Save the Date: September 2017

OK, so it’s a long way off, but I hope you’ll mark your calendars for three years hence. That’s when an exhibition I’ll be co-curating with Mike Widener of the Yale Law Library is set to open at the Grollier Club in Manhattan. The club is “America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts of the graphic arts.” Mike and I recently heard the good news that our proposal was accepted.

The exhibit is called “Law’s Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection.” Yes, it’s true: “law books” and “illustrations” are two things you don’t typically associate with each other. After all, law presents itself as based in the Word—as logocentric. And let’s face it: many law books are a visual snooze. Yet law’s application to the actual world of people and things generates a tandem, if often ignored, figurative impulse in legal books.

The exhibit will invite visitors to explore the incredible range of responses to this central tension at the heart of law as a social phenomenon—namely that law mediates between abstract rules and the material world, between ideals and the everyday—and it will do so by bringing together a fantastic array of beautifully illustrated books Mike has been collecting since 2006 as the law school’s rare book librarian.

See you there!

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April 21, 2016: the date of the exhibition has been moved forward to September 2017. The headline of this post has been changed to reflect the new timetable.

Blues Break

It’s true, this video has nothing at all to do with law, except that it was made by a legal historian. Still, I had a great time the other week helping spin blues and R&B records with my friend Al Bell at the WPKN studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut … and I brought along my camera … so I thought I’d post this for a fun break on a Saturday night.

 

A publisher, a library, a cemetery, a party

In part three of “Walking with Horatio Alger,” I take a train ride to Philadelphia’s Chinatown, spend an afternoon in a lonely academic library, drive to a Massachusetts cemetery while listening to Fats Waller, and relax at a party with a bunch of fun-loving kids. How can video help bring a 1909 edition of Ragged Dick back into some of its original spatial and temporal relationships?

Here’s the complete video:

Here are links to individual sections: part one; part two; and—the latest—part three.