The Parallel History of Books and Blooks

Date: 2 June 2025
Time: 5:30 p.m. ET
Location: UVA Edgar Shannon Library (Room 330) or Zoom
Lecturer: Mindell Dubansky - Museum Librarian for Preservation at the Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

You are invited to attend this lecture in person or virtually via Zoom. Register for the livestream here.
(RSVPs to attend in person are not required.)

Throughout the world, for hundreds of years, people have expressed themselves by making plain and decorated objects in imitation of specific titles and types of books. No genre of book or bookbinding has been ignored. Mindell Dubansky calls these objects blooks, a contraction of book-look. History has shown that infusing an object with bookish characteristics creates an emotional attachment to the object analogous to our feelings for a beloved or important book. This, in turn, increases our desire to own, share, and treasure our book-shaped objects. Love, friendship, humor, play, faith, enlightenment, and commemoration are all common and abiding themes of blooks. Dubansky’s lecture will touch on some of the areas in which real books and book-like objects most closely intersect. These include how the bookbinding trade was involved in making blooks, how blook-making followed publishing trends and popular titles, how disused books have historically been repurposed as blooks, and how the idea of the book has been translated into a myriad of unexpected objects by artists and inventors. Dubansky’s curated show on blooks for the Center for Book Arts in New York City was profiled earlier this year by the New York Times.