Teaching Book History Workshop Highlights and Reflections

Currently Reading: The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

For about a month now, I’ve wanted to write a post in response to the incredible weekend workshop that my department at the Folger Shakespeare Library co-hosted for undergraduate professors from all over the world. The workshop was called Teaching Book History and during this workshop, professors gathered to debate “how print culture, physical bibliography, and textual studies might best be integrated into a curriculum; what digital humanities may offer book historians; and how faculty and librarians can teach book history without access to a large collection of rare material” (description taken from our website). In short, it was a forum for undergraduate professors to discuss the “how” and “why” behind teaching book history courses at their respective institutions.

Adding to the endless list of reasons I love my job, I got to be part of the team helping out for the weekend. It was my job to assist our curators with lecture needs ranging from setting up a projector to displaying books from the 17th century to preparing the quills and ink as part of a demonstration. While occasionally stressful, my duties were fairly simple and were usually completed before the lecture, not during. This meant that I had the privilege of being a fly on the wall at this workshop, hearing some of the smartest people in the fields of early modern literature, history, and special collections not only share the knowledge they have, but debate and discuss with each other. It was a rare look into the minds of professors and the logistics of preparing the classes they teach.

It was fascinating and eye opening! In both a negative and a positive sense actually. I was somewhat disheartened to discover just how many gaps there are in my English knowledge since I focused so exclusively on Shakespeare and creative writing during my undergraduate career. Not that I regret taking my elective classes. I just wish that I had had more time to explore all the areas of the major and I definitely wish I had taken a course in book history after our weekend workshop. I always assumed I would find the subject mind-numbingly boring, but after hearing our Curator of Rare Books and our Curator of Art and Special Collections describe all of the nuances and careful artisanship that used to go into making books before the Industrial Revolution, I discovered I found the subject stimulating rather than boring.

And I got paid to attend these talks!

I know for my non-academic minded friends, the amazing, almost unreal feeling of luck and happiness that that sentence makes me feel will never be understood. But some of you out there must appreciate that this past weekend, I essentially was paid to learn!

Besides this financial benefit, some of the highlights from the workshop, for me, included hearing a reference to both Oregon Trail and Fifty Shades of Grey in one professor’s speech, watching a room full of undergraduate professors (i.e. mostly PhD’s) struggle to figure out a folding exercise (even though my amusement was completely unfair since I was absolutely lost just listening to it), and finally the discovery that there’s an entire field dedicated to studying the notes people leave in the margins of books – marginalia.

As the granddaughter of a librarian, I’ve always viewed notes and scribbles in the margins of books to be a desecration of property on  par with graffiti on the side of a church. However, the anthropology major in me was awakened when these professors pointed out just how much there was to learn about a person or a culture from marginalia and how it could sometimes be the most fascinating part of a document. After all, it’s a look inside the person’s mind, like reading his diaries or letters but in relation to a very specific topic. It’s certainly made me rethink my anger towards my previous used book owners.

For me, though, my favorite part of the weekend had to be Professor Ian Gadd's (Bath-Spa University) lecture called, “Touching Books.” It so perfectly and eloquently explained why I have such an attachment to hard copies of books, why I find the experience of reading from a book so much more satisfying than reading from an eReader. He described how essential touch is, how it intimately connects us to a book in a way that I believe an eReader just can’t.

In fact, if you think about it, there’s a lot more individuality to books than you might realize. Professor Gadd explained how he emphasizes this point through an exercise he does with his classes in which he has his students identify the genre of a book blindfolded, making their assessments solely based on touch. You don’t normally think about it, but a cookbook has a completely different feel from a novel and a novel has a completely different feel from a textbook, which feels different from a children’s book. 

Touch is so fundamental to our experience in handling an object. Just look at what a child does when you ask him to look at something. His first instinct is to touch it. Even adults are obsessed with being able to touch objects as evidenced by all the new technologies that allow people to “handle” digital items through touch screens.

This presentation made me really think about why exactly I find touching a book so important to the experience of reading. It made me realize that turning the pages of a book creates what Professor Gadd called an “electrical intimacy” that flipping the “page” on a screen just can’t. Through an eReader, every book touch experience is the same; it removes part of the connection I create to that specific book. Yes, there are advantages to the electronic book, but Professor Gadd helped me to understand why it’s unlikely real books will ever be obsolete or at least why I believe they shouldn’t ever become so.

Of course, at the end of the workshop there was a casual closing reception during which I attempted to talk to Professor Gadd and I’m sure I humiliated myself because I was in such awe of him. Figures.

But overall, the workshop was an unbelievable success! The energy and enthusiasm of the whole weekend was inspiring and contagious, not to mention fun. I can’t wait for our next one and I hope that it too will receive a standing ovation – because yeah, that happened.