Adventures of the Wandering Book Artists: Collegiate Gothic

Peter and Donna Thomas have been making fine press and artist's books for over 40 years. When they started, as craftspeople at Renaissance Faires, they fell in love with the graceful beauty of "gypsy wagon" caravans that other vendors had made to sleep in or use as booths for selling their wares. In 2009 Peter and Donna built their own tiny home on wheels, designed after a typical late 19th century Redding Wagon. This blog documents their trips around the country, taken to sell their artists' books, teach book arts workshops, and talk about making books as art; as well as to seek out and experience the beauty of the many different landscapes found across the USA.

Peter and Donna started their business in 1977 and made their first book in 1978, so from 2017-18 are traveling to celebrate 40 years of making books with shows in a dozen libraries across the country. See the schedule on the side bar to find if they are coming to a town near you....

Sunday, December 31, 2017

Collegiate Gothic

You may have noticed in past blogs that we commented on visiting a sizable number of really ornate libraries with buildings that looked like castles or churches, and you may also have noticed our wondering about why and wherefore. Well Cara List, the rare book librarian at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, finally explained it to us. The style is called Collegiate Gothic, and it was an attempt by young universities in the USA to create "a scholastic atmosphere" and gain credibility by emulating the libraries of the more venerable and esteemed universities in England, like the ones at Cambridge or Oxford.

Of course there are may non-gothic university libraries. For example the next library we visited after Northwestern was Chicago University. Leave it to the campus where the A bomb got its start with the first controlled nuclear chain reaction to build a library that looks like a space ship.