Material Cultures of the Book Working Group
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“This is Not a Book: Long Forms of Attention in the Digital Age”, a talk by Alan Liu. Tuesday, June 3rd at UCR!

Rebecca Addicks

Posted on May 3, 2014

{DATE CHANGE} On June 3rd we will co-host a talk by Alan Liu; please join us! “This is Not a Book: Long Forms of Attention in the Digital Age”Alan Liu (UC Santa Barbara) Tuesday June 3, 11:00-12:30, Location: UCR INTS 1113 Co-sponsored by Critical Digital Humanities This talk is free and open to the public. A common response to an electronic book or other digital media is that, while it may be better or worse than a book, “this is not a book.”  But digital media has the uncanny effect of making us realize that physical books themselves were never truly books–if by “book” we mean a long form of attention designed for the permanent, standard, and authoritative communication of human thought or experience.  This talk…

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Book Traces

Jessica Roberson

Posted on April 30, 2014

From Andrew Stauffer and Nines.org comes a new project to find unique copies of 19th and early 20th century books on library shelves that are at risk from digitization initiatives. Many of these books are not marked as ‘rare’ or ‘unique’ and are in danger of being discarded as copies. As the site’s home page says: Thousands of old library books bear fascinating traces of the past. Readers wrote in their books, and left notes, pictures, letters, flowers, locks of hair, and other things between their pages. We need your help identifying them because many are in danger of being discarded as libraries go digital. Books printed between 1820 and 1923 are at particular risk. Help us prove the value of maintaining rich print…

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Free Book History Talk at the Clark

Rebecca Addicks

Posted on September 27, 2013

The Ninth Annual Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade Eighteenth-Century Publishers and Women Writers: Antagonism and Alliances     (a lecture at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library) —Isobel Grundy, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 4:00 p.m. This lecture will look at the processes whereby women reached print during this period, and the attitudes and practices of those in the book trade towards woman-authored copy. Publishers were becoming attentive to the gender as well as the rank and circumstances of authors; women judged their publisher a monster or a hero less on the basis of contract terms and honesty than on sympathy with the particular predicament of the female author. The relations between these two groups…

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Conference Announcement for the History of the Book Working Group at UC Berkeley

Rebecca Addicks

Posted on August 14, 2013

Call for Papers: “Faking It: Forgery and Problems of Authenticity” A History of the Book Working Group Conference, UC Berkeley Saturday, February 22, 2014   Keynote Speaker: Nick Wilding (Georgia State University)   This conference will explore the problems and potential of the fake from antiquity to the present. With an attentiveness especially to material texts and objects, the conference will consider how falseness and inauthenticity threaten our sense of reality – historical, material, theological, racial, sexual, national, linguistic – while at the same time informing it. As we increasingly come to understand selfhood and identity as social constructions and performances, what remains at stake in distinguishing between the real and the false? What connections might we draw between the social construction of selves…

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Book Arts in UCR Rivera Library Special Collections!

Rebecca Addicks

Posted on May 1, 2013

A few of us in the Material Cultures of the Book Working Group are taking a printing class for the DE BAM. It’s really amazing to be able to learn how books are constructed first hand, but it is also a very time and labor intensive process. This photo is from my first print run on a 32 leaf octavo pamphlet. It took me 2 days of trial and error (along with a mid-print-run set-back), but it turned out well in the end.

printing-press
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Japanese Prints: Hokusai, Exhibit Review

Heather Van Mouwerik

Posted on April 25, 2013

Perhaps I was spoiled in my youth, growing up near the Seattle Asian Art Museum, or maybe it was my long-standing fascination with Hokusai’s work, but LACMA’s Japanese Prints: Hokusai exhibit was underwhelming.  This did not stem from the number of pieces—seeing even a single Hokusai print is impressive, let alone the Waterfall series which is rare—or its location in a cramped, narrow hallway in the Pavilion for Japanese Art. Instead my disappointment came from the exhibit’s lack of structural unity, historical context, and understanding of print. Hokusai was most likely born in October, 1760 and died in May, 1849. During his life he revolutionized—both methodologically and aesthetically—Japanese woodblock print. Starting his career as an apprentice to Shunsho, he crafted images traditional to Japanese…

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(dis)junctions 2013 – An Intimate Chat About Archives

Jessica Roberson

Posted on April 24, 2013

On the morning of Saturday April 6th, a number of our members gathered for a special session at the 2013 (dis)junctions Graduate Student Conference, an interdisciplinary conference hosted annually here at UCR and put on entirely by the graduate students from the English department. Initially titled the “BAM and Book History Working Group Special Panel” we re-titled it in the introductory discussion as “An Intimate Chat about Archives” – owing both to the fact that, as a first panel of the day, the audience was sparsely populated, and that the short five-minute talks given by the panelists all revisited material produced for a seminar on archival theory taught by English Professor Robb Hernandez the previous quarter. It was a productive chat, however, and felt…

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April Meeting

Rebecca Addicks

Posted on April 21, 2013

Our April Meeting will take place on Tuesday April 30th at 3:30pm (location TBA). For this meeting , Schuyler Eastin will provide a theoretical reading to guide our discussion of some medieval manuscripts. We look forward to seeing you there!

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