The Caxton Club

The Caxton Club will start off the new year with an address by Ahmad Sadri, the translator and adaptor of a new profusely illustrated edition of the Persian Shahnameh epic. In February we will hear from James Canary about designer bindings in the collection of the Lilly Library at Indiana University. And in March will learn about the too-little-known Frederic Warde, a contemporary of Stanley Morison and Bruce Rogers. We will finish out the year with addresses by California printmaker Richard Wagener and by librarians Paul Needham of the Scheide Library at Princeton and John Neal Hoover of the St. Louis Mercantile Library.

The Club’s lunch programs will include talks by Caxtonians Martha Chiplis, co-author of For the Love of Letterpress, and Wendy Husser, a former editor for the publications of the American Urological Society, along with Malcolm O’Hagan of the American Writers Museum, Tony McGuire of the Union League Club Library Committee (and an engineer designing climate control systems for libraries and museums), and Megan McKinney, author of The Magnificent Medills. January will feature Caxtonian Frank Schier discussing the literati of the Rock River Valley (near the hometown of former President Ronald Reagan).

In April the Caxton Club and the Bibliographical Society of America, in cooperation with the libraries of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, will present a symposium entitled Bibliography, Collections, and the History of Science. It will feature major presentations by Professor Nick Wilding of Georgia State University, talking about the forgery of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncias (about which much has appeared in the popular press, including the New Yorker and the New York Times), Professor Michael Shank of the University of Wisconsin, talking about stop-press corrections in early astronomy books, and Professor Florence C. Hsia of the University of Wisconsin, talking about the unraveling of Chinese scientific materials at the Bodleian Library in the seventeenth century. Discussants on the afternoon panel will include Bruce Bradley of the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Richard Lan of Martayan Lan Fine Antique Maps and Rare Books, and science collector and Caxtonian Ronald Smeltzer of Princeton, New Jersey.

The symposium will be held on April 26^th at the Pyle Center on the UW campus in Madison. It is free and open to the public. Additional logistical details will appear at www.caxtonclub.org as they become available.