material culture
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David Faflik. The Literary Gift in Early America.
Faflik’s book examines the gift book as a carrier of exchange—between giver and receiver, publisher and author, and author and reader—in the form of five reception histories.
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Renske A. Hoff. Involving Readers: Practices of Reading, Use, and Interaction in Early Modern Dutch Bibles (1522–1546).
Drawing on dozens of annotated, amended surviving copies, Hoff offers a richly textured account of how early modern readers engaged with their Bibles on multiple levels.
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Rare Care: Prioritizing the Personal in Rare Books & Special Collections Curatorship with Artists’ Books
In enacting rare care, we interrogate how we frame entry to, and use of, physical materials and spaces alike. Moving away from gatekeepers, we can serve as both curators of…
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The St Pancras / Hatchard’s Christmas Tree
Earlier this year I wrote a piece for SHARP news on the new Penguin Books Vending Machine at Exeter Railway Station, including other Penguin initiatives around selling books. Bookending what has…
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The Made-Collectible: The Bookish Iconography of the Franklin Library and FairyLoot
No matter the time or place, the ownership of books has functioned not only as a point of access to texts, but also as a status symbol. There are many…
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James W. Watts and Yohan Yoo (eds.). Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings.
The volume, edited by James W. Watts and Yohan Hoo, is a thought-provoking addition to our discipline as it expands the study on sacred texts by looking at them attaining…
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Martyn Lyons. The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practice. University of Toronto Press, 2021.
Martyn Lyons’s The Typewriter Century, A Cultural History of Writing Practices takes the machine as a starting point to examine its relationship to work, creative and otherwise and, like Hazzard’s…
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BookLab: Approaches to the Material Text
I am happy to share two syllabi prepared for the graduate level “BookLab” course I teach at the University of Maryland. BookLab itself is dedicated book arts studio and press,…