ENG 5805 Spring 2020 Gants

Books are eloquent witnesses to their own creation and reception. Each leaf bearing inked impressions of long-recycled letterforms and elegant autograph marginalia speaks to the eyes and the hands and the minds of those who made those marks. Watermarks hiding in the fibers of the paper hint at the aesthetic desires of those who twisted wire profiles into miniature icons and sewed them onto the waiting paper mould. Because it involves careful listening to what an object tells us, this course might also be called “The Autobiography of a Book.” It complements more theoretically and sociologically oriented History of the Book offerings by approaching the book as a physical artifact, exploring various methods of bibliographical analysis, and engaging in current scholarly debates. The syllabus consists of three dove-tailed sections: enumerative, where we will compile a list of books according to some organizing principle (author, journal index, printer or publisher, etc.); descriptive, where we will prepare a full bibliographical description of a book or books from their enumerative list; analytical, where we will write an essay suitable for publication in a bibliographical journal, preferably something dealt with in the first two sections.