Thursdays 11:45-1:15, March 5-April 16, 2026, in person at OLLI.
Check back here for additional resources as the term goes along.
Recommended reading to accompany this course: Adam Smyth, The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives.
SCHEDULE OF TOPICS
NB: The schedule of topics below is subject to change and may ebb and flow as the group’s interests reveal themselves. I will email you as well as posting here with any updates.
WEEK 1: Gutenberg and his medieval context
TECHNOLOGIES OF THE HAND PRESS PERIOD
- Stephen Fry documentary on Gutenberg and 15th-century printing
- The blog of Alan May, who made the press seen in the Stephen Fry documentary and the one exhibited now at the Folger.
- Punchcutting and casting type: videos by Stan Nelson
MORE ON THE GUTENBERG BIBLE
- The opening of Genesis from the Bodleian’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible in hi-res jpg
- Wikipedia article with census of known copies. Scroll down to “Substantially complete copies” and click “Show” at right to display the chart.
BACKGROUND: ASPECTS OF THE BOOK IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES
- Video excerpt of Christopher de Hamel giving a tour of the locations of the Paris book trade
- Full audio of Christopher de Hamel’s tour of the Paris book trade
- Video on the chained library at Hereford Cathedral. 18 minutes long; includes a good overview of 12th-century books, the formation of a cathedral library, changes in book storage over time, and the post-medieval origins of bookcases and chains.
- The Book of Hours: A Medieval Bestseller — essay from the Metropolitan Museum explaining the structure of the Book of Hours, with links to examples in the Met’s collections
Suggested reading between weeks 1 & 2: The Book-Makers, Ch. 1, Printing: Wynkyn de Worde, and the first part of Ch. 6, on eastern papermaking.
WEEK 2: Paper in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe; printing in Asia; wood block printing in the west; alternative theories of Gutenberg’s types
PAPER EAST AND WEST
PRINTING IN ASIA
- Overview of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese printing from Wikipedia
- “What did Gutenberg invent?” Video of a conversation between a specialist in East Asian printing and a Ransom Center curator of western books.
- Lecture by Cynthia Brokaw on the early history of printing in China
BLOCK BOOKS
Suggested reading before or after week 3: The Book-Makers, first half of Ch. 4, “Typography: John Baskerville”
WEEK 3: Format; development of the printing trade 16th-18th c.; censorship and control of the press; printing and the Reformation
- An interesting read on control of the press: Print and Power in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800) is a collection of essays on how state and church actors, both Catholic and Protestant, both harnessed and tried to control the new technology of the press for their own purposes. A useful corrective to the traditional view of the press as only an anti-authoritarian Protestant technology, and censorship as only a Catholic phenomenon. The book is open access: you can download the chapters as PDFs at that link for free. Definitely do not pay $182 for it!
Suggested reading before or after week 4: The Book-Makers, Ch. 5, “Non-Books: Benjamin Franklin”
WEEK 4: Printing in Colonial America
- Census of known copies of the Bay Psalm Book as of 2012, before David Rubenstein bought one of the Old South Church copies in 2013.
- Video: David Rubenstein talks about the Bay Psalm Book. Video opens with a performance of some of the psalms by a quartet of Music Division staff!
- The Judgment of Experts, by James Gilreath, about the investigation of the forged “Oath of a Freeman.”
- A good Wikipedia article on Elizabeth Glover, proprietor of the press for which Stephen Daye did the printing.
- More about the Eliot Indian Bible from the Massachusetts Historical Society.
- English Common Press thought to have been used by Benjamin Franklin early in his career in London, now at the Smithsonian.
- Anti-counterfeiting measures discovered in Franklin’s paper currency.
Suggested reading before or after week 5: The Book-Makers, Ch. 6, “Paper: Nicolas-Louis Robert”
WEEK 5: The Industrial Revolution
EVOLUTION OF PAPER AND THE PRESS
- Explanation of cylinder and rotary presses from the Britannica
- Short video on Friedrich Koenig’s invention of the steam-powered cylinder press
- Cathleen A. Baker covers the history of papermaking techniques concisely with good visuals in this video seminar.
Suggested reading before or after week 6: The Book-Makers, Chs. 9 & 10
WEEK 6: Fine printing, the Arts & Crafts movement, 20th-century typographers
THE KELMSCOTT PRESS
- Overview of the work of the Kelmscott Press from the William Morris Society.
- The Kelmscott Chaucer online (scans of page images).
THE DOVES PRESS
FREDERIC GOUDY
- Silent film of Goudy’s type creation process, from design through casting.
WEEK 7: Hot Metal
LINOTYPE AND MONOTYPE
- Video demonstrating use of a Linotype machine. The demonstration occupies the last ten minutes of this video, but watch the whole thing if you are interested in predecessors to this system.
- Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu, a half-hour documentary about the last issue of the New York Times produced using Linotype, July 2, 1978.
- A John Kelly column in the Washington Post about the history of Deaf printers, mentioned in the NYT documentary above.
- A full-length documentary about Linotype.
- Making punches and matrices for the Linotype machine: “The Autobiography of Capital B”
- Animation of how a Linotype machine works.
- Very short video on a small paper in Colorado that is still set using a Linotype machine and printed on a cylinder press (flatbed for the forme of type, cylinders for the paper). Worth watching for a glimpse of the operation of the press!
Ruff Notes 