The Terry Belanger Endowed Scholarship: Matching-Gift Challenge
Rare Book School is proud to announce that it has received a $1 million commitment from bibliophiles, collectors, and RBS supporters Cathy and Glen Miranker to honor the legacy of our founding director and long-time course instructor Terry Belanger. The Miranker Family’s pledge will kickstart a dollar-for-dollar matching-gift challenge to establish the Terry Belanger Endowed Scholarship, a fund that will provide full-cost tuition scholarships and travel stipends to RBS students with financial need.
Setting the RBS Standard
Few have contributed more to bibliographical and book-historical education than Terry Belanger, a lifelong effort he pioneered with the founding of the Book Arts Press at the Columbia University School of Library Service (SLS) in 1972. Devised for the training of rare book librarians and antiquarian booksellers, his bibliographical laboratory provided a space where students could set type, print using a hand press, make relief cuts and etchings, and explore the book as a physical object.
A decade later, in the summer of 1983, Terry organized the first series of offerings that would become Rare Book School—eight five-day courses on subjects relating to the history of books and printing—and created the signature hands-on teaching method that has defined RBS for more than 40 years. In 1992, when he accepted an academic appointment as University Professor and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia, the School moved to Charlottesville, where it continued to flourish with widespread institutional support. By the time of his retirement in 2009, RBS courses had grown to more than 25 offerings annually in Charlottesville and at partner institutions in Baltimore, New York City, and Washington, D.C.
Terry’s commitment to bibliographical scholarship was recognized with a 2005 MacArthur Fellowship, nicknamed the “Genius Grant.” He retired in 2009. Throughout his career, Terry has been a prolific lecturer at libraries and bibliophilic organizations, including as the 1986 speaker at the A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania; an Individual Award recipient from the American Printing History Association; and an active member of the Grolier Club in New York City.
A dedicated educator, Terry has helped to shape a generation of leaders across rare book fields through Columbia’s SLS and Rare Book School. No RBS course instructor has taught more courses, and thus more students, at RBS than Terry Belanger. He has led an iteration of his course Book Illustration Processes nearly every year since 1983, sometimes teaching two or three times in a single summer, and he continues to influence thousands of students of the book worldwide.
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Matching-Gift Challenge
To maximize the Miranker Family’s generosity, we are endeavoring to raise an additional $1 million for the Terry Belanger Endowed Scholarship before 30 September 2026, coinciding with the year of Terry’s 85th birthday. Each dollar raised toward this amount will be matched dollar for dollar, doubling the impact of each gift received. We invite you—former students, SLS graduates, antiquarian booksellers, friends of Rare Book School, and others who have benefited from the courses and programs of this School that Terry founded—to help us reach this ambitious goal and recognize Terry’s many contributions.
Please consider being a part of this challenge. Your support can be counted if made as:
- an outright donation, through our website or by mailing a check;
- a pledge over up to five years;
- a gift of securities, such as stocks, bonds, or other assets;
- a Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCDs) or Required Minimum Distribution (RMDs) from your IRA; or
- a pledged bequest or other estate gift, for which you would be recognized as a member of the School’s Malkin Society.
To discuss this scholarship or for questions, please contact Adam Miller, Director of Development, at 434-243-1010 or adam.miller@virginia.edu.
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Terry’s Impact on RBS
Recorded as part of an oral history project to commemorate RBS’s 40th anniversary in 2023, these interviews were filmed by Macbeth Studio in 2022.
Terry Belanger on the origins of RBS and what makes the School unique:
Bruce McKittrick, Antiquarian Bookseller, on why Terry was one of the three best teachers he ever had:
Irene Tichenor, a fan of RBS, on her early experiences with Terry at Columbia and the lion logo: