Rare Book School Lecture: On the Movement of Books

Books are immigrants. Their very design encourages movement-from one collector to another, whether institutional or individual, often legitimately but sometimes less so, across borders and across time. These journeys are reflected in marks of ownership, sales records, private catalogs, marginalia, bindings, and other material evidence of use (and occasionally abuse). This is a story as old as the printing press. Books printed by the Aldine Press (1494–1596) have been coveted and pursued by collectors before the proverbial ink was even dry, and this press therefore provides particularly fertile ground for exploring how books have moved and how humanity captures, preserves, and transmits information and knowledge. G. Scott Clemons will discuss how he has collected the Aldine Press since his days as an undergraduate in the Classics Department at Princeton University. This is the 2024 Kenneth W. Rendell Endowed Lecture.