A full program of events to accompany this exhibition has been scheduled for March-April 2021.
March 5, 2021 The Interactive Book Symposium, Gabrielle Dean, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Marissa Nicosia, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh
March 17, 2021 Public Lecture: Opening the Interactive Book, Julie Park (recording here)
April 8, 2021 Public Lecture: How the Sausage Gets Eaten, Ben Denzer
April 14 Workshop: How to Make Your Own Interactive Paper Flag Book (limited to 25 participants), Roni Gross
THE INTERACTIVE BOOK SYMPOSIUM, March 5, 2021
Speakers Abstracts and Bios
Suzanne Karr Schmidt
George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts
Newberry Library
“Dialing It In: Interactive Renaissance Shortcuts”
Premodern books with moving parts, (especially flaps and dials), aimed to impress with printed ingenuity, but also to simplify. Many offered solutions: whether for scheduling quandaries; for offering tactile learning; or even for planning one’s future. This talk touches on several intentionally hands-on publications whose authors delivered the very latest improvements for the sake of their reader’s edification and amusement.
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, is the George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Newberry. Previously, she was the Assistant Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Suzanne has a PhD in the history of art from Yale University and a BA from Brown University. She loves curating exhibitions and writing about unusual forms of early printmaking, as in her 2011 show and catalog, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life at the Art Institute. Her book, a history of the “Renaissance Pop-Up Book,” entitled Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance, was published in late 2017. Most recently, she co-curated Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Reperta with Lia Markey at the Newberry.
Marissa Nicosia
Assistant Professor of English
Penn State University, Abington College
“Interacting with Early Modern Recipe Books”
What would happen if we approached recipe books as usable cookbooks? This paper takes up this question by considering cooking as a method for manuscript study and presenting examples from my ongoing Cooking in the Archives project. Since I started the project in 2014, I have become increasingly interested in cooking as an interpretative practice. In this paper, I will reflect on cooking as a method for understanding historical recipes now as well as in their original contexts. To do this, I will bring together frameworks from disparate fields: ethno-bibliography, embodied ethnography or carnal sociology, and work on historical reenacting and historical interpretation. I will argue that cooking is not only a valuable method for recipe studies, but a method that we cannot ignore if we are invested in thinking about histories of book use.
Marissa Nicosia, is Assistant Professor of Renaissance Literature at the Pennsylvania State University – Abington College. She has published articles on early modern English literature and book history in Modern Philology, Milton Studies, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and she edited the collection Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives which was published by Oxford University Press in March 2021. She runs the public food history website Cooking in the Archives.
Jacqueline Reid-Walsh
Associate Professor of Education (Language & Literacy Education) and Women’s Studies
Penn State University, State College
“Before Pop-Ups: children’s interactive books in the 18th and 19th centuries”
Many people today associate the modern pop-up book with children, and often use the term to refer to all types of movable books for this market. Yet they often don’t realize that for hundreds of years books with movable components have been directed towards Anglo-American children for education and pleasure. In this talk I examine several notable kinds; 18th century turn-up books, also called metamorphic pictures or harlequinades; early 19th century paper doll books with movable heads; and complex, late 19th century “mechanical books.” I examine the affordances of each type: flaps and accordion folds, tabs and slots, and combinations of two- and three-dimensional devices. In each case the actions of the book are controlled by the child reader-viewer-player or interactor.
Jacqueline Reid-Walsh is an Associate Professor at the Pennsylvania State University. Cross-appointed between the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on children’s books and on girl cultures. In her scholarship she combines archival research with children’s literature studies, book history, and juvenilia studies. By examining commercially produced and homemade examples, she explores the interrelations among children, interactive media, and historical participatory culture. Her latest book Interactive Books: Playful media before Pop-ups (2018) draws on both 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers and contemporary digital media theorists, which enables us to think critically about children’s media texts paper and digital, past and present. She has an ongoing digital archive and blog project called Learning as Play that is housed with Penn State University Libraries.
Gabrielle Dean
William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts
The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University
“Selfing in the Postcard Album”
The modern picture postcard developed in the late nineteenth century as an expression of new governmental, technological, and commercial possibilities: postage costs and mail services; printing and photography; tourism and travel. The picture postcard offered a new medium not just for communication but, through its image options, self-expression. Often, nineteenth-century postcard collectors gathered their bounty into albums, to exist alongside or in combination with other kinds of paper-based personal collections: photographs in photo albums; resonant ephemera in scrapbooks; signatures, poetic extracts, and other textual mementoes in friendship albums. The postcard album references and in a sense incorporates a mode of interactivity—the writing and sending of postcards—that other albums don’t offer, supplementing that primary mode with another, the construction of a “book” through the curation and management of widely available material. “Selfing” in the postcard album is a process that does not lend itself to a final product—and the interactivity these albums facilitate is, likewise, both more constrained and more open-ended.
Dr. Gabrielle Dean is the William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts and faculty in the Museums and Society Program at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the Associate Editor of Archive Journal. Her research focuses on the exchanges between textual and visual culture during the industrial era of print. Her essay on Emily Dickinson’s sheet music was recently published at the Dickinson Electronic Archives, part of a longer project on sheet music, gender, and the domestic scene. She is currently working on essays about Gertrude Stein’s postcards and alternative theories of authorship. She has curated large-scale exhibitions about Stephen Crane, John Barth, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. Her most recent exhibition at the George Peabody Library in Baltimore was City People: Black Baltimore in the Photographs of John Clark Mayden.