Friends of the Library Lecture at ISU Nov. 11

Bookbinder Don Etherington will present A Sixty-Year Odyssey in Bookbinding and Conservation on Thursday, Nov. 11, at 7 p.m. in the Bone Student Center Circus Room.  A reception and book signing will follow the Friends of the Library Lecture.  The lecture and reception are free and open to the public.

Etherington will recount his career experiences and describe how the bookbinding and conservation fields have evolved, and how he learned from and contributed to this evolution. Etherington began bookbinding at 13 years of age as a student at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and at Harrison's and Company in London. He studied bookbinding and design with Edgar Mansfield and Ivor Robinson at the London School of Printing and worked as a conservator for the BBC and Roger Powell and Peter Waters.

From 1967 to 1969, Etherington was a training consultant at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, where he trained individuals in conservation practices as part of the flood response effort. He came to the Library of Congress in 1970 with Peter Waters, where he served as training officer and assistant restoration officer. Etherington served as assistant director and chief conservation Oofficer at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1987, he joined Information Conservation, Inc. where he created a new conservation division. In 1982, he co-authored Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, the first comprehensive attempt to compile terminology from all the bookmaking and conservation fields.