Professor
History of the Book
In this occasional series, we ask Arts and Sciences instructors to discuss how they engage students in the great questions of our time.
Q. How would you describe this course?
A. It’s an introduction of the history of the book. The course gets students to think about what a book is, what a book does, how books have survived such a long period and the different forms a book can take.
We look at books, not just the modern idea of the book, which is a codex — a load of pages and a cover — but we look at other kinds of books like scrolls and tablets.
Q. What makes this course appealing for students?
A. We don’t actually sit and read the content of books in this class. We think about the kind of codes books use to communicate with us and how that affects our reading experience.
One of the things students enjoy about this course is even if it’s a new subject for them, everyone already knows how to read the codes of books. What students find out is that just by feeling the book they can tell if it’s a hardback or softback, whether it feel old, feels like a dictionary, or has torn pages. Is it square, tall, skinny, a phone book, or a pop-up book?
The students start off thinking they can’t read a book without looking at it but within 30 seconds of asking the right kinds of questions and just touching a book, they realize they already know the types of codes a book communicates with.
This course is about having students realize what they already know,think about what it is they don’t know, and asking the right questions.
Q. Why is this course important?
A. Books, for thousands of years, have been a crucial vessel for transmitting knowledge, culture or beliefs. We use books as a permanent form for transmitting culture. That may be changing but books have a very central role and we have institutions, like libraries, that are built around books.
I want students to think about not only the past of books but also the present and future state of books. What would books be used for in the age of TikTok? We’ve been told books are dying but even paper books are being sold at higher and higher rates every year.
The book is changing, and the course helps students think how they interact with books and how their love of books might be changing as books change as well.
I want us to take a look and study this thing that so many of us take for granted and ask ourselves, what is a book?
Q. What can students gain from this course that will help them in the workplace and in life?
A. It can be the entry drug for a career as a librarian, archivist, bookseller, but it’s also good for anyone who interacts with books so they can think about what it is that they’re reading.
It’s meant to be a course for the generally curious. It’s not going to directly land you a job but will set you up with questions that are applicable to a wide range of activities.
Q. What got you interested in this subject?
A. I’m a historian of early modern Europe, so I read a lot of old books and took them for granted. Then I bizarrely got involved in a case of forgery. Someone had forged a Galileo book that was supposed to have been printed in Venice in 1610. One was on the market for $10 million and a lot of experts had looked at it and said it was genuine and I managed to prove, by thinking hard about how books were made, that it was a forgery. Everything about it was fake. So I’ve become this kind of expert of forgery.
It was scary because all these experts in the field, really good people, had looked at this book closely and I at this point was an untenured Georgia State professor. Bit by bit I got the evidence together, one letter was printed that was impossible to do in 1610. I thought it had to be modern.
That’s the odd way I got into this field.
Q. What is the most unusual or interesting assignment you give in this course?
A. I want to make this a hands-on class. We go to Georgia Tech’s Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking and we make paper. By doing that, you understand the labor that’s involved. We take paper for granted but we rarely stop and think what this is made of and what is paper. At the end of it, the students come out with a square of paper they made themselves that they can stick on their fridge.
I also give students a Shakespeare play in the sheets as it was printed and I tell them to turn it into a book. There’s only one way that you can fold and assemble the sheets in the right order for it to work. The students usually think this is easy and try to fold the papers up to make it look like a book, but every time they do it, they get it wrong.
It’s about learning through mistakes and respecting the person in the 17th century who took the printed sheets and spent 10 hours a day making these things that was a crucial bridge between Shakespeare’s mind and our mind. By having the students go through that exercise, it shows them the chain of labor that has to happen to get from one person’s head to someone else’s head.