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The
Seventh Annual
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Earn
three graduate credit hours from the School of Library |
OVERVIEW
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LECTURES
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The seventh annual Texas A&M Workshop in the History of Books and Printing will take place May 18-23, 2008, in the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives. This five-day workshop provides an intensive, hands-on introduction to the history of books and printing. The workshop is intended for librarians, archivists, students, teachers, collectors, and private individuals who have an interest in the first three and a half centuries of the printed book. The course consists of a unique combination of labs and seminars designed to provide students with practical experience, as well as a broad historical survey of the field. The lab sessions will concentrate on printing in the hand press era and its allied technologies--typecasting, papermaking, bookbinding, illustration, and ink-making. During these sessions, students will have the opportunity cast type in a hand mould. They will also set type, prepare it for the press, and print on a period-accurate common press. The seminar sessions will provide a chronological survey of book and printing history, with the collections of Cushing Memorial Library providing examples of some of the most significant artifacts and books in the history of recorded culture. These classes will begin chronologically with Mesopotamian clay tablets and medieval manuscripts, before focusing on developments in the hand press era.
The workshop begins with a reception at 6:00 p.m. Sunday evening. Workshop sessions begin at 8:30 a.m. each day and, minus breaks and lunch, end at 5:00 p.m., except for Friday, which wraps up at noon with a wayzgoose, a reenactment of the annual party traditionally thrown by the master printer for his journeymen and apprentices. While the morning and afternoon sessions are limited to workshop participants, the evening lectures are free and open to the public. The lectures begin at 7:00 p.m.
| Enrollment and Application |
The workshop is limited to 20 students. Applications are welcome beginning December 1 and will be accepted until May. Admissions will be made on a rolling basis and will be made in light of each applicant’s needs in relation to the course content. Applicants are reminded that this is an introductory course intended for those with little or no exposure to the subject. On the application form, potential students should clearly identify the link or links between the subject matter of the workshop and their professional, academic, vocational, or avocational interests.
| Cost |
$700
registration fee, $100.00 of which
is due at the time of admittance.
Participants who have not remitted their deposit or made other arrangements with
us within three weeks of acceptance may be dropped from the workshop to
accommodate other applicants. Refunds are available up to three
weeks before the course begins. The full payment is due on the day
you arrive.
| Housing |
Discounted accommodations are available at The Tradition, a recently-built commercial dormitory. Private suites cost $36.50 per night and include daily breakfast. The Tradition is located in the Northgate area adjacent to campus; there are multiple restaurants within a couple of blocks. Cushing is about a 12-15 minute walk. All arrangements for accommodations in this dormitory will be made through Cushing Library. You can learn more about The Tradition by visiting their website.
Workshop participants may also stay in one of the many local hotels. Rates vary. If you choose to stay off campus, you will need a car, as there is no off- campus hotel within easy walking distance of the Cushing Library. You will also still need a parking pass. If you choose to stay off campus, please let us know when you register for the workshop. You are responsible for your own reservations if you stay off campus.
| Travel |
Directions to the campus and the Cushing Library are available online.
Located
in what National Public Radio has described as the “lush central Texas
countryside,” Texas A&M University is within easy access of most of
the major metropolitan areas in Texas: Austin is about 2 hours, Houston 1
½ hours, Dallas 2 ½ - 3 hours, San Antonio 2 ½ - 3 hours.
Commuter flights to Easterwood Airport in College Station, and
minutes from the A&M campus, are available on SkyWest from Houston
Intercontinental airport and on American from Dallas/Fort Worth.
If you fly into Easterwood Airport, cab fare from the airport to
the campus or nearby is about $12.00.
| Workshop Staff |
Steven Escar
Smith, workshop director and instructor, is C. Clifford Wendler Professor,
Director of the Cushing Library and Archives, and Associate Dean for
Advancement, Texas A&M University Libraries (Ph.D., Texas A&M;
M.A., M.L., South Carolina). His publications include Roy
Fuller: A Bibliography (Scolar, 1996) and American
Book and Magazine Illustrators to 1920 (Gale, 1998) and essays and
reviews in Studies in Bibliography,
Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America, Book
Collector, Imprint, ANQ, Analytical and
Enumerative Bibliography, Rare
Books and Manuscripts Librarianship, and elsewhere. He has also spent the better part of the last decade
gathering and acquiring the physical things (i.e. the books, printing
tools, artifacts, facsimiles, etc.) that form the core of this workshop.
Smith is director and organizer of the workshop.
Stephen Pratt,
printer and craftsman in residence (M.A., BYU, and further graduate work
at Berkeley). With his son Ben, Pratt is proprietor of Pratt Press Works,
a family business specializing in replica printing and type-casting
equipment. They recently completed their 24th press, a foolscap
folio Albion. Pratt’s study of the typeface used in the printing of the
Gutenberg Bible (“The Myth of Identical Types”) was published in the
most recent issue of the Journal of the Printing History Society (n.s.
6, summer 2003). Pratt is taking an experimental approach to the birth of
printing. As part of this study, he has created matrices for Gutenberg’s
type. They have also built a replica of the oldest known hand mould (GI48
in the Plantin-Moretus museum) for the casting.
He is a member of the Gutenberg Geselleschaft, Arbeitskreis
Druckeschichte, the Wood Engravers Network, the Fine Press Book
Association, and was one of the organizers of the 2002 American
Typecasting Fellowship conference, which was held at the Crandall
Historical Printing Museum in Provo, Utah.
