Corcoran Book History

An ongoing online project of Casey Smith's MA seminar, "The History of the Western Book," at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington DC, focusing on information, discussion, and debate about the history (and future) of scripted forms, especially the printed forms of the past five hundred years commonly referred to as books.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

The Little Prince Meets Galileo

Thanks to Lilla Verkady and the Dibner Library of the Smithsonian Institution for an unforgettable afternoon!

Thursday, December 4, 2014

The Pilcrow

Behold the Pilcrow Read more about it

Type: Rider

Maybe there are other video games based on printing history? Maybe not? Check out Type: Rider . This isn't the game itself, but a wal...

Denker Fellows Deadline Approaching

ATTENTION Wanted: APHA Chesapeake Students December 15 is the deadline. Information here: Denker Fellowship Read a...

Online Course Evaluations

All students should complete the course evaluation found at this link: online course evaluation . The deadline is December 9, next Tuesday....

Heralds of Science on LibraryThing

Want to learn more about one of the books we saw today? Consult The Dibner's Heralds of Science Collection on LibraryThing. This is...

Dibner Today!

Friday, November 21, 2014

Our Classmate Lauren Reads Her Poetry Tonight!

The Black Squirrel is located at 2427 18th St NW (in the middle of Adams-Morgan). The reading takes place in the top floor lounge. Food ...

Thursday, November 20, 2014

APHA-Chesapeake Denker Fellowship Information

Here's a photograph from our recent waysgoose at the home/studio of Chris and Pat Manson and The Crooked Crow Press. Join our merry ...

Morris Lessmore

This is a poignant and even tear-inducing story of a man and his relationship to books: The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore . ...

Yet More Future of the Book

From the commercial design and marketing firm IDEO: Three "Books" Instead of One . Click on the videos if you can stand yet mor...

Say No to Nostalgia

Check out this great website if:Book Great stuff also on: if: Blog

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Between Page and Screen

Here's a link to a strange video with horrible music. The text (textual body?) produced by "Between Page and Screen" seems...

Monday, November 17, 2014

Historic E-Book Settlement

An Amazon warehouse in Phoenix. How soon will this culture be obsolete? Is it already? The scene above is from a physical-book warehou...

Gutenberg = Fox Talbot = Edison = Jobs/Bezos = ?

FOR THIS THURSDAY'S CLASS Please read Matthew Rubery's essay from Book History, "Canned Literature: The Book After Ediso...

Out of the Academy & Into the Industry

The quotation abovie is by Elizabeth Minkel. Here is her review of the The 2014 London Book Fair

Oh no! Not Another "Future of the Book" Argument/Debate/Rhapsody/Screed

Our classmate Krista Sharp sent me a great online piece about the redesign of the Pelican logo by a young designer in London, Matt Young;...

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Russian Avant-Garde Books

While English and American printers and book designers were held in thrall to the aesthetics of the English Arts and Crafts Movement (ess...

Response to Mallarme

Manet's portrait of Stephane Mallarme, 1876 For your brief assignment next week, please read Stephane Mallarme's essayistic poem...

Carnegie Libraries

The Carnegie Libraries were uniquely influential not only in fostering American literacy but American culture at large. Scroll through ...

Printing at the Margins: an Ink-Stained History of Women and Work

Kathy Walkup's illustrated lecture at the San Francisco Public Library Printing at the Margins dwells at great length on a subject t...

Penguin Revolution

To the left is the cover image of the first Penguin book. Many articles and monographs have been written about the design of these books. ...

Pyramid Atlantic Book Arts Fair

This weekend in lovely Silver Spring! Lots of Corcoran familiars and other friends in the world of books. A genuinely fun event for the w...

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

A Reasonable Argument

Could it be that Washington, DC Has the world's two best libraries? The Smithsonian Institution & the LC. Nothing truly rhymes wi...

Thursday, November 6, 2014

On the Making and Issuing of Books

Seven years after Henry Stevens published Who Spoils Our New English Books? , C.T. Jacobi's On the Making and Issuing of Books , a...

Who Spoils Our New English Books?

Read this book to find the answer.

The Kelmscott/Goudy Albion Press at RIT

In last December's well-publicized auction, the Cary Collection at RIT came out as the winning bidder of William Morris's Albion P...

William Morris and the Kelmscott Press

Bill Peterson's monograph on The Kelmscott Press is an amazing work of synthetic scholarship. It's unlikely to ever be equalled o...

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Thinking About Your Seminar Paper...

Edward Burne-Jones, a drawing in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection Detail from a Roz Chast cartoon published in The New Yorker

Sunday, October 26, 2014

SHARP 2015

Proposals for papers are due no later than 30 November: CFP One of my former students in this seminar delivered a wonderful pape...

GPO Visit, Next Thursday, October 30

Here it is, ensconced within its massive brick edifice, the United States Government Printing Office. Next week our class will convene h...

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Page Density

William Blake's densely lettered pages in Jerusalem and other books challenge our relationship to reading itself. Blake demands full att...

It's all about the paper.

Thanks to Georgia Deal for today's visit to her papermaking class. Here's more, much more, about the history of paper. Pa...

Blake!

This is not a post about Blake Lively, Blake Shelton, Blake Bortles, or Blake Griffin. This is about the only Blake that matters to the c...

Bookmark Project: Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here

Spend some time learning about the culture and history of Al-Mutanabbi St. Why is intellectual and artistic freedom important? Here is a li...

The Book in Art

Even though this assignment is fairly straightforward, please follow these directions carefully. Also take a close look at the example. 1...

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Diderot's Panic

Information overload is not a new phenomenon. The origins and intent of Diderot and D'Alembert's famous Encylopedie are plainly de...

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Novgorod!

Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times For some historians this is old news, but it's news to me. These remarkable birch scrolls ha...

Thursday, October 16, 2014

The Rise of the Novel: Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne

Linked below are three short videos by Robert McCrum discussing the earliest novels and novelists. It is somewhat hard to believe that the n...

Cookery & Crime in the 18th Century

Hannah Glasse's, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. (London, 1777) Click here to access the Hathitrust/Google digital surroga...

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