The Clark Quarterly brings a new series of lectures to the Library, with topics focused on the history of the book, book collecting, publishing history, the book arts and fine printing, as well as those subjects near & dear to the Clark—Oscar Wilde and of course the literature, history, and culture of the 17-18th centuries, British & Continental.

Readers of the Clog will perhaps forgive this slightly delayed announcement of the new series, and the writer of this post offers the following summary of our first two talks:

The Clark Quarterly’s inaugural lecture was given by Terry Belanger on February 9, 2012, an event co-sponsored by UCLA Library Special Collections.

Terry’s lecture, “Parallel Lines Never Meet: Dolphins and Anchors and Aldus/Book Historians and Numismatists and Roman Coins,” was presented to a full audience of librarians, book collectors & book sellers, and numismatists.  For his topic, Terry applied his formidable bibliographic skills to the study of the production of Roman coins bearing the dolphin & anchor emblem—which most of us associate with the Aldus Manutius colophon device.

Aldus took the design from a 1^st century AD Roman Denarius, much like the one you see below—the coin shown here is now, due to Terry’s generous gift, a permanent part of the Clark’s collections.

On Thursday March 22, Peter Hanff delivered a lecture on his recent Book Club of California publication, “Cyclone on the Prairies:  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the Arts & Crafts of Publishing in Chicago, 1900.”  Peter, who is Deputy Director of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, is well known to the rare book community as well as the wonderful world of L. Frank Baum scholars and collectors, and the Clark’s drawing room was filled to near capacity.

In spite of a serious head cold, exacerbated by his flight from Oakland, and a bout with laryngitis, Peter gave a richly illustrated and marvelously detailed presentation on the production, printing practices, publishing, and historical back ground of first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the Arts & Crafts movement in American Printing at the beginning of the twentieth century.  The event was co-sponsored by the Book Club of California and many of their Southern California members turned out for the talk.

Our next lecture will take place in the Fall quarter, October 4, when Dr. Greg Mackie, University of British Columbia, will give a talk on Oscar Wilde forgeries.