will start at 10 am with three synchronous panel presentations. The Editors of PBSA will host a brown-bag lunch session starting at noon, with the New Scholars program beginning at 1 pm.

Details about the morning sessions and the New Scholars Program speakers will be announced in November 2024.

The Board of Trustees of the American Printing History Association warmly invites you to join us for our 2025 Annual Meeting!

The meeting is free, and will take place on Zoom. APHA Members in good standing (i.e., valid membership status) are invited to vote on the proposed Trustees during the election. Vote will be conducted as a secret ballot; if you cannot attend, you may vote by proxy by contacting memberships@printinghistory.org.