News Archives

The History of Typography

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

This course will provide a general overview of the history of typography and related letterforms in the West from the fifteenth century to the present day. It will cover description and identification of types, including moveable metal type, wood type, type for machine production, and digital type. The course will also aim to place type and lettering within historical, cultural, and political perspectives through a series of case studies that examine the creation, […]

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? […]

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. […]

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. […]

Identifying and Understanding Twentieth-Century Duplicating Technologies

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 6–11 July 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

This course will examine the history and identification of twentieth-century duplicating processes. Students will learn how these technologies operated, and, from that understanding, learn the capabilities and characteristics of each in order to effectively identify the process used on a given document or text.

We will cover the nineteenth-century origins of duplication, common duplicating processes like spirit, mimeography, xerography, and offset—as well as more unusual methods like verifax, […]

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; […]

The History of Artists’ Books since 1950

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 14–19 July 2024
Format: in person, Grolier Club in New York City, NY
Fee: $1,495

This course will review the history of twentieth- and twenty-first century artists’ books and related publications, focusing on transformations in publishing that led to deeper engagement among various communities of artists. Starting in the 1950s and continuing to the present, this course will consider how this genre was formed and what influences it. We will take time to discuss the readings, review selected artists’ books, survey popular book types, […]

The Photographic Book since 1843

“The course gave me a different perspective on early photography and the development of the photobook.” — 2017 student

This course will explore the evolution of the photographically-illustrated book from the first commercially available example (William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature) to the present day. We will focus on the technical developments in the production of photographically-illustrated books, covering both photographic processes themselves and—in greater depth—the developments in photomechanical printing that have driven the historical expansion of the field. Students will look at key examples, exploring the books themselves and their surviving archival evidence for the technical, […]

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; […]

Printed Books since 1800: Description & Analysis

This course is designed for librarians, booksellers, collectors, scholars, and others who seek an introductory understanding of how to recognize, evaluate and describe the physical aspects and textual significance of printed materials. Focusing on the post-1800 period, the course provides instruction and practice in identifying and analyzing books and other printed artifacts. Topics include: determining how books were manufactured, how to read a bibliographical description of a book; how to read and interpret dealer and auction descriptions; how to distinguish between edition, issue, and state; and how to assess the aesthetic, market, and research potential of materials. The course is built around hands-on interaction with RBS’s rich teaching collection of books, […]

Modern Art of the Book

This course considers the codex book as a work of deliberate, self-conscious art production from the very beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. Taking William Blake as the point of departure, the course asks what makes a book modern and what distinguishes a work of art from other forms of publication. The course will look at illustrated books in the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts movement and notions of the “Ideal Book,” and continue with focused discussion of works that reflect the private press movement, art nouveau, the avant-garde, fine press, documentary impulses, livres d’artistes, […]

The Printed Book in the West since 1800

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 8–13 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

This course will survey the technological advances in papermaking, illustration processes, composition, printing, binding, and distribution that fueled the development of the modern book industry. It will also give an overview of those phenomena—William Morris and the modern fine press movement, artists’ books, the rise of book-clubs and organized bibliophily—that have arisen to balance this industrialization. The class will make extensive use of books and periodicals embodying the advance of printing in the West since 1800, […]

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. […]

The History of 19th- & 20th-Century Typography & Printing

“I feel much better equipped to analyze and date types. I also learned a lot about the physical labor and tools employed in letterpress printing.” — 2017 student

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 10–14 July 2023
Format: online only
Fee: $800

By the end of the eighteenth century, letterpress printing had been in existence for 350 years, and in that time it had changed technologically hardly at all. Baskerville, Bodoni, and Didot were printing from essentially the same hand-cast type on the same handmade paper with the same wooden presses that Gutenberg, […]