Review some of the membership activities of the Society:
and
The Ticknor Society
“The Collector’s Corner”
A New Initiative for Extended Conversations with
Ticknor Members and Friends about their
Book Interests & Collections
One of the most enjoyable experiences of being a member of The Ticknor Society is to learn about special book collections in the Boston area – and of course, by extension, everywhere else in the world. Beginning locally, our members visit special libraries and hear from experts in book conservation and preservation as well as learn from other members about their own book collecting interests through events like the annual members’ “show and tell” sessions either through in-person meetings or online Zoom events for the occasion. This experience of our members in Boston opens them to the possibilities of other similar explorations of book collections across the world.
In addition, each year since 2019 the Ticknor Society has awarded an annual George and Anna Eliot Ticknor Book and Book Culture Collecting Prize to recognize and inspire personal book collecting. The award is given in the spirit of George Ticknor and his daughter, Anna Eliot, who were scholars, teachers, and avid book collectors.
The purpose of this competition is to encourage New England-based book collectors to understand more deeply what their collection means to them, what they have collected, how it might be helpful to other collectors and researchers, and how they want their collection to develop in the future.
In the coming months the Ticknor Society intends to initiate a series called “The Collector’s Corner,” to expand and capture conversation with Society members about their collections. In the past, the annual “Show and Tell” sessions have allowed member volunteers to talk about their collections for ten minutes each. These sessions have proved to be very stimulating and the have often engendered further conversations between members and friends after they occur. In the future “The Collector’s Corner” will enlarge and enhance this opportunity. It will afford the chance for individuals to expand the description of their collections and answer in-depth questions that other members may wish to pose in learning about these collections.
The format will differ from the live-presentation mode undertaken in the past for the “show-and-tell” sessions. Instead, those who wish to participate in “The Collector’s Corner” will be expected to develop a contribution well beforehand as a slide show or audio/video presentation. A link to this material will be circulated to members several weeks in advance of a subsequently scheduled “Collector’s Corner” Zoom session. Since members will already have had access to view materials about the collection ahead of time, the scheduled “Collector’s Corner” Zoom session will focus upon an inter-active conversation with the featured member enabling the opportunity for extended conversation about the collection itself and how the collector came to develop their interest in their chosen material.
As an extension and amplification of both the “show-and-tell” sessions and the annual Ticknor Book and Book Culture Collecting Prize, this new initiative will help members get to know one another more fully and enable them to communicate their own interests on an expanded scale to both current members and, in the future, to all those who view the “The Collector’s Corner” archived videos linked to the Ticknor Society’s online member’s page
Over time this online archive will preserve and present personal stories from members about those who have learned from and come to love the books they collect.
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