Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible

One hundred years ago, Gabriel Wells, a New York bookseller, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world’s greatest book, the Gutenberg Bible, and sold it off in individual pages. This is the story of an Australian man’s hunt for those fragments and his family’s debt to an act of literary vandalism. In 1921, Wells’ audacity scandalized the rare-book world. Was the break-up a sacrilege or a canny deal? New Yorkers were divided. It was the Roaring Twenties, the Gatsby era of fabulous wealth. Tycoons were in a feeding frenzy to acquire items that would demonstrate their refinement. Wells marketed the pages as “Noble Fragments,” they sold like hot cakes, and he died a rich man. A century later, Sydney journalist Michael Visontay stumbled upon a mysterious legal document that linked Wells to his own family. He became obsessed by the Gutenberg’s invisible imprint on his life, and set out to track down the pages of the broken bible. Part detective story and part memoir, Noble Fragments is an expedition into the arcane world of book collectors and their eccentric passions, and a journey of discovery about how Wells’s gamble set off a chain of events that changed a family’s destiny.

About the Speaker

Australian journalist Michael Visontay has worked for over 40 years as a reporter, editor, author and lecturer. Michael was a writer and senior editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian newspapers, and is a former editor of The Jewish Independent, where he is now a senior writer. He has founded and taught journalism at several Australian universities, and is the author of six nonfiction books.

Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters

A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember, pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.

Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is a highly transformative force that shapes how we experience the world in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Knowing this can help us with daily remembering tasks, like finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. What’s more, when we work with the brain’s ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, learn faster, and grow in self-awareness.

Including fascinating studies and examples from pop culture, and drawing on Ranganath’s life as a scientist, father, and child of immigrants, Why We Remember is a captivating read that unveils the hidden role memory plays throughout our lives. When we understand its power–and its quirks–we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can make freer choices and plan a happier future.

About the Speaker

Charan Ranganath is a Professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. For over 25 years, Dr. Ranganath has studied the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to remember past events, using brain imaging techniques, computational modeling and studies of patients with memory disorders. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. He lives in Davis, California. Outside of neuroscience, Dr. Ranganath is also a songwriter and guitarist with a number of recording credits, including a song on a feature film soundtrack.

Ayanna Thomas is Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Professor at Tufts University. In her research, she investigates interactions between memory and metamemory to better understand the role metamemory plays in memory acquisition, distortion, and access. She examines these questions using a balanced approach towards basic and applied designs as they related to education, eyewitness memory, and age-related changes in memory. Her research is supported by the National Institute on Aging, and the National Science Foundation. She regularly contributes to popular podcasts that focus on disseminating research findings to general audiences.

Jewish Country Houses An exploration of the world of Jewish country houses, their architecture and collections, and the lives of the extraordinary men and women who created, transformed and shaped them. Country houses are powerful symbols of national identity, evoking the glamorous world of the landowning aristocracy. Jewish country houses—properties that were owned, built, or renewed by Jews—tell a more complex story of prejudice and integration, difference and connection. Many had spectacular art collections and gardens. Some were stages for lavish entertaining, while others inspired the European avant-garde. A few are now museums of international importance, many more are hidden treasures, and all were beloved homes that bear witness to the remarkable achievements of newly emancipated Jews across Europe—and to a dream of belonging that mostly came to a brutal end with the Holocaust. Lavishly illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, this book is the first to tell their story, from the playful historicism of the National Trust’s Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire to the modernist masterpiece that is the Villa Tugendhat in the Czech city of Brno—and across the pond to the United States, where American Jews infused the European country house tradition with their own distinctive concerns and experiences. This book emerges from a four-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council that aims to establish Jewish country houses as a focus for research, a site of European memory, and a significant aspect of European Jewish heritage and material culture. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Brasenose College. She is author of the award-winning book, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero and has published widely on aspects of international Jewish history and European political culture. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Jewish Review of Books. Juliet Carey is Senior Curator at Waddesdon Manor, where she is in charge of paintings, sculpture and works on paper and oversees academic collaborations and research. She has curated exhibitions and published on subjects including Elizabethan portraits and French drawings, Guercino, Chardin, Gainsborough and Gustave Moreau, Sèvres porcelain and Edmund de Waal. This year she is curating two exhibitions relating to the Jewish Country Houses project – photographs by Hélène Binet and a new commission for Pablo Bronstein.

