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ARH 292: The Art and History of the Book
A survey of the book - as vehicle for the transmission of both text and image - from the manuscripts of the middle ages up to contemporary artists' books.
The course will examine the principal techniques of book production - calligraphy, illustration, papermaking, typography, bookbinding - as well as various social
and cultural aspects of book history, including questions of censorship, verbal and visual literacy, the role of the booktrade, and the book as agent of change.
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As I approach it, the course has three separate but inter-related emphases or themes. The first is about seeing the book as a physical artifact or, in other words, how to look at a book as a biblio-archaeologist. To do this you will learn to discover information about the nature, purpose and implications of a book's type, paper, printing, illustration and binding. The second theme is the impact of the book on European society - that is, the book not only as a commercial commodity and as the primary vehicle for the transmission of ideas but also as an expression of the mentalité, or mind-set, of all those who came in contact with the book: author, printer, publisher, seller, binder, illustrator, reader, censor. And the third theme that will weave through all our investigations is the mutability and transience of the text, the sometimes fragile and tenuous transmission of a literary work from edition to edition, century to century, civilization to civilization. In exploring this third theme we will be mainly concerned with the question of how the physical form of a book affects the way the text is understood and disseminated. Throughout the semester you will have the advantage of being able to work with many "real" examples of manuscripts and printed books from the Mortimer Rare Book Room in order to learn the basic taxonomy of the book and to name and identify its parts. You will also develop your ability to ascertain what these physical objects can tell us about their creators' varied intentions and anticipated audiences. This you will be able to do just by virtue of what you discover by examining books attentively, quite apart what you learn by reading them. In other words, books are "primary sources" from several points of view, and you should finish the semester more aware than when you began it of how many different kinds of things books can tell us. Class meetings will be held in a variety of formats, combining formal lectures and class discussions with hands-on workshops and the study of rare books themselves. During the course of the semester we be visited by several outside experts in the history of the book. In addition, there will be labs in printing on the handpress and bookbinding.  |