Teaching Book Forms
Posted by Kate Ozment
This post is part of a series covering workshops in a single course called Technologies of Writing. For an overview, see this post.
This lesson centered on that wonderful and complicated question: what is a book? As with previous weeks, Monday was reading and discussion and Wednesday’s class was a hands-on activity.
Monday we had a 75-minute lecture and discussion focused on book forms based on reading from Joyce Kinkead’s A Writing Studies Primer. Our goal was to discuss what is a book and to get ready for our work in special collections the next day.
We spent a surprising amount of time on the first question, which we discussed using whiteboards in the room. Every time someone offered a definition of “book", we would write it down and explore what it offered the conversation and what was left out. Inevitably, we began with the codex, but quickly thought about whether or not an empty codex could be a book and if audiobooks and ebooks would be included. As time went on, we got more granular and specific. Students offered ebooks as a “derivative” of “real” books, but we talked about born-digital materials that have no paper analogue. (And channeling Matt Kirschenbaum’s work, we pointed out that digital books are still very much “material” as the cloud is not an abstract thing but servers and hardware). By the end of the lesson, no one had a thorough definition, which was part of the goal. We did identify that “book” has cultural weight with us and some things seem more bookish than others, but how to exactly define it remained out of our grasp.
We then transitioned to following up on the previous week’s discussion by talking about how paper is folded to make codices: folios, quartos, octavos, duodecimos, and so on. I used Rare Book School’s materials from their Descriptive Bibliography course, which show impressions of books in 12mo and other formats. I supplemented these materials with The Anatomy of a Book on YouTube. Partially because it’s expensive to have people ship you large pieces of paper and partially to make this more sustainable in the future, I made some similar designs of these resources in InDesign to give students something to hold onto and, if they wanted to, keep. (I’m not posting these because I don’t want to take away from Rare Book School’s ideas or materials here; if you can afford it, please purchase from them.)
Lastly, we spent some time with a teaching collection of eighteenth-century books to think about how codices are made and prepare them to encounter objects in special collections the following class. These books, pictured above, were purchased of eBay in 2019 for $200 with shipping. There are 10 books, all printed in the mid-1700s. They are collected reprints of the Spectator and are not in particularly good shape. But! They’re perfect for teaching, as I’m not worried about them being handled. I believe I first got the recommendation to do a “teaching library” like this from Rare Book School in 2015, but it’s advice I’ve heard a few places so I’m unsure of the citation. If you don’t have special collections in your area, I cannot recommend enough making friends with some rare book dealers or antiques stores in your area and offer to take less-than-stellar materials off their hands if they can’t sell them. Estate sales are also a good place to look, but I’ve never been able to find time to go to one (and they intimidate me.)
Based on a suggestion from Aaron Pratt, I got luminescent panels from Glow Hut that are not archive-safe, but do okay for in-class work. These are a fraction of the price, so it might be worth it to invest if you want to track chain lines on your own books. Students spent some time with these books and we then ended by discussing protocol for visiting special collections next class period.
Wednesday we had 75 minutes in CPP’s special collections. I set up this visit six months in advance with our wonderful librarians and archivists, and this was the staff’s first time doing a rare books-focused course and my first time doing a class without an archive focused on literature. We decided to pull books that were interesting in their format and construction. This included oddly sized books and ones, those with different kinds of bindings, those with pull-outs or complex illustrations, and some that are interesting because of when and how they were made. CPP’s special collections are largely about horses, wine, and landscape architecture, and this ended up helping us focus on format rather than trying to “read” them for information. One book, for example, had pressed California wildflowers in it, and we talked about what such a book could tell us about the environment where we live in addition to being a beautiful object.
The Head of Special Collections and Archives, Katie Richardson, talked students through security and safety issues with materials and got all of them registered as readers. This took about 15 minutes. For the next 45 minutes, students were put into pairs to look at a single book using a worksheet developed by Richardson that asked about the book’s physical characteristics. In the last 15 minutes, each pair taught us about their book. We all wished we had more time, which signals a good course.
Reflection
As their wrap-up assignment, students were asked to do the following:
This week we learned about book forms such as the codex, the scroll, and the ebook. We also learned some basics of descriptive bibliography, which we practiced on books in class and in special collections. This week, I'll ask you to reflect on these experiences and connect them with your preconceptions about books and format.
In class, we discussed what is a book? What are your thoughts on this question now? I want you to be deliberately nuanced about this answer; do not just answer a "codex."
How does special collections compare to a typical library experience? What was interesting about the visit for you?
Student responses indicated they have no idea what a book is, but they have a lot of thoughts about bookish characteristics, and that special collections was awesome. All-in-all, a good week.
About the Author
Kate Ozment is assistant professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She has a book on Hroswitha Club forthcoming from Cambridge UP’s Elements series, and you can find her other work in Textual Cultures, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. Contact her at: keozment (at) cpp (dot) edu.
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October 2022
- Oct 16, 2022 Teaching in the Maker Studio Part Two: Safety Training and Open Making
- Oct 16, 2022 Teaching Book Forms
- Oct 16, 2022 Teaching Letterpress with the Bookbeetle Press
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September 2022
- Sep 24, 2022 Making a Scriptorium, or, Writing with Quills Part Two
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June 2020
- Jun 1, 2020 Black Lives Matter
- May 2020
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April 2020
- Apr 1, 2020 Teaching Materiality with Virtual Instruction
- March 2020
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February 2020
- Feb 1, 2020 Making the Syllabus Zine
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January 2020
- Jan 1, 2020 Teaching Print History with Popular Culture
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December 2019
- Dec 1, 2019 Teaching with Enumerative Bibliography
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November 2019
- Nov 1, 2019 Finding Women in the Historical Record
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October 2019
- Oct 1, 2019 Teaching in the Maker Studio
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September 2019
- Sep 1, 2019 Graduate School: The MLS and the PhD
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August 2019
- Aug 1, 2019 Research Trips: Workflow with Primary Documents
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July 2019
- Jul 1, 2019 Research Trips: A Beginner's Guide
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June 2019
- Jun 1, 2019 Building a Letterpress Reference Library
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May 2019
- May 1, 2019 Teaching Manuscript: Writing with Quills
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April 2019
- Apr 1, 2019 Why It Matters: Teaching Women Bibliographers
- March 2019
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February 2019
- Feb 1, 2019 Roundup of Materials: Teaching Book History
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January 2019
- Jan 1, 2019 Building and Displaying a Teaching Collection
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December 2018
- Dec 1, 2018 Critical Making and Accessibility
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November 2018
- Nov 1, 2018 Teaching Bibliographic Format
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October 2018
- Oct 1, 2018 Teaching Book History Alongside Literary Theory
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September 2018
- Sep 1, 2018 Teaching with Letterpress
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August 2018
- Aug 1, 2018 Teaching Manuscript: Circulation
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July 2018
- Jul 1, 2018 Setting Up a Print Shop
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May 2018
- May 1, 2018 Teaching Manuscript: Commonplace Books
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April 2018
- Apr 1, 2018 Getting a Press
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March 2018
- Mar 1, 2018 Teaching Ephemera: Pamphlet Binding
- February 2018