Syllabus for English 395:
History and Future of the Book (Spring 2025)

Introduction and first day

• Medieval Helpdesk (short video)
• Matthew Kirchenbaum, "Bookscapes: Modeling Books in Electronic Space" (PWeb Documents)
• Jessica Pressman, introduction to Bookishness
(PWeb Documents)
• PDF document: Erik Simpson, ChatGPT (and Its Relatives) and College Writing: A Quick Guide for Students

1. Put a paragraph of self-introduction in the "Self-Introductions" document in our Classwork Document folder, and
2. As the first entry in your Classwork Document, write a brief description of one memory you have about the physicality of a book--writing in one, tearing one, hitting something with one, whatever you like.

Communications Circuits and Texts across Media

• Robert Darnton, excerpt from "What Is the History of Books?" (PWeb Documents)
• Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, image of alternative communications circuit (Pweb Documents)
• Readings for Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool":
  • Short biography of Brooks from the Poetry Foundation
  • "We Real Cool" in Poetry magazine, September 1959. Look at the setting of the poem itself and also use the "Read Issue" button on the web page to look at the setting of the poem within the magazine issue.
  • 1966 Broadside Press poster of "We Real Cool."
  • "We Real Cool" audio recording on the Poetry Foundation website
  • "We Real Cool" audio recording on the Library of Congress website. Start listening at the 20:00 mark to hear Brooks’s introduction to the poem as well as the poem itself.

Part One: Following the example of Darnton's communications circuit, make your own diagram of a communications circuit based on an aspect of your own experience. For instance, you could diagram the flow of communications in a workplace, a class, a team or activity, or part of your family life. Follow the examples of today's reading, in creating a fairly simple visual representation that describes a circuit, meaning that the communication forms a repeating pattern. You can draw the circuit by hand or digitally. By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, post an image of your circuit in your classwork document.

Part Two: Briefly but attentively, look over the Brooks readings and be ready to talk about them in an in-class exercise.

Technologies of the Book: Gutenberg and the Almanac

• Documentary: The Machine that Made Us (2008)
• Molly McCarthy, "Redeeming the Almanac: Learning to Appreciate the iPhone of Early America"
• Sarah Werner on very early almanacs
• Optional bonus content: Lalita Kaplish (editor), "Modern Encounters With a Medieval Almanac," Wellcome Collection

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write an entry of at least 200 words building on the ways in which the readings connect older forms of publishing to contemporary media. How do you see the functions or design of older books or almanacs continuing (in a transformed way) today?

Collections of Books

• Henry Petroski, "Order, Order" from The Book on the Bookshelf (PWeb Documents)
• Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel" from Ficciones (PWeb Documents)
• Ohkamp, Organizing the Bookcase (very short video)
• xkcd on Instagram: yet another way to organize your bookshelf

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write an entry of at least 200 words reflecting on the way you or your family has chosen to organize books.

In class today, you will meet with the library group in Special Collections, who will introduce you to the library in a tour tailored for the purposes of our class, with emphasis on the idea of the book collection.

Introduction to Bibliography

• Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, from The Broadview Introduction to Book History (Pweb Documents)
• Sarah Werner, "Speculations on Feminist Bibliography"
• Optional bonus content that may be especially useful if you are writing on these subjects later in the term: Werner covers some similar ground with lots more delicious footnotes and quotations in "Working Towards a Feminist Printing History"

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write an entry of at least 200 words about how some element of these discussion of bibliography takes you out of the ways you are normally accustomed to thinking about books.

The Body of the Book

• Borsuk, Chapter 2: Book as Content
• Charles Chesnutt, "Baxter's Procrustes"
• Christy Hyman, "Charles W. Chesnutt: A Biographical Sketch"

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write an entry of at least 200 words that puts Borsuk's chapter in conversation with the Chesnutt readings in some way.

Collection description due at 8:00 p.m. Submit the collection description in your classwork document.

