Books, Bans, and Business: Two Women and a New York Bookshop
Penn students curate a pop-up exhibit on the collections of Frances Steloff, who founded the influential Gotham Art and Book Mart in the 1920s.
Hosted by: Kislak Center
This pop-up exhibit will draw on the Karen Burke LeFevre research collection on Frances Steloff. Frances Steloff was born to Jewish-Russian parents in 1887 and founded of the Gotham Art and Book Mart on 128 West 45th, in New York in the 1920s. This bookshop was a hub for avant-garde and modernist writers.
Throughout the semester, students in the graduate course Professional Archiving and Curating for Academic Settings have worked together to organize and describe this collection of materials on Stellof, the literary world of the 1920s, and Stellof's experience with the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which tried to censor the books she sold in her shop. Stop by this pop-up exhibit to see interesting findings from their work, and visit the Unique at Penn blog for more reflections on their experiences.
These materials were collected and donated to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries by Stellof's biographer, Karen Burke LeFevre, whose work is also featured in the exhibit.