Minsky's American Decorated Publishers' Bindings
Book artist (and FB&C columnist) Richard Minsky announced today that his Third Exhibition of American Decorated Publishers' Bindings is being acquired by the Boston Athenaeum. The books will be available for study in the Arthur & Charlotte Vershbow Special Collections Room once they have been entered into the Athenaeum's system. He wrote today:
The three exhibitions in this series together have presented 1,100 cataloged designs, plus many variants, with 141 identified cover artists. All the original books will be available to researchers, with geographic diversity. The first exhibition is now available for study at the University of Alabama's W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library:
http://bindings.lib.ua.edu/gallery/minsky.html
The second exhibition is at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington. It has not yet been integrated into IUCAT, and will be available when that is completed.
Institutional libraries often have hundreds of these books, still in circulating stacks. One use that librarians are making of the data file on the CD-ROM that comes with each catalog is to run a comparison with the library catalog for an automated search of these books in their collections. They then can be removed from circulation to preserve them, and can be the basis for an exhibition that will be of interest to Friends of the Library and the outreach community.
If you do not have the catalogs, there may be an institution near you that does: There is a fairly complete list at http://minsky.com/orderform-subscription1.htm#collections.