Introduction to Type

• Film: Helvetica (2007), directed by Gary Hustwit
• Ellen Lupton, from Thinking with Type (Pweb Documents)
• Animated short by Ben Barrett-Forrest: The History of Typography
• Optional bonus content:
• myfonts.com explaining points and picas
• Many, many ways of organizing type in cases

Assignment: using the potato you have been given in class, create two letter stamps: cut the potato in half, print out two letters from two different styles (gothic, roman, modern, experimental), trace the outline of each letter onto half of your potato, and carve out the negative space to create a letter stamp. Be sure to REVERSE the image of your letter so that it prints correctly. You can use whatever process works for you, but it may help to consult the Grinnell Guide to Carving Type from Potatoes. Bring your potato stamps to class.

Type and Typesetting

CLASS IN THE SIMPSON GARAGE

• Podcast episode (for listening, but you may also want to see the images on the web page to understand what the typefaces look like): 99pi on Fraktur
• Instagram reel from the Sacramento History Museum
• Philip Gaskell, from A New Introduction to Bibliography (Pweb Documents)

Assignment, part one: By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write an entry of at least 200 words that connects our work with typography on Tuesday to today's readings in some way.

Assignment, part two: come to class with a word or phrase of up to 14 characters (including spaces) that you would like to try to typeset.

Book construction: substrates

• Keith Houston, Part One of The Book (PWeb Documents)
• From the University of Iowa's Center for the Book: Chancery Papermaking (2013)
• Paper Making by Hand at Hayle Mill, England (1976)

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write an entry of at least 200 words about some part of your experience of printing or reading culture that today's readings helped you think about in a new way.

Book construction: folding and binding

• Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, "Format" (pages 42-55) and "Signature Marks" (96-98)
• Erin Blake, Signature statements in book cataloging
• Optional bonus content: PDF guides from Traveling Scriptorium on medieval book binding and medieval ink and pigment recipes (Pweb Documents)
• More bonuses! New York Times article (gift link) on solving a binding mystery and an Instagram reel on surrealist bookbinding

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, take a shot at writing a signature statement for a book that has 4 preliminary pages, then nine signatures consisting of 16 pages each, then one signature of 8 pages, then three signatures of 16 pages each. Give your signature statement and explain your reasoning, based on Blake's and Werner's writings, for representing the signatures as you do.

Book construction: covers

• Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, Part 4: Looking at Books

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, make two notes, with a brief explanatory comment on each item: one thing you’re especially interested in exploring and one that you feel you don’t understand especially well.

Book construction: the machine era

• "Out of Sorts: Typesetting Meets the Industrial Revolution," from Keith Houston, The Book (PWeb Documents)
• Nicole Howard, "Timeline" from The Book: The Life Story of a Technology (PWeb Documents)
• Encyclopedia Britannica Films, Making Books (1947)
• Vocational Guidance Films, Printing (1947)
• The Telegraph, Birth of a Book: How a Hardback Book is Made
• Gotham Print, How Books Are Made: A Look Inside a 2021 Commercial Print Shop
• Porter Press, How Our Books Are Bound: Behind the Scenes
• Espresso Book Machine

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write at least 50 words each about three elements of twentieth-century printing that you understand in a new way from today's assignments.

Interlude: Identifying Illustrations

• Keith Houston, from The Book, Part Three: Illustrations
• Erik Simpson and Emmelene Perencevich, Printed Book Illustrations before 1900: A Grinnell Guide (PWeb Documents)
• Oshi Ramos-McCormick, example of drawing in line and dot styles (PWeb Documents)
• Videos of printmaking techniques (required as well):
  • On relief printing: Christie's, How did Hokusai create the Great Wave?
  • Eric Meier (Rhode Island School of Design), "From Paper to Copper: The Engraver's Process"
  • The Museum of Modern Art, Pressure + Ink: Intaglio Process
  • University of Houston Digital Media, Stone Lithography
  • "Handprinted" on YouTube: Screen Printing: What Is a Halftone?

