-
Title
-
Invisible Labor in Book History
-
Description
-
For the majority of the history of book production, the laborers who created the objects that modern scholars study – monks in scriptoria, stationers working for clients, students copying textbooks, and pressmen in the printing house – remained largely anonymous. For every name attested in a manuscript colophon or recognized from the historical record, many more are unknown. Even the most extensively scrutinized volumes – for example, the 1623 First Folio of William Shakespeare – do not provide definitive lists of workers whose identities remain the source of conjecture (the compositors who set the Folio’s type at William Jaggard’s shop, for instance, are known by the letters A-E).
My academic work explores evidence of book creation practices, not necessarily through the discovery of the identities of those whose expertise contributed to the books we research and teach, but by the reconstruction of the laborious processes of bookmaking. This page from an architectural treatise bears an entire handprint pressed into the fibers of the sheet during its formation (not otherwise visible to prevent the content of the page from being read), and provides an apt metaphor for the physical presence of the laborers who created the material works housed in the Library.
Per la facciata del Duomo di Milano (ca. 1657). The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cavagna Q. 726.645 P41.
-
Date
-
2026-01-09
-
Creator
-
Samuelson, Todd Victor
