William Wreden ’58: Sincerely Yours

When was the last time you wrote a proper letter to someone? You’ll be forgiven if it has been too long to recall. To lifelong book collector William “Bo” Wreden ’58, however, handwritten correspondence remains endlessly fascinating, even in our digital times.

Wreden spent more than 20 years assembling a trove of books, articles, comic strips and more addressing the art of letter writing. The inspiration? A book he bought from a catalogue: The Polite Letter-writer, published in London in 1804. This past spring, he organized the collection into a 10-week exhibition titled “Correspondence & Letter Writing,” on view at The Book Club of California.

Among the exhibition’s treasures was an item Wreden acquired during a 1952 visit to Exeter as a prospective student .While Wreden was on a tour, the chair of the English Department, D’Arcy Curwen, gave him stapled mimeographed pages titled “Putting Your Best Foot Forward on Note Paper.” In 1954, soon after his arrival at Exeter — some 3,200 miles from his home in Menlo Park, California — Wreden felt the importance of letter writing.

“When I was at Exeter, we were not allowed to have or use telephones,” Wreden says. “All communication with family and friends was by letter writing, which set me on the path of becoming a correspondent.” Wreden still has letter she wrote and received while he was a student at the Academy.

Wreden has been a member of The Book Club, a San Francisco institution celebrating the book arts and western history, for about 32 years. The first exhibition he organized there, in 2004, was called “A Joint Show” and featured psychedelic posters. In 2015, a second exhibition showcased 70 years of playful and festive fine press holiday cards, many of which were commissioned by his family from some of California’s most important printers. Like those, “Correspondence & Letter Writing” offered unique historical perspectives and plenty of wit. A friend who attended wrote to Wreden, “The whole experience was like going through a magic keyhole.”

To speak with Wreden on the topic of collecting is not unlike the experience of exploring an old bookshop. He recalls details — names, dates, titles, publishers — with ease, as he shares memories from his past. A holiday card printed by the Grace Hopper Press, featuring an illustration labeled “California, the Baloon [sic] Railway,” by a man named

John Browne from the 1849 issue of Mechanics Magazine. A 1958 Sports Illustrated article titled “Baseball’s for the Birds,” covered a thrilling rowing race in which Wreden and his crewmates competed during his senior year at Exeter. A psychedelic poster printed for a 1967 meeting of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers with the motto “Amor Librorum Nos Unit.” In this way, he reveals fascinating pockets of publishing history that are permanently intertwined with his own.

Wreden was born into the literary world. His father, William P. Wreden Sr., was an antiquarian book dealer with a shop in Palo Alto, California. As a boy, Bo was often in the store; as an adult he managed a second outpost the family opened in San Francisco in 1963. At Princeton, where he majored in early and modern European history, Wreden found his way into a job in the university’s rare book room. After graduation, he went abroad, studying 18th-century literature at the University of Edinburgh. He then traveled to France to work as an apprentice at Aux Amateurs de Livres, an antiquarian bookshop owned by Marcel Blancheteau.

Today, Wreden’s library in Berkeley, California, spans centuries and includes books, correspondence, pamphlets, posters, greeting cards, bookmarks and more sourced primarily from bookshops and catalogues. He has collections by and about California authors Joan Didion and Richard Brautigan, who wrote an introduction to a limited edition the Wredens published. His largest collection, consisting of a few hundred books and ephemeral items, is devoted to Buddhism, sensory awareness, yoga and Zen, with some emphasis on publications relating to the San Francisco Zen Center.

“What can I say about collecting?” he muses. “There’s a certain thrill to finding things that you know fit into your collection, and it’s a way of connecting with people.”

Like so many of us, Wreden relies heavily on email these days. But he still maintains letter-writing relationships with many people, preparing first drafts in a notebook before he sends a final version into the world. Properly, politely, he remains a man of letters.

This feature was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.