Join us as Martin Antonetti discusses an emerging genre of artists books: printed objects interpenetrated by digital media.

These collaborative ecosystems bring poets, technologists, and readers together in visually arresting narrative environments mediated by technology, harbingers of the transit from the age of literacy to the age of visuality.

Martin Antonetti, Director of Distinctive Collections at Northwestern University Libraries, oversees the Deering Special Collections; the University Archives; the Herskovits Africana Collection; and the Art, Music, and Transportation Libraries. Before joining Northwestern, he was curator of rare books and director of the Book Studies Concentration at Smith College, where he also taught courses in the history of the book and in contemporary artist’s books. He had previously held the positions of Librarian and Director of the Grolier Club in New York City. He has served on the boards of Hand Papermaking, the Book Arts Press, and the American Printing History Association, and recently completed a term as President of the Bibliographical Society of America. He is also on the faculty of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. A classicist by training, he received his library degree from Columbia University in New York, where he specialized in rare books and special collections librarianship.

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About the Wing Foundation Lecture Series on the History of the Book

The year 2017 marked the centenary of the death of John M. Wing, the remarkable and eccentric collector whose bequest founded the Newberry's John M. Wing Collection on the History of Printing. Over the last one hundred-plus years the collection's curators have amassed an extraordinary group of materials ranging from incunables to modern artist's books to everything in between. Together they represent one of the world's best known collections related to the history of the book and the book arts, used by all manner of readers: academics, students, printers and other book artists, calligraphers, designers, and general readers simply interested in seeing and learning about books and manuscripts.

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