TEACHING THE HISTORY OF BOOKS AND PRINTING
A CONVERSATION AND A PRACTICUM

SYLLABUS

In this class, the instructors will lead a series of discussions about various pedagogical approaches to teaching the history of the book on both undergraduate and graduate levels. The readings constitute both recommendations and texts for discussion. Thanks to the resources of the Book Arts Press, we expect to have many of them ready to hand in the room where class meets. (You should feel completely free to browse in those you do not know.) Building on these conversations, each participant will have an opportunity to prepare and present to the entire group an individual session on some topic in the history of books as a kind of "practicum." Everyone should thus be able to engineer a small "experiment" before your "real" courses begin. The opportunity to think about syllabi -- or classroom presentations -- is also afforded, and results will take up much of the final day of class.

The readings represent only a small sample from a huge, and growing, literature now available on an exceptionally wide range of book history topics. The instructors have selected individual titles either because they are generally regarded as classics in the field or because they are provocative and provide interesting perspectives on it. Additions -- your own "personal favorites" -- are welcome!

1. Monday, July 26

• Introductions
  • Who are we? (all of us)
  • What are we doing here? and what do we do when we're not here?
  • What do we want from the course and why?
  • What do we already do along the lines of teaching the history of books and printing? If teaching such a course is now a prospect rather than a reality, what are we planning to do with it?

• The subject
  • What is the "field"?
  • What do we mean by the "history of the book"?
    • "the"?
    • "history"?
    • and (last but not least)"book"?
  • "the book"? What do we mean by "the book"? I.e., is there a generally accepted vocabulary (or taxonomy) of the field? IS there a field?
  • "teaching"?
    • what are some of the problems of teaching in this field?
      • undergraduate courses
      • graduate courses
      • considering institutional settings
        • academic department
        • library school
        • within library contexts
        • continuing education
        • disciplinary perspectives (literature, history, communications, etc.)
        • single instructors, collaborative teaching

• Exemplary practicum
  • This afternoon, we meet in Alderman's Special Collections (exact location to be announced). With the assistance of some "real" material objects -- books and manuscripts -- the instructors will suggest or remind all of us of some of the approaches different objects -- or the same object -- can elicit. ("Here are the books. What do we do now?")

• Assignments
  • Class time during the week will be scheduled to allow you to use the library's resources to prepare a similar presentation for Friday (roughly ten minutes apiece so as to allow time for comment and criticism from the class)
  • Prepare an exemplary semester-length syllabus
  • or if you are a librarian who makes classroom presentations, create the outline for such a presentation, indicating the subject of the class it is for
2. Tuesday, July 27

• Texts and themes
  • bibliography
  • general background and history
    Bibliography, editing, and the transmission of texts (the classical corpus, the Bible, the Bard)
    • Current debates over the "text"
    • Tanselle vs. McKenzie and his revisions
    • Publishing history
    • the image: illustrated books, prints, maps; iconology
    • Bindings and other aspects of "the book arts"
    • the birth of the "paratext"
    • the "sociocultural" book
    • Havelock, McLuhan, Ong (the spoken, the written, the seen: from the "true Homer" to McLuhan and beyond)
    • the Annales school (the "book and society")
    • Henri-Jean Martin and his students and epigones
    • Elizabeth L. Eisenstein
  • mixed formats
    • manuscript to printed book
    • printed book to electronic formats

• Afternoon (1 session of 2): library research and discovery
3. Wednesday, July 28

• Texts and themes, continued
  • the study of European book history
  • the study of American book history
  • the study of "non-western" book histories
  • the author: birth and death of same
  • the reader: practices of appropriation; reception theory; readers as the manipulated and the manipulators
  • sites of reading: libraries and collections

• Afternoon (1 session of 2): library research and discovery
4. Thursday, July 29

• Themes, continued
  • legalities of publishing and reading
    • pre-publication permission
    • post-publication censorship
    • copyright
    • forms of resistance
  • who reads? who reads what? and how do we know it?

• Resources
  If we have not already begun doing so in small doses, then today we will have a large dose introducing us to the kinds of teaching aids collected en masse by the Book Arts Press.

• Afternoon (1 session of 2): library research and discovery
5. Friday, July 30

• Preliminary results 1: the practicum
  • Reports on the materials/topics students have investigated during the week (approximately 10 minutes each, with comments from classmates)

• Creating courses
  • what ingredients? and how they work together (or don't)
    • lectures
    • student presentations; student teams
    • assignments (oral and written)
    • in-class exercises

• Preliminary results 2: the syllabus
  • reports on syllabi for semester-length classes
  • or, alternatively, for subject-centered classroom presentations (e.g., for library staff)

• Evaluation