Events

Long regarded as one of the Newberry's Latin American treasures is a book of sermons written in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The result of a collaboration between Franciscan missionaries and Indigenous students, it is one of the earliest surviving examples of Christian writing in an Indigenous language of the Americas. Recently, it revealed a great secret. Scientific analysis revealed that it was written on a very rare paper made of maguey, best known as the plant that yields tequila. In this presentation, an anthropologist, an art historian, and a conservator discuss their work on the Newberry manuscript and the meaning of its once-hidden and now-revealed secret.

This workshop covers the fundamentals of hand bookbinding. Students will fold sheets of paper into sections to construct a textblock. The sections will be sewn through the fold onto linen tapes. The textblock will be rounded and backed, and endbands will be hand sewn. The texblock will be bound into a half cloth cover with decorated paper sides. Students will not only learn the handskills required for bookbinding, but they will also learn how these processes were developed through time.

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Editing involves numerous tiny decisions about the text, before one even begins to think about commentary notes or glosses, and any of these seemingly minor decisions can turn out to require deeper dives down rabbit holes (of history, of linguistics, of geography, of writing and printing technology) than one might expect. Many of them will not be noticed by readers and will remain minor, but others can have large ramifications for our understanding of the literary work. In this talk I will examine several moments of editorial decision in Macbeth, all of them constellated around questions of what G.T. Tanselle calls “external fact,” beginning from the most seemingly minor and then turning to one of the most famous and intriguing textual cruxes in Shakespeare: what to call the three witchy “sisters.”

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The launch of the Kim-Park program represents an opportunity to consider what the enterprise of the history of the book is and should be. It is also a moment when we can reflect on how the University of Chicago has contributed to this discipline in the past and may help to shape its future. At this inaugural event I will highlight some of the distinctive contributions that Chicago has made since about 1900, including not only research into bibliography itself, but also pioneering studies of individual reading, analyses of America as an information society, and arguments about how controls on communication are imposed and evaded. Over the decades, researchers in Chicago have generated foundational arguments about how books – and the practices and communities that coalesce around them – affect major currents in humanistic and scientific cultures alike. Seen in this light, the history of the book matters because it contributes to our efforts to address essential historical questions of stability and change. And those questions are taking on new form nowadays as we face a revived set of anxieties about whether the book itself matters: How will authorship survive in the age of AI? How does the datafication of everything affect human knowledge? Does anybody read books any more anyway? The unique critical culture that has grown up here promises to help us comprehend, through history, the ecologies of information that confront us today.

Are you an avid book collector? Are you passionate about the history of books and printing? Have you ever wondered about a career in rare books? This panel offers an overview of work in the antiquarian and rare books markets from specialists in the field. Join Rebecca Flore (PhD‘21, music), Special Collections Metadata Librarian at the University of Chicago Library; Sandra Hindman, Professor Emerita of Art History at Northwestern University and founder of Les Enluminures galleries; and Bill Cotter, writer, book binder, and owner of W.S. Cotter Rare Books for a discussion about their career trajectories, ongoing projects, and ways to get involved in the rare books world.

Join Curators Elizabeth Frengel and Rebecca Flore for a guided tour of A Pressing Call: Five Centuries of Women Printing. This exhibition features the stories of women who have worked in the print trade in a variety of roles including as publishers, print shop proprietors, typesetters and compositors, and booksellers. From women who led printing houses in the sixteenth century, such as Charlotte Guillard, Yolande Bonhomme and Katherine Gerlach, to modern and contemporary printers and book artists, including Emily Faithfull, Virginia Woolf and Tia Blassingame, learn the stories of women drawn to the printing professions, from its infancy to the present day. This tour will be followed by a presentation on a few further items of book historical interest in the Special Collections Research Center.

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Less a traditional lecture than a series of reflections about the challenges of engaging a difficult archive over an unusually long period of time, my presentation will explore key issues in my ongoing effort to say something useful about the intersection of the zine form and a hard to define cohort of girls and young women in the 1990s. Currently, my working title for what I hope will finally become a book, is Zines, Girls, and the 1990s: Selfhood and Sociality in Unsettled Times.Methodologically, what I am interested in exploring with the seminar is the problem of what happens when the conditions of possibility for one’s own work change over time; when the archive itself mutates as a result of myriad engagements with it; when the larger historical conditions for finding it interesting in the first place also change. Why, then, continue to engage with the archive or even continue the project, especially when it becomes clearer and clearer that neither of one’s key terms, that is, “zines” or “girls,” was ever stable in the first place? More substantively, I am interested in a series of historically specific questions. Why did “girls” take up the zine form in the 1990s? To what ends? What agency did the form itself exert as part of that intersection? Why did those zines travel among girls throughout the 1990s in what zine artist and theorist Mimi Thi Nguyen has called “wayward lines of flight?” And why did those zines also travel more far-flung routes into zones other than the cultural underground, captivating journalists, academics, students, librarians and archivists, all laboring in their own venues? What I am intrigued by now, is the instabilities of the zine form and the very idea of “the girl” and the question of why their collision proved both compelling and generative not just for young zine-makers in the 1990s but for others as well over the course of 35 years and more.

This talk explores the long afterlife of early modern print within the modern research library. It delves into quotidian practices of book care to show how institutional collections are open the world that surrounds them. Across the late 1960s, the bindery at the Newberry Library took on several substantial projects for the University of Chicago’s Special Collections. Each year scores of premodern items traveled the ten miles across the south side of the city to be washed, mended, boxed, and rebound in modern cloth. This occurred during a moment of institutional and social transformation. At the same time as the University was building a new research library, the Newberry was reorganizing its departments and labor forces to establish a modern conservation laboratory. Using bindery records, invoices, and correspondence, this paper offers a microhistory of seventeenth-century English books that were enmeshed in the culture and politics of mid-twentieth-century America. As they were shuttled between collections, these books emblematize a profound investment in the cultural past, a desire for material endurance that defies today’s ongoing decimation of the humanities.

In the late tenth century, a Baghdadi bookseller by the name of Ibn al-Nadim embarked on the ambitious mission of compiling a comprehensive and systematic inventory of all books ever written in or translated into Arabic. By that time, the vast Islamic empire that had once stretched from Iberia to India had fragmented, but the shared cultural and intellectual space defined by the lingua franca of Arabic continued to flourish. What Ibn al-Nadim sought to produce, then, was a complete record of the knowledge available in his time. In his extensive introduction and his catalog of more than eight thousand books, Ibn al-Nadim offers us a glimpse into a knowledge economy that was still expanding even though the empire that had launched it no longer existed. Please join us for this special Chicago preview of Dr. El Shamsy's keynote lecture for the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Bibliographic Society of America in New York.

If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi tells the story of how bhāṣā, the vernacular language of northern India now known as ‘Hindi,’ came to be written down and transformed into a language of literature, scholarship, and scripture. In this book, Tyler Williams argues that the material technologies and practices of written inscription, together with specific modes of using written works in literary, pedagogical, and liturgical performance, shaped the development of vernacular literary genres and distinctly vernacular types of ‘books’ during the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries. The book ends with an exploration of how the archival, museological, and scholarly practices of the twentieth century transformed the richly variegated landscape of premodern written artifacts into a linguistically and religiously disaggregated—but materially homogenous—‘archive.’ Please join us in exploring these and like issues of material technology and archive alongside an exciting display of items from our Special Collections Research Center and Williams’ personal collection, including manuscript copies of the Razmnāma and Vājasaneyī saṃhitā, a handwritten collection of Sri Lankan folk medicine, and more.