The Lone Star Chapter annual Meeting and Election of Officers is to be held in Dallas during the lunch break at the DeGolyer Conference. The Helen Warren DeGolyer Triennial Exhibition & Conference on Bookbinding takes place May 29 - 31 in the Bridwell Library, SMU Campus. The exhibition will continue until July 31. Activities at the conference include Jan Sobota's session on "Hard Cover Vellum Bindings" and Priscilla Spitler's on "Sewn board Bindings", lectures, demonstrations and the presentation of the award for the winner of the exhibition competition.
The New England Chapter's Spring Meeting was at the Providence Public Library on May 10, with and Open House at the Papermaking and Bookbinding Studio, Rhode Island School of Design.. The Chapter sponsors a workshop on May 31 on Pressure Sensitive Tape Removal with Elizabeth Morse, of Harvard University Library Preservation Center.
The Midwest Chapter has set a tentative date of June 16th in Cleveland, Ohio, for its Annual Meeting. In November Sid Neff gave a workshop on many aspects of leather working. The report in the Midwest Newsletter, vol. 9, no. 1, said: "...He began by acknowledging that he had first learned the techniques in classes with Jean Gunner and Sylvia Rennie. Through the years he had added some Xourishes of his own. ...He demonstrated using a Scharfix to pare leather wafer thin and explained that you can send your skins out to Lomelis Bros. Splitting Co., Inc. (listed in the Supply Directory) and for one set fee have them all pared down to a usable thickness. Then Sid had us cut sixteenth inch wide leather strips out of the wafer thin leather strips he had prepared and use them as decoration on leather headbands. ... By the second day we were ready to decorate our leather plaquettes. Sid Neff is a graphic designer, so we also received lessons in transferring a design from paper to tissue to templates to leather...".
The New York Chapter has had a busy spring schedule with, in April, an Open House at Jeff Peachey Conservation Studio, the memorial for Laura Young at the Grolier Club and a slide lecture by the Australian bookbinder, John Newland. In May, Jeri Davis gave a one-day demonstration on cloth rebacking and the Chapter visited an Open House at the Municipal Archives.
The Chapter is planning a members' exhibition for 1998, the title of which will be Doomsday Books: Myths for a New Millennium, a purposefully vague theme to be interpreted broadly, reXecting the idea of ends and beginnings.