2020 Slate of Nominees for Office and Council

December 13, 2019

The Nominating Committee is pleased to present the following nominees for Council in 2020. A vote will be held at the Annual Meeting in New York City on January 24, 2020 (click for details).

William Stoneman Chaired the Nominating Committee, which also included Meghan Constantinou (The Grolier Club), Michael Ryan (The New-York Historical Society), and Heather Wolfe (The Folger Shakespeare Library). The Society thanks them for their service.

Candidates for Office

Barbara A. Shailor was elected for a first term as President of the Bibliographical Society of America in 2018.  She joined Yale University in 2001 as the Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; she assumed the position of Deputy Provost for the Arts in July 2003 and retired from the Yale administration in December 2012. Prior to that, she was Dean of Douglass College and Professor of Classics at Rutgers University (1996–2001), and a faculty member and administrator at Bucknell University (1975–1996). Her award-winning volume The Medieval Book, published by the University of Toronto Press, is in its 6th printing; among her many publications is the Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (3 vols.).  Ms. Shailor was a Trustee of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation from 2003 to 2017, was on the Council of the Grolier Club, and is presently on the Executive Committee of the American Trust for the British Library. She was elected to the French honorary society Comité internationale de paléographie latine in 2000, to the Association internationale de bibliophilie (AIB) in 2002, and as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy in 2006. 

Candidate for Vice President, Kenneth Soehner, has been a librarian at the Thomas J. Watson Library, the research library of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for twenty-five years as Arthur K. Watson Chief Librarian. He has been active in raising funds and working with colleagues to develop the depth and geographic scope of both current publications and special collections. Before the Met, he had a number of positions including bibliographer and head of technical services at Barnard College Library, and in the mid-1990s worked part-time at the reference desk at Queens College Library. He is a Council member at the Grolier Club and serves on numerous committees there including Chair of the Audit Committee. He was recently elected a member of the Association internationale de bibliophilie (AIB). He has taught a number of classes at Pratt Institute School of Information, including a class on Art Librarianship every year since 2000.  He has an M.L.S. from Columbia University School of Library Service, and an M.A. in Art History from the Department of Art History and Archeology at the same university. He has been active in the Art Libraries Society of North America at both the national and local level and served as president of ARLIS/NA in 2008-09. His most recent publication is here. 

Candidate for Secretary, John T. McQuillen, has been a curator of Printed Books & Bindings at the Morgan Library & Museum since 2012. At the Morgan, John has curated exhibitions on William Caxton, Martin Luther, and J.R.R. Tolkien and published on medieval and early modern library history and book provenance, and he has a forthcoming article on the provenance and physical history of the Morgan’s three Gutenberg Bibles. John was the curatorial assistant and rare book cataloger at Bridwell Library (Dallas) in 2001–2006. He received his PhD in Art History with the collaborative program for Book History and Print Culture from the University of Toronto, where he spent four years as a graduate fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and produced a descriptive catalogue of the incunabula at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. In 2013 he was named one of the BSA’s New Scholars for his work on 15th-century book production networks in Bavaria.

Candidate for Treasurer, Scott Clemons, was elected as Treasurer of the Bibliographical Society of America in 2018.  He is a private collector of the Aldine Press, a collection he started as an undergraduate in the Classics Department at Princeton University.  In 2015 Clemons curated an exhibition at the Grolier Club to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Aldus’s death, mounted largely with items from his own collection.  He is the immediate past president of the Grolier Club, a member of the Association internationale de bibliophilie (AIB), and a past President of the Friends of the Princeton University Library.  By day, Clemons is a partner at the private banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.

