Virtue and Vandalism: The Ethics of Breaking Books

A Symposium sponsored by the Caxton Club of Chicago to be held at the Newberry Library on May 20, 2005, 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

The leaf book is an invention of the late 19th century; a modern publication that incorporates one or more leaves from an earlier book judged important historically or aesthetically. The original leaves may derive from manuscripts or printed books. The first examples grew out of the book-collecting mania of the Victorian age as a way to allow more collectors to own significant bits of the bibliographical past. The genre was popular chiefly in England and America up until about 1950 and thereafter had several revivals, most importantly in California, into the 1970s. Leaf books continue to appear today, but they are more rare than they once were, at least in part because notions of bibliophilia have changed in the last quarter century.

In conjunction with the exhibition Disbound and Dispersed: The Leaf Book Considered, organized by the Caxton Club of Chicago and running at the Newberry Library from April 16 through July 16, the Caxton Club will host a panel discussion of the ethical issues involved in the breaking of old books for the making of leaf books. The participants will be a curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Newberry, the head of special collections at a teaching institution, a law professor specializing in issues involving the preservation of cultural property, and a rare book dealer who has sold and published leaf books. The panel will be moderated by Michael Thompson, president of the Caxton Club.

Participants:

Michael Thompson, Attorney at Law, Chicago, Illinois, Moderator

Paul F. Gehl, Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing, Newberry Library

Sarah Harding, Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Institute for Law and the Humanities, Chicago-Kent College of Law

John Windle, John Windle Antiquarian Bookseller, San Francisco, CA

Max Yela, Special Collections Librarian, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee