The fields of book history and bibliography are having a cultural reckoning. The Women in Book History Bibliography (womensbookhistory.org) has acted as an impetus for championing the “lost” histories of women in the book trades and as a tool for arguing for further recovery work. Still in progress, the bibliography currently consists of over 2000 […]
From a book’s “spine” to its “appendix,” bibliographers use a language of the body that reveals our intimate connection with books. Yet books do more than describe bodies—they embody a frontline of colonization in which Indigenous authors battle the public perception and reception of Indigenous peoples. Starting with John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures […]
In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Marshall McLuhan argued that significant changes in technology would generate massive cultural transformations that will permanently alter the form and function of the book. Fundamentals of bookmaking have not changed much since the contributions of Gutenberg, but the cultural environments in which they have been grounded, expanded, and received certainly […]