Candidates for Council

Class of 2022 (a vacancy created by the move of Ken Soehner to Vice President):

Collector, bibliographer, and typographer Mark Samuels Lasner is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library, Museums & Press. A graduate of Connecticut College, he is the author of The Bookplates of Aubrey Beardsley (Rivendale Press, 2008), A Bibliography of Enoch Soames (Rivendale Press, 1999), The Yellow Book: A Checklist and Index (Eighteen Nineties Society, 1998), A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley (Thomas G. Boss Fine Books, 1995), and William Allingham: A Bibliographical Study (Holmes Publishing Co., 1993); as well as co-authored (with Margaret D. Stetz) books such as England in the 1880s: Old Guard and Avant-Garde (University of Virginia Press, 1989), England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head (Georgetown U Press, 1990), and The Yellow Book: A Centenary Exhibition (Houghton Library, 1994). His articles and notes have appeared in the Book Collector, Browning Institute Studies, Notes and Queries, and other journals. He has organized or co-curated exhibitions held at numerous institutions, including the University of Virginia Library, Houghton Library and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Georgetown University Library, Bryn Mawr College Library, Liverpool Central Library, the Grolier Club, and the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Active in numerous bibliophile and bibliographical organizations, Samuels Lasner was the 2003 recipient of the Sir Thomas More medal from the University of San Francisco, awarded to honor the spirit of “private collecting, a public benefit.”  In 2016 Samuels Lasner donated his collection of more than 9,500 rare books, manuscripts, graphics, and ephemera relating to British literature and art of the period 1850–1900 to the University of Delaware Library.

Class of 2023

Mary Crawford has been a collector of English and American literature for the past forty years.  Author collections, in first editions and primary material, include Dorothy L. Sayers, Mary Webb, Jane Austen, Isak Dinesen, J.R.R. Tolkien, Rebecca West, Madeleine L’Engle, Kate Seredy, May Sinclair and the Brönte sisters.  In 2010, Mary curated bi-coastal exhibitions at the Grolier Club and Stanford University Libraries related to the twentieth-century British writer, Mary Webb; she wrote Mary Webb: Neglected Genius, the two-volume book published to coincide with these exhibitions. Concurrent with the exhibition, Mary also led the Grolier Club annual Poetry Reading featuring Mary Webb and hosted the American premier of the dramatic reading, “My Wife Did a Bit of Scribbling.”  Mary serves on the board of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, where she is currently Treasurer and Chair of the Finance Committee. She was head of the RBS Audit Committee from 2013-2018.  Mary is a member of the Grolier Club of New York (Special Functions Committee), and the Bibliographical Society of America (Development Committee).  Crawford retired as a Senior Vice President of Morgan Stanley in 2019, where she ran a financial planning team in Palo Alto, California.

Andrew Nadell is a physician and bibliophile.  For some decades, the practice of medicine took much time away from book collecting, but he persisted.   He began collecting during a research year at Duke medical school, while in London reading for an M.Sc. on “Sociology with Special Reference to Medicine in the Faculty of Economics.”  The book collection “Medical Politicks” was exhibited in the Duke University medical library in 1977. A second exhibition on “Doctors of Medicine” was at the Grolier Club in 1996, and traveled to the Perkins Library at Duke.  With his wife, the designer bookbinder, Eleanore Ramsey, he has collected books and bindings of the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, reported in the Grolier Gazette, 2013.   His main collection now deals more broadly with learned professions and trades, from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries.  Dr. Nadell is the American national delegate and governor of the International Society for the History of Medicine, and a vice-president of the Academia Panamericana de Historia de la Medicina.  He is also a longtime member of the Association internationale de bibliophilie (AIB), and of the Société royale des bibliophiles de Belgique, as well as the Grolier Club. In 2019, he was elected to the livery of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London.

Douglas S. Pfeiffer has served on Council since 2017, and now stands for re-election. He is Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University.  He received his PhD from Columbia University’s English and Comparative Literature Department and has taught at Columbia, Barnard College, The Cooper Union, and The University of California, Irvine.  His research centers on Renaissance humanism, early modern poetry, and history of the book.  He is the author of The Force of Character:  Authorial Personality and the Making of Renaissance Texts (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).

Elizabeth Ott is the Frank Borden Hanes Curator of Rare Books at Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a position she has held since 2018. Additionally, she is an adjunct lecturer at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she teaches an annual course on bibliography and rare book librarianship. She has also worked in various roles at the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and Rare Book School in Virginia. Elizabeth completed her doctoral work at the University of Virginia. Her research interests include nineteenth-century British publishing, library history, and bibliography beyond the hand-press era. She currently serves at the Chair of the BSA Membership Working Group.