Applications Open for RBS Online Course on Publishers’ Archives

Are you interested in exploring how publishers’ archives illuminate the history of the American book? Apply now for Rare Book School’s Winter 2026 online course, H-95v: Reading Publishers’ Archives for the Study of the American Book, taught by noted bibliographer and book historian Michael Winship. This 22-hour course meets Mondays and Thursdays from 26 January to 26 February 2026. Apply by 1 December 2025 for first-round consideration; applications received after this date will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the course is full.

H-95v will introduce students to the use of publishers’ and book trade archives and other records for the study of the creation, production, distribution, and reception of American books produced from the colonial period to the twentieth century. Particular attention will be paid to financial records and how to decipher those that reflect the ways that publishers and other book trade members adapted standard business and accounting practices, including double-entry bookkeeping, to their needs.

The course is chiefly aimed at scholars who are engaged in book historical research, but will also be of use to librarians, collectors, and others whose duties or interests require an understanding and knowledge of the archives and records that document the history of American book publishing. To benefit fully from the course, participants should already have a basic understanding of publishing practices and the book trades.

Michael Winship is Iris Howard Regents Professor of English II (emeritus) at the University of Texas at Austin and edited the final three volumes of the nine-volume Bibliography of American Literature. He is the author of American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields (1995) and has published widely on the nineteenth-century American book and publishing trades. He was an editor of and contributor to The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 and contributor to Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (volumes 3 and 4 of A History of the Book in America), and served on that series’ editorial board. He has taught or co-taught numerous RBS courses throughout the years, including The History of the Book in Antebellum America; The American Book in the Industrial Era, 1820–1940; and both in-person and online versions of Reading Publishers’ Archives for the Study of the American Book.

For more information about H-95v, including how to apply, please visit rarebookschool.org/courses/history/h95v.