Dürer’s Knots: Early European Print and the Islamic East

Albrecht Dürer’s depictions of Muslim figures and subjects are considered by many to be among his most perplexing images. This confusion arises from the assumption that the artist and his northern European contemporaries regarded the Muslim Levant as an exotic faraway land inhabited by hostile adversaries, not a region of neighboring empires affiliated through political and mercantile networks. Susan Dackerman casts Dürer’s art in an entirely new light, focusing on prints that portray cooperation between the Muslim and Christian worlds rather than conflict and war, enabling us to better understand early modern Europe through its visual culture. In this beautifully illustrated book, Dackerman provides new readings of three of the artist’s most enigmatic print projects—Sea Monster, Knots, and Landscape with Cannon—situating them within historical contexts that reflect productive collaborations between Christendom and Islam, from the artistic and commercial to the ideological and political. Dackerman notes how Gutenberg’s development of printing shares an inextricable relationship to the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople. While Gutenberg’s workshop produced a call to crusade and other publications antagonistic to the Muslim East, Dürer’s prints, she shows, instead emphasize instances of affiliation between Christendom and Islam. A breathtaking work of scholarship, Dürer’s Knots shows how the artist’s prints of Muslim subjects give expression to the interconnectedness of Christian Europe and the Islamic East.

About the Speakers

Susan Dackerman is an art historian and curator previously at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums, Getty Research Institute, and Stanford University. Her books include Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts; Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe; and (with Jennifer L. Roberts) Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Monotypes.

Jennifer Roberts is the Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, where she teaches art history, print history, and material studies, with an emphasis on intersections between the arts and the natural sciences. She is the author of six books on American and European art from the eighteenth century to the present, and has written extensively on printmaking, especially in terms of its impact on the development of modern and contemporary art. Her latest book, Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, was published with Princeton University Press in 2024.

After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart

Megan Marshall’s innovative books, including The Peabody Sisters and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Margaret Fuller, are treasured works of American biography. In the richly absorbing essays of After Lives, Marshall turns her narrative gift to her own art, life, and the people in it. In each of six essays, Marshall reinvents the personal essay form, as a portal to the past and its lessons for living into the future. The book’s brilliant, assured interplay between memoir and biography places surprising characters on the page, including the twelfth-century Buddhist hermit Kamo no Chomei, a reassuring spiritual presence for Marshall during several otherwise deracinating months in Kyoto. In her stunning coming-of-age tale, “Free for a While,” set in 1970s California, Marshall interweaves the story of her adolescence with that of Black Power martyr Jonathan Jackson, the author’s AP history classmate, gunned down at seventeen in a failed attempt to free his famed older brother George from prison in the case that put Angela Davis on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Here too is the author’s passion for the biographical chase, and for the mysteries at its heart. She tells the astonishing story of viewing the disinterred remains of her one-time subject Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel, and their daughter Una, the truths of whose early death Marshall works to reveal. Throughout these finely wrought essays, Marshall, “[at] the front rank of American biographers” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), makes palpable her driving impulse to “learn what I could from others: how to live, how not to live, what it means to live.”

About the Speakers

Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life as well as Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor of Nonfiction Writing at Emerson College and a recipient of the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization.

Joan Wickersham is the author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her new book is No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, as well as many magazines. For the past 15 years her essays have appeared regularly on the op-ed page of The Boston Globe.

To kick off Women’s History Month, the Athenaeum joined forces with The League of Women for Community Service (LWCS) of the South End, one of the oldest continuing Black women’s service organizations in the United States, with a rousing author talk by Kellie Carter Jackson, the Michael and Denise Kellen 68’ Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College and author of We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse, historian Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. Carter Jackson’s scholarly research shares a natural connection with the rich legacy of LWCS – revolution, resilience, flight, protection, and especially joy!

About the Author

Kellie Carter Jackson is the Michael and Denise Kellen 68’ Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of the award-winning book, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. Her most recent, critically acclaimed work, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press), examines a radical reframing of the past and present of Black resistance—both nonviolent and violent—to white supremacy. We Refuse was listed as one of the best books of 2024 by eight different publications and organizations. Dr. Carter Jackson’s essays have been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, and other outlets. She has also been interviewed for her expertise on Netflix, Apple TV, Good Morning America, CBS Morning, MSNBC, PBS, Vox, CNN, the BBC, and a host of documentaries. Carter Jackson served as Historian-in-Residence for the Museum of African American History in Boston from 2021 – 2024. She also serves as a commissioner for the Massachusetts Historical Commission. Lastly, Carter Jackson loves a good podcast! She is the co-host of the podcast, “This Day in Esoteric Political History” with Jody Avirgan and Niki Hemmer.