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, paste two photos of drawings you have made. Both photos will capture drawings you have made in imitation of automated printing techniques, using paper and a pen or pencil.

For both drawings, depict the same simple object using a pencil or, if you're feeling bolder, a pen. (Drawing a book would be thematically appropriate, but you can choose another object if you want to.) For the first drawing, draw the object using only thin lines, in the style of steel engraving. For the second drawing, use only small, circular dots as in half-tone printing. The quality of the results is unimportant; the point of the assignment is to gain a visceral sense of how printing techniques create images (and to have some creative fun). Oshi Ramos-McCormick's drawings for this assignment, shared with permission, are included in today's readings to help you envision the look of the two styles.

Creative Interlude: Paper Marbling in the Simpson-Jacobson Garage

• Geoffrey Wakeman, English Marbled Papers: A Documentary History (PWeb Documents)

We will meet in Professor Simpson's garage to learn the process of marbling paper.

Book Construction: The Paperback Revolution

Begin your work for the book description assignment: read the assignment itself, choose the book you want to describe, and take some initial notes about your observations and questions. By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, enter some of those initial notes in your classwork document. Come to class ready to work further on the assignment.

We will devote part of class time to that work on the book descriptions and the other part to discussing the paperback revolution in twentieth-century book publishing.

Scholarship Day: Readings on African American History and Textuality

• Jonathan Sencheyne, "Under Pressure: Reading Material Textuality in the Recovery of Early African American Print Work" (PWeb Documents)
• E. Jennifer Monaghan, "Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy" (PWeb Documents)
• Optional bonus content: John J. Garcia, "Critique! Critique! Critique! Black Labor in the Early American Book Trade" (Pweb Documents)

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, quote one sentence from each article that you think of as its thesis. (You just need to type the quotation and the page number for each of the two sentences.) For each of the two sentences, come to class prepared to say what you think your chosen sentence captures and what it leaves out as a representation of the whole article.

Book Description Conversations

Book description due at the time of your scheduled conference with me. In place of a regular class meeting, your assignment and class session will consist of the book description conversation.

Fast, Cheap Forms: Zines

• Amaranth Borsuk, The Book, 135-139
• Jenna Wortham, "Why the Internet Didn’t Kill Zines" (also in PWeb Documents)
• Zine Librarians’ Code of Ethics, 2015 version (you can read it on the web or download it as a printable PDF zine!)
• Margarete Miller, "What’s a zine and how do I make one?" (11-minute video)
• @brianhuntresss, fun, short song describing the basic one-page Zine process
• Optional bonus content: Miller's more detailed process video about collage-style zine-making--you might want to come back to this one when you get to the zine project
• Truly CA, "But I Love the Zine"
  • MORE optional bonus content! Amanda Visconti's Zine Bakery, and the website of a new small-run publishing operation in Minneapolis that supports zine-making and similar activities

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write at least 50 words about each of three ideas you might like to explore in making your own zine: one idea about being a fan of something and wanting to share your appreciation; one expressing information you want to share with a community; and one remixing found materials. (The first two ideas can also involve remixing found materials, but the third should be a different idea.)

Fast, Cheap Forms: Newspapers

Films from the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois:

• American Newspapers, 1800-1860: Introduction (2012)
• American Newspapers, 1800-1860: City Papers (2015)
• American Newspapers, 1800-1860: Country Papers (2013)
• Optional bonus content: Ryan Cordell and David A. Smith, “Editing a Paper,” in Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers

And from Stanford University's Bill Lane Center for the American West:

• Growth of American Newspapers, 1690-2011 (2011)

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write an entry of at least 200 words about how today's print or online newspapers continue or tranform some aspect of the history of newspapers that you learned about in the films.

