In this final letterpress lab report, I want you to think about our work with type and the press in the context of our course’s ongoing discussions of media, book history, and technology. How does physically working with this historical technology change your view of the handpress period and its... [Read More]

Let’s leave the response for today open, but keep a particular eye on the week’s readings and ways you can connect our ongoing work with type to those historical and literary touchstones.

For today’s lab you will set as much as possible of the following poem, which was widely reprinted in nineteenth-century newspapers. This version appeared in the *Winchester Home Journal on May 6, 1858. [Read More]

This week’s readings were an interesting mix of arugment, form, and content. In Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maid,” he explores the settings of two very different forms of culture and production: the all-male club of the Temple Bar in London and the almost all-female run... [Read More]

For this lab, I have selected books from Northeastern University’s Archives and Special Collections for us to investigate. As when we looked at Harlequins on the first day, this lab is an exercise in close looking. I’ve arranged the books in pairs, each designed to illuminate a particular textual contrast:... [Read More]