Talk about AAS Bicentennial History

Tomorrow, Thursday, April 19 – 7:30 p.m.
“Celebrating the American Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012”
Philip F. Gura

Philip Gura, William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of the just-published bicentennial history of the American Antiquarian Society. He will tell the story of the Society and its directors and librarians who have shaped and nurtured it into the twenty-first century.

The book is available for purchase from Oak Knoll Press and you can read about it on the website of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America.

Here is a quote from the blurb on the back of the book to whet your appetite:

The American Antiquarian Society-pride and joy of its founder Isaiah Thomas-holds the DNA of our shared national patrimony. On the occasion of its bicentennial, this uniquely American library has published a copiously illustrated history that is at once scholarly in purpose, rich in probing insight, and brimming with narrative detail. While keenly alert to the evolution of the Society, Philip F. Gura’s guiding approach has been more finely focused on its intellectual development as a cultural repository of extraordinary consequence, with careful attention given to the people who have shaped and nurtured it into the twenty-first century. The founding spirit of this remarkable institution-a bookman for the ages “touched early by the gentlest of infirmities, bibliomania”-would be mightily pleased, I am certain, with this magisterial tribute to his enduring legacy.

-Nicholas A. Basbanes, author of A World of Letters: Yale University Press, 1908-2008 and A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.

Come hear all about it tomorrow night!