News Archives

Print for Children

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, […]

The Printing Press in Spanish America, 1500–1830

Course Length: 22 hours
Course Week: 28 July–1 August 2025
Format: online only
Fee: $1,100

This course will examine the production and consumption of print in Spanish America, with a focus on New Spain—the Spanish Empire’s largest viceroy­alty in the Americas, including present-day Mexico, Central America, most of the Caribbean, the U.S. South and Southwest, and the Philippines. The course will start with the European invasion of the Americas in 1492, analyzing the Spanish Crown’s deployment of the press as a tool to establish sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and their lands during the sixteenth century. […]

Reference Sources for Researching Printed Western Americana

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 24–25 June 2023
Format: in person, Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
Fee: $800

The American West has long been a popular field for book collectors, antiquarian booksellers, and institutional libraries, and bibliographers have produced a large number of reference works related to it. In this two-day course, we’ll examine more than 100 printed and electronic bibliographies, catalogues, and other reference sources, which focus on printed materials relating to, or printed in, the American West through the early twentieth century, as this geographical area has been variously defined by those in the world of rare books. […]

African American Print Cultures in the Nineteenth Century

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 16–21 July 2023
Format: in person, American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA
Fee: $1,395 

This seminar will explore the relationship between African American print and activism during the long nineteenth century, focusing simultaneously on African American print practices and the ethics of studying African American print and life. How did African Americans use a variety of print forms to share and advance issues of import to Black life in the United States? How did the specific print forms they chose to work in and with influence such issues? […]

Introduction to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Length: 6 hours
Format: Online

Designed for librarians, archivists, curators, and others with an interest in special collections and exhibitions focused on the global Black experience, this course provides an introduction to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. One of The New York Public Library’s research libraries, the Schomburg Center is an historic institution recognized for its devotion to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences. Special collections materials are held in the Schomburg Center’s Divisions of Art & Artifacts; Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books; […]

Spanish American Textual Technologies to 1700

Length: 10 hours
Format: Online

This course will explore the history of textual technologies in the region now referred to as Spanish America, from the pre-contact period to the colonial period (c. 300 BC to c. 1700 AD). The framework of “textual technologies”—as opposed to “the book”—encompasses the variety of material modes of writing and recording employed before and after 1492. We will cover a broad range of topics, from stone inscriptions and painted texts on artifacts of a variety of materials to knot-tying, writing with ink on linen paper, and manual printing on the moveable-type press. […]

Indigenous Book History in Virtual Space

Course Length: 10 hours
Format: Online

Even before Marisa Duarte’s Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country (2017) was published, Indigenous peoples have had a long and enduring history of creating and accessing different technologies (such as wampum belts, birch bark scrolls, ledger books, and buffalo hides) in order to chronicle Native ways of being and knowing in the world. In the midst of a global pandemic, this course will make use of remote teaching platforms and Indigenous epistemologies to offer a brief introduction to Native North American engagement with books as authors, […]

African American Print Cultures in the Nineteenth-Century United States

This course will focus on early African American print culture in the United States during the nineteenth century. We begin with an overview of American print culture studies generally, focusing our attention on early African American print production and form as the sessions move forward. In examining print as both a cultural form and a marketable commodity, we will situate objects within a variety of distributional, technological, consumerist, and cultural networks. Indeed, our sessions will spend equal time discussing the “print” (material infrastructures) and the “culture” (the cultural and political movements surrounding and working through print technology) in African American print culture. […]

The Photographic Book since 1843

Course Length: 12 hours
Schedule: 7–11 July 2025
Format: Online
Fee: $900

The nature, form, and impact of the book changed dramatically with the introduction of photography, altering the way books would be made, would appear, and would help transform the communication of ideas in visual form.

In parallel to this phenomenon, the ability of the photograph to reach its widest audience would entail an essential partnership with the form of the book. The nomenclature of photography remains tied to the book: we think of the photographic “print” and of “printing” a photograph, […]

Six Degrees of Phillis Wheatley

“Never has a single professional development opportunity so profoundly transformed my research, thinking, and teaching.” – 2021 student

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 9–13 June 2025
Format: online only
Fee: $900

If you Google “Phillis Wheatley,” the widely reproduced engraving of her silhouette is easy to find. The image remembers the young (and at times, enslaved) poet sitting alone with pen in hand. It memorializes the writer at her craft, and it also fixes a lone, singular Wheatley in time. This course will introduce students to another story for the young poet and, […]

