RICHARD THORNER
Looted and Supplied: Ephemera Travels to the Enemy
Richard Thorner majored in history at Dartmouth before attending Boston University School of Law. While law remains a “means to an end,” Richard’s passion has always been the collecting of and dealing (since 1993) in historic paper, archives, autographs, books with an association, 17th and 18th century mezzotints, and other important visual material. With his wife Ann he currently exhibits as “Resser-Thorner Americana,” often joined by their daughter Katherine. Richard serves on the board of the Antiques Dealers Association of America and the New Hampshire Antiques Dealers Association and as an appointed member of the State Historic Resources Council.
ELLEN G.K. RUBIN
Interactive Political Ephemera: Making a Statement with Mechanical Paper
Ellen G. K. Rubin, aka The Popuplady, has collected pop-up and movable books and ephemera for about 40 years since seeing Yale University’s exhibition, Eccentric Books. Her curated exhibitions have included, Brooklyn Pops Up!, and Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn in 2010 for the Smithsonian Library. Pop-ups from Prague: A Centennial Celebration of the Graphic Artistry of Vojtěch Kubašta, at the Grolier Club in 2014 for which her catalog won the 2015 Leab Award. She is a founding and Board member of the Movable Book Society and writes for its newsletter, Movable Stationery. She has demonstrated pop-ups on The Martha Stewart Show, CBS Sunday Morning, Japanese TV, and Atlas Obscura.
STUART LUTZ
The American War In Vietnam: The Pro-War and Anti-War Movement
Stuart Lutz, author of The Last Leaf: Voices of History’s Last-Known Survivors (Prometheus Books, 2010) has been collecting Vietnam War items for over twenty years. Professionally, he buys, sells, authenticates and appraises historic documents, letters, manuscripts and archives. Member of the Professional Autograph Dealers Association, the Manuscript Society, the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, the Appraisers Association of America [Certified in the field of Historic Documents], the Universal Autograph Collectors Club (Registered Dealer #166), he is also a historic autograph authenticator for the History Channel program Pawn Stars.
JENNIFER HOYER
Printing 1960s High School Student Activism
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Her curatorial collaborations in archives have resulted in over ten exhibitions at Interference Archive, a community archive of social movement ephemera in Brooklyn, NY, as well as publications including Finally Got The News: The Printed Legacy Of The U.S. Radical Left, 1970–1979 (Common Notions 2017), Walkout: A Brief History of Student Organizing (Interference Archive 2020), and Defend/Defund: A Visual History of Organizing Against Police Violence (Common Notions, 2023). She is co-author of The Social Movement Archive (Litwin Books, 2021) and What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (Libraries Unlimited, 2022).
KEN FLOREY
English Suffrage: Ephemera of Militancy and Response
Ken Florey is a retired professor of English language and literature at Southern Connecticut State University who has avidly collected suffrage ephemera and memorabilia since the 1980s. His published works include Women’s Suffrage Memorabilia—an Illustrated Historical Study and American Woman Suffrage Postcards. He has given presentations at the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester, the Jacob Javits Center and the Metropolitan Postcard Club in New York, the Old Saybrook Historical Society, as well as at a number of other venues. He is editor of The Clarion, the publication of the Woman Suffrage Chapter of the American Political Items Collectors.
VINNIE VAICEKAUSKAS and
HEATHER LOCKLEAR
How the Union Printing Industry Promoted Patriotism and Profited During the Civil War
Vincent Vaicekauskas, a collector of postal history has been a member of the American Philatelic Society for over 50 years. He is a former Secretary-Treasurer of the Connecticut Postal History Society. Originally interested in just Civil War envelopes, he has expanded his collection over the past 20 years. Heather Locklear has been an educator for 20 years and currently is a mentor coach at an early childhood school and teaches at the college level. For the past 12 years, she has been developing and facilitating trainings, so she immediately agreed when her father asked her to collaborate on this presentation. She fondly remembers going with him to stamp shows as a child and starting a mini-collection of sea life stamps of her own.
STEPHEN COLES
Strikethrough: Typography as Protest
Stephen Coles, author of The Anatomy of Type and co-founder of the influential websites Typographica and Fonts In Use, is Associate Curator and Editorial Director at Letterform Archive. For over 20 years he has been active in the typography community, initially as a creative director at FontShop, and later as an independent consultant, connecting font makers with font users.
COREY SERRANT
Gay liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s
Corey Serrant is Specialist of the African American Art department at Swann Galleries as well as the Associate Director for the LGBTQ+ department. After completing his undergraduate degree, he interned for the National Academy of Design, 303 Gallery, and Jack Shainman Gallery. He has worked for Salon 94 and Eric Firestone Gallery, most recently as Associate Director, where he focused on gallery sales and liaising with artist estates. Corey has served as a juror for the MFA thesis at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He has participated in lectures at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the Appraisers Association of America, and the LGBT Historic Sites Project.
BARBARA FAHS CHARLES
Protesting on the Capitol Steps
Barbara Fahs Charles was a partner with Robert Staples in the design firm Staples & Charles for nearly 50 years. The firm specialized in exhibition planning and design for museums nationally and internationally. Barbara and Robert met at the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, where Charles coordinated exhibitions and Staples was senior designer. The couple received the Maurice Rickards Award in 1986. Barbara is an expert in the history of American carousels.
MEREDITH SANTAUS
Emerging Scholar Presenter:
Pseudo-Ephemera: Book Artists, Preservation, and Protest
Meredith G. Santaus is a PhD student in English Literature at Boston University, where she focuses on book history, artists’ books and visual culture, and modernism. She is also a bookseller and gallery curator with Bromer Booksellers & Gallery, dealing in private presses, illustration art, designer bindings, and miniature books. She has curated exhibitions for Barry Moser, Robin Price, David Esslemont, and Gunnar Kaldewey, among others, and in 2021 spearheaded Pressing Issues: Voices for Justice in the Book Arts, a catalog and concurrent exhibit that gathered more than one hundred items from over one hundred years of artists’ responses to a range of conflicts and injustices.