Dean of the College Presents
A Broken Set of Dickens
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Olin Humanities, Room 102
A Faculty Seminar Presented by Bradford Morrow
“My lifelong obsession with books began not because I grew up in a family of book lovers or because I had access to an intellectually stimulating private library or my father was an English professor or my mother was a poet. No, it had to do with deprivation.”
These are the opening lines of Bradford Morrow’s lecture on the making of a bibliophile. Delivered as the keynote address at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar last year, “A Broken Set of Dickens” explores the myriad ways in which people interact with books. Morrow traces his personal journey, begun in boyhood, from furtively reading an off-limits copy of Bleak House taken from his mother’s mantelpiece set to handling a fifteenth-century edition of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiæ in college to becoming, in his twenties, a noted rare bookseller and then a bibliographer, restoration binder, editor, publisher, critic, poet, novelist, children’s book writer, essayist, and professor.
This talk also appears as a chapter of Professor Morrow’s collection in progress, Meditations on a Shadow, which includes his essay “My Willa Cather,” delivered as the keynote address at the 2009 Willa Cather International Symposium at the Chicago Public Library and the following year at Bard.
These are the opening lines of Bradford Morrow’s lecture on the making of a bibliophile. Delivered as the keynote address at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar last year, “A Broken Set of Dickens” explores the myriad ways in which people interact with books. Morrow traces his personal journey, begun in boyhood, from furtively reading an off-limits copy of Bleak House taken from his mother’s mantelpiece set to handling a fifteenth-century edition of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiæ in college to becoming, in his twenties, a noted rare bookseller and then a bibliographer, restoration binder, editor, publisher, critic, poet, novelist, children’s book writer, essayist, and professor.
This talk also appears as a chapter of Professor Morrow’s collection in progress, Meditations on a Shadow, which includes his essay “My Willa Cather,” delivered as the keynote address at the 2009 Willa Cather International Symposium at the Chicago Public Library and the following year at Bard.
Please join us at 6:30pm for a reception prior to the event in the Olin Atrium.
For more information, call 845-758-7490, or e-mail [email protected].
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102