2021 William Anthony Conservation Lecture: Peter D. Verheyen

2021 William Anthony Conservation Lecture, presented by the University of Iowa Libraries Conservation and Collections Care Department.

"Down the Rabbit Hole: Embracing experience and serendipity in a life of research, binding practice, and publishing" with Peter D. Verheyen.

About the lecture series:
The William Anthony Conservation Lecture Series, hosted by the University of Iowa Libraries Conservation Lab, invites Book and Paper Conservators and Bookbinders to share their experience and work with the UI book arts community and beyond. Funded by a generous gift that established the William Anthony Endowment in 1989, it honors our first Library Conservator and the first bookbinding instructor at University of Iowa Center for the Book.

About the speaker:
Peter D. Verheyen started down his path as a work-study student in the conservation lab at the Johns Hopkins University's library, followed by a museum internship and formal apprenticeship in Germany and Switzerland. Returning to the U.S., he worked as a conservator in private practice and academic libraries, also working as a librarian. His research interests focus on the German tradition in bookbinding. He is the translator of Ernst Collin's Der Pressbengel and completed a bilingual history and bibliography of The Collins: W. Collin, Court Bookbinders & Ernst Collin, the Author of the Pressbengel. Research is shared via his Pressbengel Project blog and in other publications. He founded the Book_Arts-L listserv in 1994 and the Bonefolder e-journal in 2004.

In this talk, Peter D. Verheyen will discuss how he came to discover bookbinding and conservation, and how the relationships he formed and his experiences would intersect to become ongoing and ever-morphing research interests. His bio-/bibliographic work around Ernst Collin and his Pressbengel, his experiments using fish skin in bookbinding, and his investigations into the German binding tradition will illustrate this synergy. This lecture will form an introduction to his specialized workshop for students at the UICB on the history and construction of the German case binding.

In conjunction with the lecture, Verheyen offered a workshop, "The Bradel Binding and its Illustrious History," for UI Conservation Staff and UI Center for the Book Students with funds provided by the Nadia Sophie Seiler Fund.