Hands-on course introduces you to manuscripts and the first printed books — how to handle them and what excites people about them. Most famous books, from the I Ching to The Odyssey to the Bible, have come down to us copied by hand. Yet manuscripts are not just vehicles for texts: they have their own stories to tell and carry the traces of scribes, craftspeople, booksellers, owners, readers, and doodlers. The class meets in Special Collections and centers experiential learning, including handling historical materials, reading the evidence embedded in writing surfaces, inks, and layouts, and executing traditional bookmaking techniques.
