Richard Wendorf is Director and Librarian of the Boston Athenaeum. Among his other books in eighteenth-century studies is The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart and Georgian England. Helen Vendler (1933-2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker , the New York Review of Books , the New York Times Book Review , London Review of Books , and the New Republic . She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. William H. Bond was Librarian of Houghton Library, Emeritus, Harvard University.