Perspectives Over Pints: Chapter VII

Perspectives Over Pints: Chapter VII
Monday Nov 16th, 2026
7:30 PM – 9:30 PM

Perspectives Over Pints is a monthly lecture series exploring the intersection of Utah and contemporary culture — from environment to industry to public life. Each talk delivers a straightforward look at what’s happening and why it matters. Come for the talk, stay for the pint, leave with a new perspective.

This months topic: Is it a book? Clay tablet: book? Scroll: book? Your phone: book? The rare books curators at the U’s Marriott Library have 80,000 items and strong opinions.

Our speakers:

Lyuba Basin

Lyuba Basin is the Rare Books Curator at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, where she looks after a collection of more than 80,000 items — Sumerian clay tablets, medieval manuscripts, artists’ books made in the last few years, and a great deal in between. She comes to the Salt Lake Book Festival to open that collection up in public and put one stubborn question on the table: what actually makes something a book?

Basin started with the rare books collection as a part-time student employee and became curator in 2019. She holds a double BA in English and Applied Linguistics and a master’s degree from the U, where her thesis on the underground Untide Press earned her the University’s nomination for the Western Association of Graduate Schools Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award. The argument she made then is the one she still makes: the physical qualities of a text — how it was printed, bound, and passed hand to hand — can be read as closely as the words on the page. She built the library’s Rare Books Virtual Lecture Series, including an episode titled “What Is a Book?”, and she regularly teaches and leads showcases that put rare material directly into people’s hands.

Before returning to Salt Lake, Basin spent a year in Argentina as a Fulbright English Language Assistant at the Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, and later served as a Fulbright Alumni Ambassador. Join her at the Kiln Stage for an hour on one question nobody has fully settled.

Theadora Soter

Theadora Soter is the Rare Books Assistant Curator at the J. Willard Marriott Library, where she helps care for, research, and share one of the largest rare book collections in the Intermountain West. She joins the Salt Lake Book Festival to take on a question that gets harder the closer you look at it. Thea is a Utah native who fell for special collections while earning her BA in English at the University of Utah, then moved to Illinois for an MLIS at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She came to librarianship by way of the newsroom — the web team at The Salt Lake Tribune, and reporting on broadband access and who gets left off the map. That reporter’s instinct shows up in how she handles the collection. She writes the library’s Book of the Week posts, on everything from a 1608 witchcraft manual to a 1930 D.H. Lawrence volume with a phoenix stamped on its title page, and she opened BOO!KS to Die For, a night of the collection’s strangest volumes staged with the local reading community Bookish SLC. Her work also sits behind The Pen Is Mightier: Writing a Revolution, the Marriott Library’s loan of revolutionary-era rare material now on display at the Utah State Capitol.

Outside the reading room she cooks, reads, drinks wine with the people she loves most, and hangs out with her dog, Larry. Join her at Fisher for an hour of arguing about what counts, and why the answer keeps moving.