Public Programs

When London viewers opened elegant folio books like Oriental Scenery or The Costume of China they were not just engaging with visual and cultural difference. They were also seeing an …

This talk highlights a number of resourceful women in American book history, some celebrated and some whose names we’ll never know, who found ways to preserve and share aspects of the historical record outside the established institutions of their own day.

Women’s book collections appear in a wide range of forms: as catalogued libraries; as groups of surviving books linked by inscription and family use; or as volumes dispersed but still …

This talk will offer an attenuated archaeology of what someone we know once called the textual condition. The talk also asks how we can still make some good old fashioned material messes in a world of slop.

This talk returns to the decades in our previous century when the printed newspaper thrived as the center of the news cycle, and it highlights some of the hidden landscapes, labor, and infrastructures enabling that.

This talk will draw from the past thirteen years that Mike Kelly has spent building the Native American Literature Collection in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College, as well as current work to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into library, archives, and museum practices. Kelly will demonstrate how a deep knowledge of traditional bibliography coupled with an understanding of Indigenous history results in a rich and complex understanding of this aspect of book history.