The Rare Book School is the subject of a fall exhibition in New York

New York – This fall, the Grolier Club of New York, America’s oldest and largest bibliophile society, presents a special exhibit that details how books have been produced throughout history and in various parts of the globe. . Organized by the renowned Rare Book School at the University of Virginia and drawn from their unique collections, Constructing the Book from Antiquity to the Present: Five Decades of Rare Book School and Book Arts Press will be on view in the ground floor gallery of the Grolier Club from September 28 to December 23, 2022. The exhibition celebrates the international institute – founded by MacArthur Fellow Terry Belanger and currently directed by Michael F. Suarez, SJ – which brings together leading curators, librarians, book historians, restorers and collectors from around the world to teach and learn about books as physical objects.

Organized by Barbara Heritage (Associate Director and Curator of Collections, Rare Book School) and Ruth-Ellen St. Onge (Associate Curator and Special Collections Librarian, Rare Book School), build the book presents more than 200 articles that illustrate the changing forms of the book over more than two millennia. The exhibition is a deep dive into the materials, printing technologies, decorative finishes and markings that make books, such as the substrates (or surfaces) that give books their physical forms, ranging from ancient tablets cuneiforms and papyri to the composite screens of today’s e-readers; printing characters, plates and wooden blocks; and bindings that declare a book’s identity to the world.

“We have all learned to read books, but have we learned to look at them closely? What can be learned from analyzing an original specimen of ancient papyrus, or studying the friction of a Chinese book engraved on stone, or feeling the weight of a piece of beech once used in a medieval bookbinding European? said co-curator Barbara Patrimoine.

“The more we learn to think of books as objects, the more we understand how their material forms express not only their making, but also the myriad communities and social networks from which they emerge – whether it’s an old farmhouse Egyptian, ancient, modern Tibetan monastery, 19th-century prairie schoolhouse, or turn-of-the-millennium Canadian home with its own desktop computer,” said co-curator Ruth-Ellen St. Onge.

Exhibition Highlights

Among the oldest works exhibited at build the book are an Egyptian papyrus fragment (ca. 300 BCE) which features an agricultural account of wheat yields and harvest dates, and which was later repurposed for a literary account of a crime on the reverse; and a Buddhist sutra fragment from 9th-century Japan (810–824), featuring elegant hand-copied scripture expressing the lesson that wisdom can be realized through emptiness. Much more recent is a Rocket E-Book (2000), one of the first portable electronic readers, which had enough storage for 4,000 pages of text and allowed users to annotate and mark up their favorite passages.

Other works on display show the diversity of materials used in bookmaking, such as an 18th-century Russian reindeer hide, tanned and diced for binding, which was salvaged in 1973 from a Danish shipwreck in 1786 in Plymouth Sound. A deluxe miniature almanac, created in Vienna in 1777 and measuring just 2.75 inches by 1 inch, is concealed in a carved wooden case shaped and painted to resemble a Viennese bread roll. Madonna’s Controversial 1992 Photobook Sexwhich includes metallic covers, spiral binding, and printed silver Mylar packaging that mimics a condom wrapper.

Also on display in the exhibition are the electrotype printing plates of Lola Ridge’s experimental work of modernist poetry, The Ghetto and Other Poems (1918), which describes the life of Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. Alterations can be seen on the plates, where the original text has been chiseled into the copper shell and new electrotyped text has been soldered in its place. An example of the power of printing is shown in the book I saw the Philippines fall (1943), Filipino soldier and journalist Carlos P. Romulo’s first-hand account of the Japanese invasion of his country in 1941 and 1942, written shortly after his arrival in the United States. The United States Office of Censorship wanted content removed on twenty-four pages of Romulo’s book, but their request came too late to reset the book before publication. Heavy lines printed in black obscure references to ongoing military activities in the region, as well as past acts of brutality committed by the US military during the Philippine-American War.