De Motu Librorum: On the Movement of Books--The 2024 Kenneth W. Rendell Endowed Lecture

"De Motu Librorum: On the Movement of Books"--The 2024 Kenneth W. Rendell Endowed Lecture by G. Scott Clemons
Books are immigrants. Their very design encourages movement-from one collector to another, whether institutional or individual, often legitimately but sometimes less so, across borders and across times. These journeys are reflected in marks of ownership, sales records, private catalogs, marginalia, bindings, and other material evidence of use (and occasionally abuse). This is a story as old as the printing press. Books printed by the Aldine Press (1494-1596) have been coveted and pursued by collectors before the proverbial ink was even dry, and this press therefore provides particularly fertile ground for exploring how books have moved and how humanity captures, preserves, and transmits information and knowledge.
G. Scott Clemon has collected the Aldine Press since his days as an undergraduate in the Classics Department at Princeton University. He is a past president of the Grolier Club as well as past Chairman of the Friends of the Princeton University Library, and currently serves as Co-President of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, and Chair of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. Outside of his bibliophilic interests, he is a partner at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., a privately owned investment firm in New York City. He curated an exhibition at the Grolier Club in 2015, commemorating the quincentenary of the death of Aldus Manutius.