Book Club Discussions
Arts and Crafts collectors love to read, and we love our books and our home libraries. While reading is a solitary endeavor, we also enjoy sharing with others our thoughts, opinions, and observations. For several years Pat Bartinique, English professor and author, has lead our popular in-person book discussions at the National Arts and Crafts Conference at the Grove Park Inn. This coming February, Pat will return to use her experience to lead our discussions. We hope you will take the opportunity to read any of this year’s selections in advance of February, so that you can join the other registered participants in the lively discussions Pat will be leading on the Friday and Saturday during Conference weekend.
The 2025 Book Club Selections
The Arts & Crafts: Essays Collected by William Morris
First published in 1893 by the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society, this collection of essays explores the origins of the Arts and Crafts Movement by the influential figures of the early 20th centur — including essays by William Morris, Walter Crane, Somers Clarke, Emery Walker, and May Morris.
Consider purchasing this title at your local bookstore OR use the links below for Barnes & Noble, AbeBooks.com or Amazon. Used copies available!
Links to purchase new or used copies online
If a Poem Could Live and Breathe: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt’s First Love
by Mary Calvi
Studded with the real love letters between a young Theodore Roosevelt and Boston beauty Alice Lee―many of them never before published―If a Poem Could Live and Breathe makes vivid what many historians believe to be the pivotal years that made the future president into the man of action that defined his political life, and cemented his legacy.
Cambridge, 1878. The era of the Gilded Age. Alice Lee sets out to break from the norms of her mother’s generation. Women are fighting for educational opportunities and exploring a new sense of intellectual and personal freedom. Native New Yorker, Harvard student Teddy Roosevelt, is on his own journey of discovery, and when they meet, unrelenting currents of love change the trajectory of his life forever.
Consider purchasing this title at your local bookstore OR use the links below for Barnes & Noble, AbeBooks.com or Amazon. Used copies available!
Links to purchase new or used copies online