The Book History Workshop, organised by the Institut d'histoire du livre, is the European offshoot of the Rare Book School, universally recognised by specialists in the field of book history. Founded by Terry Belanger at Columbia University, RBS is now run at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. A second offshoot of RBS has also been established in New Zealand.
The philosophy of the Book History Workshop is to perpetuate and develop skills and practical knowledge in the field of book history. Courses are based on intensive contact with internationally recognised specialists in specific fields, using printed and audiovisual documents with "hands-on" sessions with original documents of all periods from the rare book collections of Lyon's City Library and Printing Museum.
An important aspect of the Book History Workshop is its transversality for in bringing together a wide range of profesionnals it encourages exchanges among the many fields which contribute to the development of book history.
[New]
Gothic illuminated manuscripts in the history of the book
This course is an introduction to the study of Gothic manuscripts in western Europe, especially but not exclusively in France. Following a codicological introduction on the technical properties of manuscripts and their production (including analysis of their composition, script, illumination, decoration, and binding), the course will examine different types of texts and their cycles of illumination.
"Hands-on" sessions organized around the holdings of the Bibliotheque municipale of Lyons will be devoted to different types of manuscripts, as follows : the thirteenth-century Parisian portable Bible and the subsequent evolution of biblical manuscripts; romances and romance allegories, including the Roman de la Rose; the late medieval "best-seller," the Book of Hours; and hybrid manuscripts, books containing elements of script and print.
These sessions will be supplemented by an exploration of the various methodologies employed in the scholarly literature, as well as a glimpse at other relevant manuscripts in diverse libraries worldwide. Internet resources useful for the study of medieval manuscripts will comprise an integral portion of the course. The aim is to give both the knowledgeable specialist and interested amateur a better understanding and appreciation of medieval manuscripts within the broader framework of the history of the book.
Tutor: Sandra Hindman. The course is in English, discussion in English and French.
Introduction to the study of incunabula
Introduction to the study of the earliest printed books through a critical discussion of the methods and techniques available to incunabulists.
Topics include : the invention of printing; the most important catalogues, their aims, strengths and weaknesses; the interpretation of colophons; books as physical objects providing evidence of how the printers of incunabula worked (vellum, paper studies, formats, atherings; signatures,the identification of type and printing house practices); illustration, lay-out and texts; decoration; distribution; early provenance and later collectors.
Tutor: Kristian Jensen. The course is in English.
[New in English]
Type, lettering and calligraphy
Part two : 1830-2000
This course begins at the date when printing and its related crafts largely became industrial processes, and the visual effect of the change can clearly be seen in the typography of advertising and works of ‘information’. New printing techniques like lithography were able to exploit large and hand-drawn letterforms freely, and to make use of colour. This had a pro-found effect on types made for promotional use.
But in other ways type resisted the technical changes that took place in other areas of printing. Although the casting of type was eventually mechanized, the punches continued to be cut by hand until the end of the 19th century and many books were still hand set until well into the 20th. However by 1900 it became possible to translate a designer’s own drawings more or less directly into type by using Benton’s new pantographic punch – or matrix-cutting machine – the device that had made possible the launching of complete composi-tion systems like the Linotype and Monotype machines, and the marketing of named type series became necessary to the survival of the traditional typefoundries. Consequently type history in the 20th century is often linked to the names of star designers – Goudy and Gill, Van Krimpen and Koch, and Zapf and Frutiger in the period following World War 2. Type also reflects some of the movements that are well defined in the history of design: the Arts and Crafts movement, Art nouveau, Modernism.
The course begins with the growth of the aggressive commercial typography that served the promotion of industrial products, and provided new type models that are still in use, like sanserif and slab-serif. It also surveys the typography that was coloured by the retrospective mood, a taste for ‘old style’ typography that set in quite early and which has similarly endured into the era of digital typography, producing many examples of the ‘revival’ of his-torical models from the 15th to the 18th centuries. The course will look at the work of some well-known type designers, but will also attempt to do justice to names like Morris Fuller Benton at the American Typefounders Company, C. H. Griffith at Mergenthaler Linotype, and Frank Hinman Pierpont, with his German colleague Fritz Max Steltzer as the head of the type-drawing office, at the English Monotype company. These are the ‘type directors’ who deserve a substantial share of the credit for the quality of many of the enduring types of the 20th century.
As we can now appreciate, this was a classic age of ‘letterpress’ printing, a period during which the new types made for mechanical composition systems could be used side by side with types that were newly-cast from the matrices of former centuries, and both were often excellently printed on machines built to an unprecedentedly high standard of engineering. The Second World War marks the end of this epoch, not only because if effectively halted the making of new types for a time, but because by 1945 the demise of metal type and its replacement by ‘photocomposition’ –a development that had long been predicted in printing trade journals –was beginning to look as if it would really take place. All the same, there were some major achievements in the field of types made for casting in metal to come during the second half of the 20th century. Two outstanding examples are the brilliant series of types showing the inventive genius of Roger Excoffon, a designer whose types were made by the small Olive typefoundry in Marseille, and the work of Hermann Zapf, whose first type, an elegant Fraktur, appeared in 1939, and whose Palatino and Optima, made by the Stempel foundry in Frankfurt am Main, were also available for the setting of texts, and remain among the enduring examples of types made for letterpress printing.
The course ends with a survey of the work of some of the major designers who have worked chiefly or only in the field of digital type.
Tutor: James Mosley.
The course is in English.
This course addresses printed ephemera from several different directions, but principally with the needs of the curator and collector in mind. It will focus on c19 British and French ephemera, though the general issues raised relate to all periods and
to material in other languages. Classes will consist of a
mix of illustrated talks on specific topics, discussion periods, and sessions spent looking at original items.
Topics include: processes used in the production of ephemera (in particular, transfer lithography and chromolithography); acquisitions policies and strategies; describing and cataloging ephemera; dating ephemera; terminology; digitization of collections.
Members of the class are invited – though not required – to give short accounts or presentations of focused collections in their care, whether private or institutional.
This course, which is taught in French, is similar to that offered by the Rare Book School, but with a distinctly French focus.
Tutor: Michael Twyman.
The course is in French.
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