Fast, Cheap Forms: Newspapers (Continued)

• Dudley Randall, "Broadside Press: A Personal Chronicle" (PWeb Documents)
• Broadside Press response to inquiry letter, from Julius E. Thompson, Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995 (PWeb Documents)
• The Underground Press Syndicate, "How to Publish Your Very Own Underground Newspaper" (1971) (PWeb Documents)

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write an entry of at least 200 words putting some element of today's readings into conversation with the history of newspapers as you encountered it in the last class session.

Zine assignment due at 1:00 a.m. the night before class. Submit the zine assignment in your classwork document, portraying the zine itself with an inserted photo, and bring your zine to class to share with your classmates.

Interlude: Artist's Books

• Borsuk, Chapter 3: "The Book as Idea"

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write an entry of at least 200 words planning your own artist's book. (You don't have to make the book itself, so your plan can be as ambitious as you want it to be.) Refer to at least two examples from Borsuk's chapter that inspire your own design, and explain how the form and concept of your book connect to each other. You are welcome to use any kind of visual illustration you want, but illustration is not required.

Futures of The Book: Book Ends

• Alessandro Ludovico, from Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894 (PWeb Documents)
• Coover, Robert, "The End of Books" (also in PWeb Documents)
• Leah Price, "Dead Again" (also in PWeb Documents)

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write an entry that contains three short thoughts, of at least 75 words each, in which you take one specific point from each of today's readings and talk about how you might use that point in your upcoming essay on The Pandemic Generation's Future of the Book. In class today, you will build on these notes to prepare for submitting the assignment next week.

Futures of The Book: The Post-Pandemic Future

We will not meet in our regular class time. Instead, you will a) do some writing and b) have a conference with me to check in about how the semester is going.

For the writing component, which is due Friday at 8:00 p.m., you will do an essay of 500-700 words (no more!) in the op-ed style of the Price and Coover essays that we have read. (In other words, you are writing to a general audience, not people who have already done the readings for this course.) Your essay will update the Ludovico/Price/Coover conversation, and you should quote and respond to at least one of them explicitly. Offer offering your response to those readings based on your experience with reading and writing during the post-pandemic era.

Note: given the generic expectations of this mode of writing, you do not need to cite sources from our syllabus formally. If you use other sources, do add Chicago NB style citations for them at the end of your piece.

Futures of The Book: Bot Books

• Jukka Aalho, “I Wrote a Book with GPT-3 AI in 24 Hours — And Got It Published.” (also in Pweb Documents)
• From Jukka Aalho, Aum Golly: Poems on Humanity by an Artificial Intelligence (Pweb Documents)
• Vauhini Vara, "Ghosts" (Pweb Documents)
• Ted Chiang, "Ted Chiang, ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web" (Pweb Documents)

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write at least 200 words responding to these readings, responding to at least two quotations from the computer-generated poetry or fiction.

Futures of The Book: Final Project Preparation

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write three prototype ideas for your final assignment, the Transhistorical Project. Try out three separate ideas with at least 50 words of writing for each. We will use class time to share and discuss your ideas.

Futures of The Book: Bookishness

• Jessica Pressman, "'There’s Nothing Quite Like a Real Book': Stop-Motion Bookishness" (PWeb Documents)
• Going West (short film for the New Zealand Book Council)
• The Joy of Books (short film by Sean Ohlenkamp for Type Books)
• Molly Young, "These Books Are Totally Unreadable--And That's the Point," New York Times, February 23, 2025

By 1:00 a.m. the night before class, in your classwork document, write at least 200 words about some object of "bookishness" you find--not one that Pressman mentions directly. Your object can be in your physical environment or online. In your writing, explain how the object matches or extends Pressman's concept of bookishness.

Futures of The Book: Images of the Future

Last day of class: by 1:00 a.m. the night before class, insert one image in your classwork document that you think shows something that scholars of book history 50 years from now will think was important about our own historical period. In class, you will explain your image for 2-3 minutes as part of our last-day festivities.