Mark Samuels Lasner
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Mark Samuels Lasner is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library. A graduate of Connecticut College, he is the author of The Bookplates of Aubrey Beardsley (Rivendale Press, 2008), A Bibliography of Enoch Soames (Rivendale Press, 1999), The Yellow Book: A Checklist and Index (Eighteen Nineties Society, 1998), A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley (Thomas G. Boss Fine Books, 1995), and William Allingham: A Bibliographical Study (Holmes Publishing Co., 1993); as well as co-authored books such as England in the 1880s: Old Guard and Avant-Garde (University of Virginia Press, 1989) and England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head( Georgetown U Press, 1990). His articles and notes have appeared in the Book Collector, Browning Institute Studies, Notes and Queries, and other journals. He has organized or co-curated exhibitions held at the University of Virginia Library; Georgetown University Library; the Houghton Library and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Bryn Mawr College Library; and the Grolier Club.
Mark Samuels Lasner was the principal organizer of yet another conference, "Useful & Beautiful: The Transatlantic Arts of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites," held at the University of Delaware, Winterthur Museum & Country Estate, and the Delaware Art Museum on 7-9 October 2010.
In February 2004, he was co-organizer of "'Michael Field' and Their World," an international scholarly symposium at the University of Delaware, and later the same year served as the principal local facilitator for "Picture This: The Art and Technique of Illustration," the 28th annual conference of the American Printing History Association, held at the University of Delaware Library. Active in numerous bibliophile and bibliographical organizations, Samuels Lasner was the 2003 recipient of the Sir Thomas More medal from the University of San Francisco, awarded to honor the spirit of "private collecting, a public benefit." A regular on the rare books lecture circuit, he recently spoke at the NEH summer seminar, "The Decadent 1890s," held at the William Andrews Clark Library, UCLA, in July 2009 and at Grolier Club's September 2009 "Books in Hard Times" symposium.
From March to May 2010 the Henry B. Plant Museum, Tampa, FL mounted Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. This exhibition, curated by Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Delaware, was first held at the Grolier Club in 2008.
The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection is associated with the Special Collections Department of the University of Delaware Library, but is privately owned. The collection, housed in the Morris Library, focuses on British literature and art of the period 1850 to 1900, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and on the writers and illustrators of the 1890s. Its holdings comprise more than 7,000 printed books, manuscripts, letters, artworks, and ephemera.
