H-200. Print for Children
Andrea Immel Jill Shefrin
Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 27 July–1 August 2025
Format: in person, Princeton University in Princeton, NJ
Fee: $1,495
Children have been a major audience for print throughout history, and this course will introduce participants to Western children’s print, visual, and material culture and that of China. The course will draw on the rich resources of historical illustrated books, manuscripts, artwork, ephemera, and multimedia artifacts of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton. Attention will be paid to the classic literary genres such as fairy tales, alphabets, and moveable books, but we will also examine diverse materials including propaganda and advertising targeting young people, information books, educational pastimes, and transnational books. The approach will be contextual, teaching students how to identify rare materials for children and situate them within cultural, historical and literary continuums for the purposes of collecting, cataloging, and research.
Course History
Faculty
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Andrea Immel
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Jill Shefrin
Jill Shefrin
Jill Shefrin is Senior Research Associate in Arts at Trinity College, University of Toronto and an Advisory Board Member for the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, University of Reading. She began her career as a librarian with the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library, and taught the Children’s Books course at the London Rare Books School between 2008 and 2018. She received both the Justin G. Schiller Prize and the F. J. Harvey Darton Award for The Dartons: Publishers of Educational Aids, Pastimes and Juvenile Ephemera (2009). She has a particular interest in printed ephemera for children and is currently completing a bibliographical and historical study of British “school pieces.” She has spoken and published extensively on early children’s book publishing and juvenile education in the long eighteenth century. In 2017, she was a Royal Bank of Canada Foundation Fellow, Centre for the Study of the Book, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. She also edited (and was a contributor to) the Grolier catalog One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature (2014).
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