News

On Friday December 5, Robert F. Macdonald was elected to be the new President of the Baxter Society. He replaces Reid Byers, President for the last three years.

As outgoing President, Reid reported :

In 2022, the Board met, and we set some high goals. They included:

1. returning from COVID to live meetings, while still retaining Zoom access in the form of hybrid meetings.

2. meeting nine times a year, including six or seven lectures each year

3. resuming the awarding of a Society prize for the Book Arts

4. resuming the organization of public book exhibitions

5. resuming Society publications

6. performing a formal membership review

7. expanding and diversifying membership, especially younger people

8. redoing the bylaws

9. regularizing our corporate status

10. misc goals, including interviews with our senior members, especially our founders.

Over the last three years, we have made good on some of these:

Zip, BB, Bridget, Scott, and I performed a membership review, and cleaned the books.

The Society passed a revision of our bylaws that removed our membership limit.

In the last three years, we have had 27 meetings, 19 of which were lectures, the balance visits, parties, show-and-tells. The meeting schedule is posted with the minutes.

We awarded the first Baxter Book Arts Prize to Rachel Church in 2023.

We hosted Scott Vile’s great exhibition on the work of Ascensius Press, which was our first book exhibition in thirty years, and we have another coming next month.

We celebrated our 40th anniversary in conjunction with the Book Club of Washington and their 40^th anniversary.

And we increased our membership. In 2020, we had 42 members, today we have 94, in large part due, I believe, to our insistence on having hybrid meetings whenever possible.

Things we have not done include resuming publications, and founders’ interviews, and a review of our corporate status, some of which, I am happy to say, are items that are of special interest to Bob Macdonald.

It has been a privilege and a pleasure to serve as President of this fine group, and I thank you for the opportunity.

Mr. Byers will continue as Vice-President for the coming year.

Reid Byers book, Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books, is in press at Oak Knoll for a second printing, with corrections.

The new FABS group on Living with Books will hold its first meeting this month.

Hosted by The Private Library author Reid Byers, this group will meet on Zoom, on the fourth Tuesday of each month. It will cover acquisition, cataloging and photographing collections, home libraries, book furniture, conservation and storage, and more.

The format for the February meeting (Feb 27, 7:30 eastern time) will be an open discussion about three subjects: bookplates, bookmarks, and the Pleasures of Reading.

Please contact Jennifer Larson (info@fabsocieties.org) to be added to the contact list.

On March 14, 2024, Reid Byers will speak to the Aldus Society at 7:00 pm at the Thurber Center in Columbus, Ohio on the subject of the design of the private library. His book, The Private Library, was chosen by The Washington Post among the top fifty non-fiction books of 2021.

An innovative and progressive printer, Aldus Manutius’ initiative to publish humanist texts in portable, octavo editions had a great influence on the democratization of book ownership and the dissemination of ideas. He is credited with the creation of italic type. [To credit him with the creation of the Renaissance would not strike the shield of truth very far off-boss.] – RB

Reid Byers, Grolier Club member since 2005, has been elected President of the Baxter Society, the bibliophilic society of northern New England, which is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year. Reid is retired as a Master IT Architect from IBM and is the author of The Private Library: The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom, Oak Knoll, 2021.

After seven months of difficult supply chain issues, The Private Library is back in print. All pre-orders made during this time have been shipped, and the book is available for immediate shipment from Oak Knoll Press.

The Private Library was reviewed by Jennifer Larson, the new chair of the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies, the current (Spring) issue of the FABS Journal. The review runs to two and a half pages and includes:

“Reid Byers’ opus magnum on private libraries is everything it says in the title, but above all it is about the ways people contrive to have their books about them…. Byers wears his considerable scholarship lightly…. So sprightly and charming is his style that I might call this light reading, were it not that the physical book weighs in at nearly four pounds.”

I’m sorry to record the death of Jerry Morris. Gary Simons writes,

“a passionate collector of Books on Books and materials related to Samuel Johnson, passed away on Sunday, April 3rd. Jerry was a long term stalwart in the Florida Bibliophile Society and a consummate blogger. He frequently contributed to Ex-libris and had bibliophile friends throughout the world. He was stricken at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, in his milieu, in the midst of books, book lovers, book collectors, and book sellers.”

Charles Spicer, the Editor of St. Martin’s Press, reviewed The Private Library in The Book Collector on November 18th. “If you dream of building a library in a private house, buy this unusual book . . . For the bibliophile there is on practically every page something to learn, something to delight and something to amuse.”

The Washington Post rated The Private Library among the top 50 nonfiction books of 2021 in an article on Nov. 18th. “Beautifully designed, Byers’s 500-page masterwork lays out how cultures from antiquity to the present created welcoming, comfortable spaces to house books.”