Material Evidences:
Teaching Book History on Grounds since 1992 at Rare Book School
Why should students and scholars work with physical books and other original
artifacts (e.g., periodicals, manuscripts) when digital resources are readily and
increasingly available?
In reply, we consider the importance of material evidence for teaching book history.
Rare Book School (RBS) at the University of Virginia has been conducting intensive,
materials-based courses on grounds since 1992. In each seminar-style course, students
are taught how to examine and analyze a variety of printed and/or manuscript objects
placed before them. By considering the complex and fascinating relationships between
materiality and meaning in their encounters with objects, students develop
experientially based understandings and analytical abilities. When the teaching of
such subjects as paleography, codicology, hand-press books before 1800, the history of
paper manufacture, or illustration reproduction processes is rooted in the carefully
mediated student encounter with the material object, historical sensibilities and
technical insights that might well be considered largely unattainable in the ordinary
classroom (even with the best surrogate digital pictures on display) are marvelously
realized. A sense of wonder is awakened. The “pastness of the past” is powerfully
conveyed. Learning itself becomes a memorable event; the matter at hand is
presented in three dimensions. And—from parchment that bears a sheep’s hair
follicles amid the artful motions of the scribe’s practiced hand, to the soldered-in
corrections made on the surface of a weighty Victorian electrotype plate—
comprehension is a highly sensory experience. The smell of a salted-paper
photographic print, or the feel of type in a composing stick are not soon forgotten;
they involve the body in ways that more passive traditional classroom learning does
not.
In the basement of Alderman Library, Rare Book School holds a collection of some
80,000 items acquired expressly for the purpose of teaching historical bibliography
and book history, broadly conceived, from early writing systems to born-digital
materials. From papyri to photo-offset screens, from incunabula to avant-garde livres
d’artistes, this collection, used in concert with the veritable treasure trove of books
and manuscripts in the University’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections
Library, enables RBS instructors to put artifacts and their allied technologies at the
center of each student’s learning experience.
Our two fifteen-minute roundtable discussions will employ physical books and
animated discussion to demonstrate the compelling experience of historical learning
by handling and analyzing primary materials. In this way, students’ encounters with
the past enable them to think about the physical book in history and as a powerfully
resonant product of history. In the discussion sessions, we will: 1st) show what can be
learned by close encounters of material kinds with printed artifacts; and 2nd) explore
why digital surrogates are most often highly deficient in several respects. There is no
substitute for holding the evidence of the past in one’s own hand.
Presenters:
Michael F. Suarez, S.J. is University Professor, Director of Rare Book School,
Professor of English, and Honorary Curator of Special Collections. His most recent
publication is The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), a million-word reference work
that the Sunday Telegraph in London called “colossal” and “a paradise for book lovers”
and The Wall Street Journal praised as “a fount of knowledge where the Internet is
but a slot machine.” He is currently teaching a USEM on book history that meets
weekly in UVA’s special collections.
Barbara Heritage, a doctoral student in the Department of English, is Assistant
Director of Rare Book School and its Curator of Collections. An Echols Scholar and
Distinguished Major (BA/MA, CLAS ‘01-2), Ms. Heritage has published two scholarly
articles based on her research at RBS, where she has worked for eight years. She cocurated with John Buchtel (a fellow UVA alumnus) an exhibition on the novel Jane
Eyre. The exhibition was based on their research at RBS; it first appeared in the
Dome Room of the Rotunda and then later traveled to Johns Hopkins University.
The exhibition was favorably reviewed in a number of venues, including The Boston
Globe.