12th Annual Book History Workshop

19 - 24 May 2013
Cushing Memorial Library
Texas A & M University

This five-day workshop offers an intensive, hands-on introduction to the history of books and printing, with an emphasis on handpress-era printing and its allied technologies – typecasting, papermaking, bookbinding, and illustration.

One of the distinguishing elements of the Workshop is its emphasis on experiential as well as academic learning. The participants’ days, divided into traditional seminar sessions and hands-on labs, will highlight active projects. Students will cast type in a hand mould, make sheets of paper, and cut relief illustrations. Students will also set and correct lines of type, then impose them on the bed of the Library’s period-accurate common press, printing the pamphlet in three work-and-turn octavo formes. The activities of the week are incorporated into the finished pamphlet as it is bound in wrappers of handmade paper, featuring printers’ devices cut by each member of the Workshop. The Workshop has traditionally attracted scholars, librarians, archivists, students, teachers, and collectors, as well as those pursuing personal interests in book history. Applicants who register before our early cutoff date of February 15 will receive a $100 discount on their final tuition. To register, find out more, or see photographs from previous Workshops, please go to: , or contact Todd Samuelson at todd.samuelson tamu edu