Immersed in book culture…
The present moment has brought an interesting alignment between my personal, professional, and student lives… everything focussed on book culture, print culture, reading culture. For the past few weeks, pretty much my whole world has revolved around how we record and share information.
On the formal learning front, I’m taking my first elective for my MLIS and it is the most fun I’ve had in a class since LIS 501. The course is LIS 598: Special Collections and the History of the Book and it is basically everything I came back to school to study.
The primary “textbook” is The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture by Solveig C. Robinson, and I say “textbook” because it’s basically leisure reading for me. With sections titled “Scribal Culture and the Codex” and “The Printing Revolution,” followed by sections focussed on authors, publishers, booksellers, libraries, and readers, you can imagine my delight!
Throw in some videos on typecasting, bookbinding, and papermaking and I’m basically a kid in a candy store.
But then when I want to take a break from this school “work,” the book I’ve got on the go for “actual” leisure reading is What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading by Leah Price – shout out to our Butterfly-in-Chief for the recommendation! – which isn’t so much a book on reading as it is also an introduction to book and print history more broadly.
Its chapter titles ring with a more casual tone, in keeping with its more narrative writing style, but the themes are the same – “The Real Life of Books”… “Prescribed Reading”… “Bound by Books”…
There’s also a not-a-chapter listed as an “interleaf” titled “Please Lay Flat”… with pages laid out in an unusual way, in a section about the physicality of reading (I may have to borrow or buy an ebook edition just to see how they handle this untraditional layout in an untraditional format).
Meanwhile I had the privilege of delivering a guest lecture in my friend Candas Jane Dorsey’s Print Culture Studies course, in which I delivered a version of my Book as Object, Sculpture, and Performance presentation virtually, in anticipation of being able to do a followup in-person workshop on altered books later in the term. The textbook for that course is another favourite of mine, The Book History Reader edited by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. It’s the textbook I wish I’d had during my Master of Arts, and that I bought just for the flashbacks to the foundational readings I did in my earlier degree so many moons ago.
The “terrible” problem I have now is keeping clear what I’ve read in which book, both as I work on school assignments and when just generally talking books with my friends, classmates, and co-workers.
And even the new day job at a digital services agency is book culture and information studies writ large, working with a team of designers, librarians, and digital “printers” to produce useful, useable content.
To borrow one of the quotes I use in my Books as Object, Sculpture, and Performance presentation…
“Authors do not write books. Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and other engineers, and by printing presses and other machines” – Roger Stoddard
Feeling so much gratitude for the chance to take such a deep dive into a world that is, for most people, hidden from conscious view. You’re invited to join me behind the curtain!
Happy Exploring!
– Winston
