IN-PERSON PRESENTATON: Curator's Choice: Provenance!

IN-PERSON TICKETS | Members free and Visitors free with admission ($10)

Location | Henry Long Room, Boston Athenæum

Registration will open shortly. 

IN-PERSON PRESENTATION: Curator's Choice: Provenance!

with John Buchtel

Learn about the surprising ownership history of some of the Athenaeum’s remarkable books with Curator of Rare Books & Head of Special Collections Dr. John Buchtel. The collections are full of hidden stories, some of which have only recently been rediscovered. Did Elder William Brewster bring his copy of Chrysostom with him to Plymouth on the Mayflower? What did John Fell, Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, think when translator John Eliot sent him a copy of the first New Testament printed in America? How did the painter Gilbert Stuart react in 1806 when he found out that a druggist in Roxbury was going to make waste paper out of a 1676 astronomical work by the mathematician Nicolaus Mercator? See thesebooks, and more!

John Buchtel is Curator of Rare Books and Head of Special Collections at the Boston Athenæum. He previously served as director of the Booth Family Center for Special Collections at Georgetown University and as curator of rare books in the Sheridan Libraries at The Johns Hopkins University. He earned his PhD in English, with a focus on early modern British literature, at the University of Virginia, while also acting as curator of the teaching collections at Rare Book School. He teaches, lectures, and publishes on the history of books and printing, the history of libraries, book collecting, and literary patronage.