“Technologies of the Book” Course Hosts Book Binding Workshop
Students were hard at work on their final projects in William L. Harkness Hall. One pulled out a cloth she had knitted herself, while another dangled weights from a chair to create a makeshift binding press. All over, students poked threaded needles through thick stacks of paper, following stitch templates outlined on the blackboard.
“Technologies of the Book” is the first class at Yale to provide an all-encompassing overview of the science, history, art, and conservation of books. It brings together the humanities, arts, and science with hands-on projects and object analysis. The course is cross-listed as a Comparative Literature, History of Art, and Humanities credit. It counts towards the Undergraduate Certificate in Collections: Objects, Research, Society and the Graduate Certificate in Material Histories of the Human Record.
The syllabus takes students through the history of bookmaking across the Mediterranean in the late medieval and early modern world. The class studies how conservation scientists analyze objects and data to understand their context and history. Students do a bit of this analysis themselves, poring over data and comparing globally sourced manuscripts. For the final project, students create their own book, drawing from their newfound historical and scientific knowledge.
Digitization is important because it democratizes access, but when you strip away the materials, the actual handling and smelling and seeing and hearing, you lose a portion of what you would gain from the experience of being in this type of course.
Three instructors with distinct areas of expertise lead the course. Dr. Ayesha Ramachandran is a Comparative Literature professor with research interests in early modern Europe, particularly regarding multimedia worldmaking through art and science. Dr. Ramachandra is also co-leader of the COSMOS program alongside Dr. Lucy Mulroney. Dr. Richard Hark is a Senior Conservation Scientist with an extensive background as a chemistry professor. Dr. Aniko Bezur is Yale’s first conservation scientist, with a background in art conservation, chemistry, engineering, and materials science.
The three instructors, postgraduate associate Charlotte Starnes, and senior conservation technician Karen Jutzi, assisted at the book-binding workshop. They led students through the phases of folding paper, wrapping the spine, and sewing the pages together, demonstrating techniques with both structural and aesthetic purposes.
“This is the space to make mistakes,” Professor Ramachandran said to the class. “It’s not going to come out perfectly.”
The smallest details of each final project were rooted in material histories. Students shared ink made from oak galls and boiled brazilwood. They compared the look of French link stitches to long stitches. They bound illustrations, zine pages, and the manuscript for Frankenstein into covers made of scrap leather, handmade paper, and knitted cloth. The students came from a variety of backgrounds at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, sparking uncommon collaborations.
Dr. Hark discussed the class’s previous sessions, which included direct object analysis at Yale’s West Campus, a visit to the 500-year-old Pergamena tannery, the only remaining parchment producer in the US, and afternoons spent hand-making pigments, inks, and paper using traditional methods.
“It’s not like these students come as blank slates,” Dr. Hark said, highlighting the curiosity and contributions the students brought to the course. “This isn’t something you sign up for if you are casually interested.”
Dr. Hark and Dr. Bezur agreed that their favorite aspect of teaching the course was watching the students experience a paradigm shift, in which their objects of study gained tangibility through deeper analysis of their history and materiality.
“We do the readings, and then there is this moment where we actually get to be in the presence of the book and materials,” Dr. Bezur said. “There’s a little bit of magic when students are looking at the data, the primary source themselves, then interacting with the books or making a pigment.”
The scientists discussed the unique union of “left” and “right” brain thinking, in which faculty and students alike demonstrated a willingness to learn beyond their original training. The class is mostly comprised of humanities students, so for many, the coursework presented a novel opportunity to develop scientific skills. Dr. Bezur said that this course was an “incredible mutual learning opportunity” for her and Dr. Hark in terms of learning how to support and design a course.
On the other hand, they were to share their scientific understanding with Dr. Ramachandran and many of the students.
There was an appetite to bring the scientific element into the COSMOS’s ideas of materiality and history. Our goal with these students is not to turn them into scientists, but to make them familiar with another way of thinking about things.
The instructors looked forward to hopefully continuing the course in future semesters, deepening collaborations between scientific, creative, and historical inquiry.
“I think we can unpeel this onion in a different way and make it equally intriguing to a whole new world of students,” Dr. Hark said.
More information about “Technologies of the Book” is available on the course blog.
“Technologies of the Book” is made possible through COSMOS, a MacMillan Center Global Program devoted to the study of objects and materiality across the world. Through hands-on creative experimentation, historical inquiry, and scientific exploration, COSMOS aims to understand the materials that shape our global cultural heritage.
COSMOS hosts the Undergraduate Certificate in Collections: Objects, Research, Society, and the Graduate Certificate in Material Histories of the Human Record.
Article written by Michelle Foley, Woodbridge Fellow at the MacMillan Center.