Re-Designing the Bible for Reading, and How Kickstarter Made It Possible

– From the Friends of the Library Newsletter, Spring 2015

In mid-2014, book designer Adam Lewis Greene launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his first independent book publishing endeavor, Bibliotheca. According to Adam,Bibliotheca aims to free biblical literature — a cornerstone of Western culture and storytelling — from the dense, encyclopedic typographic conventions to which it has been almost exclusively relegated for centuries, and to give it fresh expression as a multivolume set of elegant, traditionally designed books conducive to enjoyable reading. The fundraising goal was quickly surpassed 40 times over, totaling over $1.4 million and making Bibliotheca one of the top 50 Kickstarter campaigns to date out of over 197,000.

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Being more or less a student of the age-old disciplines of type design, typography, book design, book illustration, calligraphy, and print, Adam is fascinated with the dissemination of ideas via the book and the letter, as well as the history and future of writingand print. Confronted with an increasing tendency in design culture toward the superficial away from the substantive, he is interested in finding and creating artifacts that possess intrinsic beauty and goodness, and he thinks a well-made book is just about the best example of this. In this lecture — which is free and open to the public — Adam will talk about his vision for Bibliotheca and how he is implementing it. More information about the project is available from Bibliotheca.

Who: Adam Lewis Greene
What: “Re-Designing the Bible for Reading, and How Kickstarter Made It Possible”
When: Thursday, April 23, 7:30–9 p.m.
Where: Upper Gwinn Commons