For more information, please see:
You can also see the show any time through March 14 during regular public hours, Tuesdays 12-8 pm and Wednesdays-Saturdays 10-4 pm, with a $10 admission fee. Stay tuned also for my lecture on Wednesday, Nov. 13, right before the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair.
The exhibition highlights the King's Chapel Library, the earliest surviving colonial library in Boston. The collection of 221 volumes was handpicked by Dr. Thomas Bray, a Church of England clergyman whose ideas about libraries, education, and social reform were well ahead of his time. The books arrived in Boston in 1698 to serve as a compact reference library for the first Anglican church in Boston. Rare items on display include:
· A 1693 world atlas
· A mathematics textbook covering everything from practical geometry to logarithms (1690)
· A 1617 edition of the Works of John Calvin
· A nine-language Bible known as the London Polyglot (1657)
· A Biblical concordance compiled by Massachusetts minister Samuel Newman (1658)
The exhibition's centerpiece is a full-scale replica of the massive, ark-like bookcase designed in 1883 to house the historic collection. The replica, created by Current Projects and supported in part by the Chipstone Foundation, is an achievement in contemporary woodworking. It has been modified in surprising, interactive ways, enabling visitors to browse dozens of “must-read” modern works offered by the exhibition's ten community partners. The show continues the celebration of traditional handcrafts with items created in partnership with Boston's North Bennet Street School: a set of replica 17th-century bookbindings, and a reproduction of one of Thomas Bray's bookpresses (book cupboards) modeled after a 1710 example preserved in a library in England.