[Libri] Save the date (8 November): Hampshire College Center for the Book Seminar

Sun Oct 7 01:51:53 EDT 2007

In conjunction with the Museums10 "BookMarks" program, our seminar  
will meet to discuss writings and themes of the speakers taking part  
in the series of events relating to the history and future of the  
book ("Books to Blogs and Back" weekend).

The seminar will take place at:

Emily Dickinson Hall Lounge
Hampshire College

Thursday, 8 November
7:00 p.m.
as always, light refreshments will be provided

(details will follow, and texts will be available in advance)

Below is a provisional description of the events of Books/Blogs.

We are very pleased that our seminar is in full swing again, and we  
look forward to seeing you.

Jim Wald

The Program (all events take place at Mount Holyoke College)

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Keynote lecture
Gamble Auditorium, 7:00 pm

Robert Darnton, recently named Carl H. Pforzheimer University  
Professor and Director of Harvard University Library, has helped to  
create the field known as “the history of the book.” A former Rhodes  
Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, as well as de Chevalier of France’s  
Légion d’honneur, Darnton is internationally recognized not only for  
his work on the literary world of Enlightenment France as well as the  
history of the book in general.  Announcing his appointment last May,  
Harvard Provost Steven Hyman described him as “an entrepreneur in  
exploring electronic books, Web publishing, and other forms of new  
media.”

For his presentation, “The Research Library in the New Age of  
Information,” Darnton asks:  How can we get our bearings in the new  
landscape created by the explosion of information technology?  An  
attempt to put the present in historical perspective suggests two  
arguments.  According to the first, technological change since the  
invention of writing has increased at such an accelerating rate that  
we have entered a new era, one without precedent: the information  
age.  According to the second, every age is an age of information,  
each in its own way, and the current sense of bewilderment at the  
textual chaos in cyberspace ignores a fundamental fact: texts have  
always been unstable.  Whether we consider the daily newspaper or the  
First Folio of Shakespeare, we encounter shifts in meaning produced  
in the very process of transmission.  Instead of entering a new era,  
therefore, we may be suffering from a collective case of false  
consciousness.  But the modern modes of communicating information  
have created a new role for research libraries.  They still stand at  
the center of campuses, their architecture proclaiming their  
importance for the preservation of knowledge.  But behind their  
classical facades they store and transmit digitized information in  
new ways.  Far from being made obsolete by enterprises like Google,  
they function as platforms for developing new kinds of scholarship;  
and they may be crucial in correcting some of the inadequacies of  
Google itself

Friday, November 16, 2007

Interactive Workshops, 9:00 – 11:00 am
LITS Information Commons, Mount Holyoke College Library
Interactive activities and exhibits relating to the history of book  
creation and publication
Hand bookbinding demonstrations by Val Moss of the Boston University  
Conservation Lab
Small letterpress printing demonstration by master printer Carl  
Darrow of Historic Deerfield
University of Massachusetts Press, Bruce Wilcox
Zines
Self Publishing Online (LuLu)
I-Photo books
Braille Books: how technology has help the disabled
Blogs
Kirtas Book Scanner demonstration by Joseph Merritt & Company

Lecture, 11:00 am
Dwight 101

Jason Epstein has been involved in book publishing since the 1950s.  
At Doubleday he created Anchor Books, which helped to propel the so- 
called “paperback revolution” and established the trade paperback  
format. With colleagues, he founded the New York Review of Books and  
in the 1982 created the Library of America, the prestigious publisher  
of American classics. For many years, he was editorial director of  
Random House. He also created the Readers Catalog of Back Titles, a  
precursor to online stores like Amazon; and co-founded OnDemandBooks,  
the company that sells the book vending machine.

Epstein will discuss how new digital technologies make the book  
publishing industry obsolete, but not the book itself.  Rather, he  
sees digital technology as an opportunity to replace publishers –  
physical inventories and costly infrastructure – with deep virtual  
inventory that will be ubiquitously cheaply available to readers via  
print-on-demand machines, or Book ATMs.

Panel discussion: The Past and Future of the Book,
Gamble Auditorium, 1:30 pm

Corey Flintoff, National Public Radio, moderator

Terry Belanger, University Professor and Honorary Curator of Special  
Collections at the University of Virginia since 1992, is the founding
director of the Rare Book School (RBS) there. Between 1972 and 1992,  
he ran a master's program for the training of rare book and special  
collections librarians at the Columbia School of Library Service. A  
2005 MacArthur Fellow, he has given his $500,000 award to RBS support  
its work. He is dedicated to enhancing understanding of the  
importance of the book in an increasingly digital world and to  
getting “books as physical objects from where they’re not wanted to  
where they are.” For his presentation, “Books and Horses,” Belanger  
will take as his text a statement by Sandra Kirshenbaum (editor of  
Fine Print, 1975-1990) who has pointed out that the future of the  
codex book may turn out to be similar to that of the horse. There are  
still plenty of horses in the world, but they are now employed more  
for recreational purposes than for their horsepower. In a coda  
following his consideration of the long past of the codex book, he  
will speculate on its possible futures.

Sven Birkerts, essayist and literary critic, has taught writing at  
Emerson College and Mount Holyoke College and is currently lecturer  
at Harvard University. Since 2002, Birkerts has been editor of AGNI,  
the web-based version of the acclaimed literary journal. He is most  
well known for writing The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in  
an Electronic Age, which posits a decline in reading due to the  
overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the  
electronic age.  In The Gutenberg Elegies, he has written:  “Our  
growing immersion in interactive electronic communication” may be  
“cutting us off from the civilizing powers of the written word.” In  
his presentation, “The Hive Life,” based on a recent AGNI essay, he  
will focus less on the book itself than on the changing information  
environment, the shift to the merged and collective at the expense of  
the subjective/individual, which the book has for so long enshrined.

Lisa Gitelman is Associate Professor in the Department of Media  
Studies, Catholic University in Washington DC. She studies media as  
uniquely complicated subjects of history. In her recent Always  
Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture, she writes: “A  
modern sense of history . . . is inextricable from experiences of  
inscription, of writing, print, photography, sound recording, cinema,  
and now—one must wonder—digital media that save text, image, and  
sound files. Specifically, when media are new, they help to challenge  
deeply held assumptions about the ways that meaning is authored and  
conveyed, revealing the points at which those assumptions remain  
importantly unsettled.”  In her presentation, “Reading at Risk,” she  
casts her gaze toward the future of the book, focusing in part on  
novel reading. She will ask, for example, how in 200 years moral  
panic about reading novels has shifted to moral panic about not  
reading novels.

Reception, 3:30 pm
Mount Holyoke College Library Courtyard

|-<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>-|

Libri is the discussion forum for all aspects of the world of the  
book, sponsored by the Hampshire College Center for the Book.

• To send a message to all the list members (only members can post),  
send email to libri at lists.hampshire.edu.
• You can subscribe to the list, or change your existing subscription  
by going to:

http://lists.hampshire.edu/mailman/listinfo/libri

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.hampshire.edu/pipermail/libri/attachments/20071007/068c2b47/attachment.htm>