This post is adapted from an essay I wrote for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) newsletter in 2003. I present this as some preliminary groundwork about the potential tension between teaching and learning in academic book art studios and in maker spaces. Professor Jeffrey Groves, Harvey Mudd College, and I will explore this topic here in Spring, 2023.
Several years ago I was a student in a bibliographic seminar with a renowned scholar. As a practitioner of bookmaking, I found myself more and more concerned as the seminar progressed at the sheer volume of misleading or simply incorrect information that the scholar was passing on to the students. There were two of us in the seminar with extensive hands-on experience (my specific production knowledge is with letterpress printing, although I was also employed in the offset trade for several years). We spent our evenings chuckling over the unlikely production scenarios being discussed during the day. We also wished that the scholar could allow for correction and discussion in class, but it was not that kind of seminar. Finally, I began to wonder if in fact the incorrect knowledge that my fellow and sister students were absorbing even mattered very much in the long run. Wasn’t it true that the scholar had been passing on this same misleading information for years without any evident effect on either the scholar’s reputation or that of the students under the scholar’s tutelage?
Actually, I suspect that it does matter. As the book as artifact comes under closer scrutiny by historians, students, and scholars of literary criticism, an understanding of just how its component parts came together should provide greater insight into its overall material functionality. An appreciation for the basic production methods of bookmaking allows for the recognition and acknowledgement of anomalies when they appear. Similarly, research may yield odd disparities and unlikely occurrences among the textual explanations of, say, a particular printing methodology that the scholar can feel more confident in questioning if he or she has a solid baseline of practical knowledge. Curious references to unlikely production scenarios not only prompt caution with regard to the immediate source, but suggest the need to query other production-based statements the writer may be making.
Hands-on knowledge can be useful in iconographic study as well. A nineteenth century advertisement for Hoestetter’s Stomach Bitters has had a home for some time among my slides of women printers. In the foreground, a row of women are sitting on low stools at small platen presses, their backs to the viewer. Behind them, a row of men are standing, likewise turned, in front of a bank of type cabinets. From this evidence it is reasonable to assume that the seated women feed the platen presses but perform no other tasks requiring movement such as inking, lifting the forms in and out of the bed, or even removing the stacks of printed paper to the bindery, while working in this mixed-gender environment. In another image from the same time period, a single woman is shown standing at a large treadle-powered platen press. The image is on a poster advertising the Women’s Co-operative Printing Union in San Francisco. That the woman is standing is indicative of a much more interactive relationship with the machine than that of the women in the stomach bitters ad. This woman is actually a printer, with control over the same facets of the operation that the first women lacked. The researcher without first-hand printing experience might notice and comment on the disparity of these postures, but might not link the two postures to separate practical working methods and might not undertake, say, a census of employees in the print shop to determine who might be performing other work there.
Granted, iconography can be misleading. Many ads for early typesetting machinery show elegantly dressed young women sitting daintily at various Rube Goldberg-style contraptions which, according to the makers, will finally allow type to be set mechanically. More than one of these machines resembles more a home pipe organ than a piece of useable typesetting equipment. The misleading information in these ads, however, is the appearance of women as the operators. In fact, the ads suggest not that women would be operating these machines – an unlikely occurrence at that time in the face of the powerful typographers’ unions – but that the machines are so easy to operate even a woman can do it.
Mining the books themselves for their artifactual evidence is, for the maker of books, an essential component of research. The idea that microfilm or a digital surrogate could substitute for the hands-on knowledge of the artifact itself is not workable. For non-contemporary books, I want to know the condition of the type or plate from which the book was printed, the depth and evenness of the impression, the heft and opacity of the paper, the production method of any images, the quality of the binding materials and whether the book is in its original binding or, if not, when it might have been rebound. Articulating the rationale for the often crude productions of the American Colonial period, appreciating the high level of mechanical reproduction in the nineteenth century, and evaluating the reliance on hand-work in the machine-age printing of the Bauhaus are acts which the book scholar can undertake, of course, but are actions which become more viscerally understandable in the wake of actually having undertaken them.
I am not suggesting that any scholar whose interest lies within the materiality of the book would not comprehend and appreciate the same aspects of the book without practical training, nor am I suggesting that every scholar with an interest in incorporating artifactual aspects of the book into his or her research should do hands-on training. On the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt. Bibliographic presses connected to library schools, now largely made redundant, recognized the value of practice coupled with theory. Acknowledging the need to understand process as part of the scholarly training could lead, at the very least, to discussions between the scholar and the person with hands-on experience.
Kathleen Walkup is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she taught studio, history, and theory classes in book art for 40 years. Her course What We Printed: The history of women & printing will be offered through California Rare Book School in July 2023. She is a founding director of College Book Art Association.
