2023 Oscar Lewis Awards

The Book Club of California congratulates the recipients of the 2023 Oscar Lewis Awards:

RICHARD SEIBERT
Oscar Lewis Award for the Book Arts

Richard Seibert was recognized for achievement in the Book Arts. Richard has lived an incredible life in the arts. After studying classics and literature, he cooked at Café Chez Panisse for 15 years. Richard’s close friend David Lance Goines of Saint Hieronymus Press taught him to how print in 1993. He soon began working with Peter Rutledge Koch, where he refined his letterpress skills over the next 10 years. He returned to Saint Hieronymus Press (with David Lance Goines) in the summer of 2005.

Richard has a long history of working with the Book Club of California on the Quarterly News-Letter, limited edition books, Keepsakes, and ephemera. His most recent run on the Quarterly News-Letter was Volume 84 (with cover illustrations by Michael Schwab) and Volume 85 (with cover illustrations by David Lance Goines). (He also printed Volumes 77-78 and Volumes 80-81.)

In addition to designing and printing the Book Club’s Keepsake, “Tangram: Pieces of the Puzzle” (2021), he designed and printed the 2017 Keepsake “Developing an Image: Photography, Books, and the National Park Service,” and the 1999 Keepsake “The Bicentennial of Lithography.”

Richard is credited with designing, printing, or providing ephemera/elements for dozens of books from printers including Peter Koch Printers, Jungle Garden Press, and many more. He played an important role in designing and printing elements of Book Club publication #215 Dear Master: Letters of George Sterling to Ambrose Bierce, and Book Club publication #235 Palatino: The Natural History of a Typeface.

He has printed ephemera (invitations, award certificates, programs, bookmarks, etc.) for the Book Club—including for the Oscar Lewis Awards in recent years.

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DOROTHY LAZARD
Oscar Lewis Award for Western History

Dorothy Lazard was born in St. Louis and grew up in the Bay Area of the 1960s and ’70s, surrounded by an expansive network of family, and hungry for knowledge.

A librarian for forty years, she joined the staff of the Oakland Public Library in 2000. From 2009 until her retirement in 2021, she was the head librarian of Oakland Public Library’s Oakland History Center, where she encouraged people of all ages and backgrounds to explore local history.

Her work developing and preserving the Center’s collection is the foundation on which hundreds of books, films, podcasts, scholarly articles, news stories, historic preservation, and cultural resource management projects rest. Her formative contribution to the work of others—her knowledge of the Center’s collections, of the city’s development, of its many neighborhoods and community organizations, city agencies and business entities—is remarkable.

Her knowledge of Oakland’s history is not purely intellectual. She grew up in the city and brought this lived expertise to those who turned to the archives for help, in her words, “the students, professors, architects, genealogists, real estate agents, developers, filmmakers, novelists, and the visual artists.” As recently as 2020, while approaching a planned date for retirement after which she would complete her own book projects, Lazard was busy initiating new projects to ensure that the everyday nature of East Bay life under the COVID-19 pandemic was well-documented for future generations, noting that while mass grieving of “normal” life was overwhelming and ongoing, “there’s something hopeful about archiving.” This is the spirit and presence of mind of an invaluable western, social, and urban historian at work.

Her first book, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World: A Memoir tells the story of her journey to becoming “queen of my own nerdy domain.”

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The Oscar Lewis Awards were established by the Book Club of California in 1994 in honor of Oscar Lewis (1893-1992), San Francisco author, historian, and club secretary from 1921-1946.

Past recipients of the Oscar Lewis Award for Western History:

Charles Wollenberg (2022)
Charles Fracchia (2021)
John Briscoe (2020)
Dr. Rose Marie Beebe and Dr. Robert Senkewicz (2019)
Brewster Kahle (2018)
Robert Bringhurst (2017)
James Karman (2016)
Dr. Gray Brechin (2015)
Rebecca Solnit (2014)
W. Michael Mathes (2012)
Philip P. Choy (2011)
Thomas Pinney (2010)
Robert J. Chandler (2009)
Malcolm Margolin (2008)
Carl Nolte (2007)
Robert V. Hine (2006)
David F. Myrick (2005)
Robert G. Harlan (2004)
Kevin Starr (2003)
Ferol Egan (2002)
Muir Dawson (2001) and Glen Dawson (2001)
J. S. Holliday (2000), Msgr. Francis J. Weber (2000)
Allan R. Ottley (1999)
Gary F. Kurutz (1998)
Richard H. Dillon (1997)
Lawrence Clark Powell (1996)
Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., (1996)
Michael Harrison (1995)
Dr. Albert Shumate (1994)

Past recipients of the Oscar Lewis Award for the Book Arts:

Mary Risala Laird (2022)
Wesley B. Tanner (2021)
Mary Austin & Kathleen Burch (2020)
Fred and Barbara Voltmer (2019)
Betsy Davids (2018)
Kitty Maryatt (2017)
Richard Wagener (2016)
Harry & Sandra Reese (2015)
Johanna Drucker (2014)
Carolee Campbell (2013)
Jonathan Clark (2012)
Clifford Burke (2011)
Charles Hobson (2010)
Graham Mackintosh (2009)
David Lance Goines (2008)
Patrick W. Reagh (2007)
Peter Rutledge Koch (2006)
Joseph J. D’Ambrosio (2005)
Eleanore Edwards Ramsey (2004)
Joanne Margarethe Sonnichsen (2003)
Carolyn and James Robertson (2002)
Wolfgang Lederer (2001)
Andrew Hoyem (2000)
Jack W. Stauffacher (1999)
S. Gale Herrick (1998)
Sandra Kirshenbaum (1998)
Marjorie G. Stern (1997)
Lewis and Dorothy Allen (1996)
Albert Sperisen (1995)
Stella Patri (1995)
Ward Ritchie (1994)