Key Moments in the History of the Book in the Antebellum United States

Course Length: 6 hours
Format: Online

This course will explore the history of the antebellum American book by looking at three important events in the history of publishing in the United States: the first national book fair in 1802, the first book trade sale in 1824, and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. Each of these moments signals a major development in how books were produced, published, and distributed during the antebellum period. Each day of class will be spent on one of these events as a lens that brings into focus our understanding of the ways that the American book trade developed and grew before the Civil War. […]

The History of the Book in Antebellum America

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 23–28 July 2023
Format: in person, University of Pennsylvania Libraries in Philadelphia, PA
Fee: $1,395

This course will focus on the emergence of a national trade publishing system in the United States by examining the production, distribution, and reception of books and other printed materials during the years from 1800 to 1860, with particular emphasis on the crucial transition period of 1819 to 1837. Among the themes that will be explored are how the publishing and book trades established and developed themselves over this period; […]

A History of the Indigenous Book in the Americas

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 3–8 August 2025
Format: in person, Newberry Library in Chicago, IL
Fee: $1,495

In this course, we will examine the millennia-long engagement of Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere with books and other textual arts and technologies. The course will place greater emphasis on 1500 to the present, and on North America, but will also include discussion of earlier materials and of Central and South American peoples. Specific topics will include structures of Indigenous textual artifacts; materials making up Indigenous books, including Native papers as well as engagement with materials introduced by non-Natives; […]

The History & Construction of the Mesoamerican Codex, 600–1550

Of the thousands of pre-Columbian books produced, only a handful have survived to the present day, all of which shed a bright light on the history, language, and book production methods and techniques of the Aztecs and the Maya.

This class will introduce the Mesoamerican Codex both as a physical and cultural object. By discussing not only the construction, material make-up, and pigments of the codices, but also by considering broader cultural questions regarding their languages, iconography, and provenance, students can begin to understand how these books functioned within indigenous societies and how they were perceived by Europeans during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. […]

Book Production and Social Practice in Early Modern Europe and America

Working outward from the material book, this course will highlight the unique value of book history in the study of culture, religion, and politics of the early modern period. Case studies will range from Europe, to England, and North America c.1500–1800, and will include John Foxe’s book of martyrs, the Essais of Montaigne, and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Each student will also work closely with one historical source selected by the instructors based on his or her special interests, culminating in a brief presentation to the group on Friday. The course assumes a basic familiarity with book history, […]

Reading Publishers’ Archives for the Study of the American Book

This course 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 20th century. The focus will be on American material, though British practice may also be addressed by way of comparison.  Particular attention will be paid to business records and how to decipher those that reflect the ways that publishers and other book trade members adapted standard financial and accounting practices, including double-entry bookkeeping, to their needs. The course is chiefly aimed at scholars who are engaged in book historical research, […]

The American Book in the Industrial Era, 1820–1940

This course will introduce students to the manufacturing methods, publishing practices, distribution networks, and use of books, periodicals, and other printed materials in the United States during the industrial era, roughly from the 1820s to the 1940s. Particular attention will be paid to exploring the introduction and impact of the new industrial production technologies that defined the period, but other topics to be addressed include: the development of trade publishing and other publishing systems; methods of book distribution, including the role of bookstores, as the book market expanded across the continent; authorship, copyright, and the importance of the international trade in American and British books and texts both before and after the 1891 Chace Act; […]

The History of the Book in America: A Survey from Colonial to Modern

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 28 July–2 August 2024
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,395

An inclusive survey of the roles of books and other technologies related to literacy in American society and culture. We will first examine the early trans-Atlantic trade in books, the beginning and early years of local print production, and the place of books, almanacs, and other printed documents in colonial British North America. Our focus will then shift to the establishment of a national book trade in an expanding United States during the industrial era, […]

The History of the Book in America, c.1700–1830

This course will focus on the production, distribution, and reception of books, newspapers, and other printed materials in colonial and early national America up to the 1820s. Among the specific topics to be considered are: the role of imported books, the factors limiting the spread of printing, the proliferation of newspapers and circulating libraries, the press in the Revolutionary era, the shift from printing to publishing in the 1790s, the reprint trade, copyright legislation and practice, author-publisher relations, the decentralized nature of the book trade, the rise of cooperative interregional book distribution systems, the structural flaws in the book trade, […]

American Publishers’ Bookbindings, 1800–1900

“Anyone who works with or is interested in working with nineteenth-century cultural heritage would gain a tremendous amount from this class.” — 2017 student

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 12–16 June 2023
Format: online only
Fee: $800

Binderies in nineteenth-century America underwent dynamic changes, evolving from small shops employing a handful of workers to large factories producing thousands of bindings per day using assembly-line techniques. In this course we will examine the industrialization of bookbinding in America during the nineteenth century and the evolving organization of labor within binderies. […]