Rosario Candela & The New York Apartment 1927-1937 

Known and celebrated for many of the apartment buildings on Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and in Sutton Place—82 in NYC, including the storied 740 Park, sometimes called the richest and most powerful address in New York and whose famous residents included John D. Rockefeller Jr.—Candela’s work is at once timeless and profoundly of its time. Classical in styling and even modest on the exterior, it is on the insides, in the apartment interiors, the floorplans, the extraordinary and frequently luxurious arrangements of rooms and space, where his designs set a standard that serves as a benchmark and aspirational goal of taste and refinement. In Rosario Candela & The New York Apartment, David Netto explores these seminal spaces through the lens of exteriors and urbanism, planning and interior architecture, and the circumstances and stories of creation. Lavish and comprehensive black-and-white vintage photography as well as color imagery of the exteriors, original plans, and a collection of exceptional interior views give historical perspective (including a seductive Slim Aarons’ Park Avenue streetscape) and contemporary sizzle (as seen in Derry Moore’s depiction of K. K. Auchincloss’s penthouse at 1040 Fifth). The story told is of a genius designer who gave form to the New York of his dreams.

About the Speaker

David Netto is a Los Angeles-based interior designer and writer. He has written on architecture and design for the The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Cabana, and other publications, and he currently writes the “Case Studies” column for Town & Country. He is the author of monographs on François Catroux and Stephen Sills, and most recently, authored a monograph on architect Rosario Candela. His interiors have appeared in Vogue, Elle Decor, Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, House & Garden, Town & Country, and Veranda. In 2023, a self-titled book representing 20 years of his own designs was published with Vendome.

Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit

In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system. In Freeman’s Challenge, Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s unforgettable story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom. Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.

About the Speaker

Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who specializes in the history of race and racism over the past two centuries. She teaches at Harvard, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She wrote Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Bernstein’s previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards. She has also written a Jewish feminist children’s book, many prize-winning articles, and op-eds and essays in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other venues. She recently received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award.

Lisa L. Biggs, Ph.D., is the John Atwater and Diana Nelson Assistant Professor of the Arts and Africana Studies at Brown University. She is an Africana and Performance Studies scholar, actress, and playwright whose work explores performance’s role in social justice movements. Her book, The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation (2022), has received multiple awards, including the Errol Hill Award. With over two decades of acting experience, her stage credits span prominent theaters, and her original plays, like AFTER/LIFE, reflect her passion for history and community engagement. Dr. Biggs’s scholarship appears in publications such as Theatre Survey and Black Acting Methods.

The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker

In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse. This exquisite biography brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words. White’s biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker—Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more. She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now classic stories and essays. She propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer’s work but also their life. Based on years of scrupulous research, acclaimed author Amy Reading creates a rare and deeply intimate portrait of a prolific editor—through both her incredible tenure at The New Yorker, and her famous marriage to E.B. White—and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community.

About the Speakers

Amy Reading is the author of The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, and The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New York Public Library, among others, and has appeared in such places as the Wall Street Journal and LitHub. She lives and writes in upstate New York. Her name is an aptonym.

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of two books: Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, which won the 2020 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and the 2019 NSW Premier’s General History Award, and a memoir, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Library of Australia, she teaches writing at Harvard University Extension.

Going Back to T-Town: The Ernie Fields Territory Big Band 

There was a time when countless music patrons in the Midwest, South and Southwest went to dances and stage shows to hear a territory band play. Territory bands traveled from town to town, performing jazz and swing music, and Tulsa-based musician Ernie Fields (1904-97) led one of the best. His daughter, Carmen Fields, tells the story of his emergence less than a decade after Tulsa’s infamous race massacre, to chase his musical dream. The book details his successes, disappointments and perseverance that kept his group alive from the early jazz era to the 1960s. This enlightening account of how Ernie fields navigated the hurdles of racial segregation during the Jim Crow era gives a before now missing account of American popular music and African American history.

About the Speakers

A fixture in the greater Boston journalism community for over 30 years, Carmen Fields has broad experience in both print and broadcast journalism; journalism education and corporate and non-profit media relations. Additionally, Fields is a SAG-AFTRA affiliated actor and voice-over artist. The Tulsa, OK native earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Lincoln University (MO) and a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University. Other achievements include Harvard University’s Nieman Fellowship and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Salem State University.

Joyce Kulhawik, best known as the Emmy Award-winning arts and entertainment anchor for CBS-Boston (WBZ-TV 1981-2008), is an arts critic/advocate and cancer crusader as a 3X survivor. The first arts reporter/critic in the U.S. to appear every weeknight as part of a local TV news team, she gave journalistic stature to arts reporting, covering local and national events live from the red carpet including the Oscars, Emmys, and Grammys, from Boston and Broadway to Hollywood and beyond. Kulhawik was inducted into the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame, received the N.E. Emmys Governor’s Award for her distinguished career, and an Honorary Doctorate in Communications from Simmons University. Joyce is currently President of the Boston Theater Critics Association, a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, Boston Online Film Critics Association, and appears on Boston’s local NPR station’s The Culture Show (GBH radio 89.7) weekdays at 2PM. Find her reviews at JoycesChoices.com.