A festschrift honoring Jonathan Fairbanks, the famous curator of American decorative arts, who has held positions at Winterthur, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Fuller Craft Museum has been published. I was very honored to be included as an author in it (my essay on the first furniture of the New England Historic Genealogical Society will be treated in a separate post). Entitled "American History, Art, and Culture: Writings in honor of Jonathan Leo Fairbanks,"
edited by Pat Warner and Gerald W.R. Ward, it includes essays by some of Jonathan's many friends and colleagues, including Brock Jobe, Robert F. Trent, Philip Zea, Wendy A. Cooper, Jane C. Nylander, and others, on a range of topics associated with Jonathan or written in his honor.
Abstracted from the preface by Warner and Ward:
"This book is not a biography of Jonathan, although its contents could be said to be something of an intellectual profile of a remarkable man and his influence on others. In our view, Jonathan's generosity of spirit and his many attributes --- his respect for others, his devotion to knowledge, his humor, his enthusiasm, his generosity, his curiosity, his openness to new ideas, and his understanding of all the meaning and memories that works of art contain---make him an example of what the playwright Richard Foreman defined as the traditional ideal of Western culture .... In these troubled times, we need more people like Jonathan, who personifies the best of the humanist tradition."
This book may be purchased through the Fuller Craft Museum: https://fullercraft.org/product/american-history-art-and-culture-writings-in-honor-of-jonathan-leo-fairbanks/