Christopher L. Morrow, visiting instructor and assistant director of programs, is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University (Ph.D., M.A., Texas A&M). Morrow is currently working on a book project which examines the emergence of nationalism in early modern literature and drama and how the material book and London book trade affected the dynamics of nationalism in these works. Morrow is the author of “Shakespeare and Pedagogy: A Bibliography” (Shakespeare Yearbook, 2002). He is also a graduate of the 2004 Workshop.
Todd Samuelson, assistant
director of programs, is the Outreach Curator for the Cushing Memorial
Library and Archives, Texas A&M University (Ph.D., University of Houston, M.A., Boston College).
His research interests include modern and contemporary literature,
poetry in translation, and the history of fine press and artists' books. His writing has appeared
in various journals, including Agni, Poetry, Southwest Review,
Prairie Schooner, and Lyric. His imprint, Fat Matter Press, specializes in
letterpress chapbooks and artists' books of contemporary poetry, including a recent
Czeslaw Milosz broadside. He is also a graduate of the 2006 Workshop.
2008 Lectures:
Michael Winship will deliver a talk entitled "American Publishers' Bindings
and the Book Trades" the evening of May 19th. Winship, Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin,
has written extensively about the history of publishing and the book trade in nineteenth-century America.
His volume on American printing during the industrial era, part of the History of the Book in America series,
appeared from the University of North Carolina Press in 2007. He has taught annually at the University of Virginia's
Rare Book School since 1983.Evening
Lecturers/Activities
Craig Kallendorf will present a lecture, "Printing the Classics: Building a Virgil Collection in the Twenty-First Century," on Wednesday, May 21. Kallendorf, Professor of English at Texas A&M University and the Editor of Allegorica: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Rhetorica, has written extensively in the fields of Renaissance literature, Classics, and Rhetoric. Last year, he published The Virgilian Tradition: Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe as well as A Companion to the Classical Tradition.
2007 Lectures:
"'Helpes in their own fieldes and gardens': Early modern women's ownership of English herbals"
Rebecca Laroche is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She has published several articles on early modern women, and her current book-length project, Herbal Rhetoric: Women's Texts and the Location of Medical Authority in England, 1550-1650, has received support from the Huntington, Folger Shakespeare, and Yale Beinecke libraries and the Institute for the Medical Humanities in Galveston, TX, where she is currently visiting fellow.
"Illustrating don Quixote: a brief history of book illustration techniques"
Dr. Fernando González Moreno, Visiting Scholar and the current University of Castilla-La Mancha Cervantes Chair Research Fellow received his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Castilla-La Mancha and is the author of El Quijote de las luces: Ilustraciones para la edición de la Imprenta Real, 1797-1798 (2004), as well as several articles and book chapters. While at Texas A&M, Dr. Moreno has worked closely with the Eduardo Urbina Cervantes Project Collection in Cushing, and his lecture will draw upon this research.
Lecture by Stephen Pratt
Stephen Pratt, printer and craftsman in residence (M.A., BYU, and further graduate work at Berkeley). With his son Ben, Pratt is proprietor of Pratt Press Works, a family business specializing in replica printing and type-casting equipment. He is a member of the Gutenberg Geselleschaft, Arbeitskreis Druckeschichte, the Wood Engravers Network, the Fine Press Book Association, and was one of the organizers of the 2002 American Typecasting Fellowship conference, which was held at the Crandall Historical Printing Museum in Provo, Utah.
2006 Lectures
"A Textual History of the Quixote, 1605-2005" by Eduardo Urbina.
Eduardo Urbina obtained his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley (1979) and is currently Professor of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University, and Visiting Professor and Director of the Cervantes Chair at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. As a "cervantista," he is the author of Principios y fines del Quijote (Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1990), El sin par Sancho Panza: Parodia y creación (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991), and editor of 'Don Quixote' Illustrated (2005). He has published over 90 articles and book chapters in Anales Cervantinos (Spain), Iberoamericana (Germany), Espéculo (Spain), Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica (México), Cervantes, Romanistisches Jarhbuch, Romance Quarterly, the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Insula, among other places. He is the Director of the Cervantes Project (http://cervantes. tamu.edu/), and editor of the Electronic Variorum Edition of the Quixote, the Anuario Bibliográfico Cervantino, the Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos , and the Biblioteca Cervantes series. He is founding member of the Cervantes Society of America, member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, and Honorary Curator of the Cervantes Project Collection at the Cushing Memorial Library, Texas A&M University.
"Donne as a Manuscript Poet" by Gary A. Stringer
Gary A. Stringer came to Texas A&M University as a Visiting Professor in the fall of 2004, having previously retired from the English faculty of the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published articles on Donne, Milton, and various other Renaissance figures, and has edited two collections of essays on Donne. In 1981 Stringer organized the project to produce The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne and assumed the role of General Editor of the edition, a position he still holds. At A&M, Stringer teaches in the English department and continues his work on the Variorum, the fourth volume of which was published in December of 2005 by Indiana University Press.
Funding
for this event has been generously provided by the Friends of the Texas A&M
University Libraries, the Sterling C. Evans Library, the Loran L. Laughlin
Printing Arts Endowment, the John H. Hinton Endowment, Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, and the C. Clifford Wendler Professorship.
Contact information
Address:
Cushing Memorial Library &Archives
ATTN: Todd Samuelson
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-5000
Phone:
(979) 845-1951
Fax:
(979) 845-1441
E-Mail:
todd.samuelson@tamu.edu