Faculty of Arts and Sciences

On the first day of History of the Book, professor Jessica Beckman puts objects on the table that most people only see behind glass: a cuneiform tablet from ancient Babylon, 3,000 years old and small enough to hold in your palm. A Quran with calligraphy so intricate that students need a magnifying glass to read it. Medieval illuminated manuscripts whose gold leaf still glows.

Then she invites students to pick them up. One student traced a bookworm’s path through vellum. Another ran his hands across parchment made from calf skin. “We talk about how it feels to handle them, and what they might tell us about cultural values,” Beckman says. “We’re all in awe.”

This hands-on access—rare for undergraduates at any institution—distinguishes Dartmouth’s approach to book history. Through partnerships between the Department of English and Creative Writing, Rauner Special Collections Library, and the Book Arts Workshop, and guided by Beckman’s sweeping historical framework, students don’t just study rare artifacts. They touch them. They make them. And they trace five thousand years of reading history, from clay to parchment to pixels.

“Our collections are here to be used,” says Jay Satterfield, head of Rauner Library Special Collections and Archives. “Their worth lies in their use. Hands-on encounters with rare materials can change the way you think in a matter of seconds.”

Sophie Chadha ’25, who supports Beckman’s class this term as the Edward Connery Lathem ’51 Special Collections Fellow, describes Satterfield’s philosophy in action: “Jay always says if you see something, stop and look.”

For Chadha, a course on Victorian children’s literature sent her to Rauner’s first editions, reigniting childhood favorites and leading to research on Rudyard Kipling that became her senior honors thesis.

That culture of curiosity shapes Beckman’s course.

“Any book that you pick up will have a history of its ownership—people who used it, who gave it to someone else,” Beckman says. “When you touch that book, it’s like touching someone from the past. It’s a profound experience to be connected to the past like that.”

In an era when artificial intelligence can generate text instantly and e-readers offer books without weight or texture, Beckman’s teaching and scholarship ask urgent questions: What do we lose when we separate meaning from matter? And what can five thousand years of material texts teach us about what we’re giving up?

Later in that first class session, Beckman distributes copies of Jeff Bezos’ 2007 “Dear Customers” letter announcing the Kindle. In it, the Amazon founder imagines a future where “the paper, glue, ink, and stitching that make up the book vanish and what remains is the author’s world.”

“The question that stretches across the whole term is this,” Beckman says. “How did we get to a cultural moment that believes books should disappear? What happened to create this expectation, and what does it say—for better or for worse—about what we value?”

Form as meaning

The contrast frames Beckman’s course and animates her forthcoming book, The Kinetic Text, which challenges a pervasive assumption in literary criticism: that what matters is the text itself, while the physical container is merely incidental. Focusing on Shakespeare’s era—when writers were experimenting and printed books weren’t standardized—Beckman demonstrates how this assumption has obscured how literature actually works.

Writers and readers back then recognized something modern criticism has forgotten: the way words appear on a page creates meaning. Beckman points to Shakespeare’s 126th sonnet, which ends not with the expected final couplet but with two sets of empty parentheses. Most modern editors deleted them, assuming the printer made a mistake. But what if that blank space—those parentheses where words should be—is the point?

The answer reveals what Beckman calls the “kinetic” text—writing that manipulates the physical process of reading to create rhetorical and thematic effects. Among the examples she analyzes in her book: George Herbert’s devotional poems in The Temple invite readers to “enter” the church by turning from one page to the next. The first quarto of King Lear, with its printing errors and chaotic typography, enables readers to experience the mad logic of the play’s grieving king.

“What all of these writers share is an assumption that how readers move through a text—the stops and starts, the turns, the corrections, the re-readings—could be shaped by the material form of the page,” Beckman explains. “And that this shaping could produce meaning.”

Since the 18th century, editors have systematically “corrected” the messy original printings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, removing unstandardized spelling and peculiar formatting. Scholars now often work with clean, standardized editions that have silently removed the visual quirks of originals. The result, Beckman says, is criticism that can't fully explain the symbolic power of a blank page.

For students in Beckman’s course, learning to see these overlooked details transforms how they read.

Hailey Maloney ’28 describes that transformation: “I entered thinking I knew what you needed to truly read a book, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The yellowing of the pages, the state of the binding, the publisher’s name—Professor Beckman taught us that these seemingly inconsequential aspects surrounding a book’s production truly make a story.”

From theory to touch

Students in History of the Book move from handling rare manuscripts to making their own books.

In the Book Arts Workshop, they begin by writing on papyrus and parchment with lamp black and iron gall inks (made by students in senior lecturer Jenny Lynn’s fall term Latin class), using reed and quill pens. Each student hand sets a sentence and prints a proof with an iron hand press from around 1900. The class arranges these proofs on a long table to create a collective story, then prints the text in folios on 1960s Vandercook letterpresses, creating an edition of 20 books, which the class sews together.

“This project gives students a tactile experience,” says program manager Sarah Parella. “They get a sense of how the materials feel and smell—especially the parchment made from animal skins. They also find an appreciation for how intentional one would need to be to produce a book in the past, compared to our quick and often casual approach to printed material today.”

For their final project, students choose between writing a traditional paper or making a book. Past students have created books with removable pages, waterproof books, a typewritten book resembling a 1970s community recipe book, and small editions designed to be passed hand to hand.

Some students continue developing sophisticated book arts projects throughout the semester. Others begin research projects centered on specific books from Rauner. 

“We never know what we’re going to find,” Beckman says. One student discovered a book bound with wallpaper. Another found an old children’s book with markings revealing its history of use. Some students develop these discoveries into full research papers; others use them as foundations for senior theses.

Roger Friedlander ’27 describes the breadth of materials available: “This course allows me to analyze everything from Shakespeare’s first folio to foundational American documents to Dr. Seuss’s personal drawings.”

“A goal is to make students feel they deserve to go to special collections,” Beckman says. “Once you know what you're doing, you can go to any collection.”

The integration of making and studying creates what Beckman calls “the truest form of interdisciplinarity.”

“No one can have all the expertise needed to understand these objects,” she says. The course regularly draws students from across disciplines. The ecology alone—which plants made the paper, which materials created the inks—requires specialized knowledge. “We need perspectives from every discipline, because understanding the future of written communication requires all of us.”

Questions for the digital age

The interdisciplinary mix becomes especially important when students tackle questions about AI and digitization—questions that animate contemporary debate about the future of reading and writing.

Beckman draws parallels between the introduction of the printing press and today’s AI anxieties. When the printing press arrived, people worried it was too fast, that anyone could write anything, that information couldn’t be trusted—the same anxieties we have about AI today. But scientific knowledge could suddenly travel at unprecedented speed. The parallel helps students see how societies adapt. “We talk about the systems that had to develop over centuries to mitigate the bad effects of speed, of anonymity, of information overload. That leads us naturally into a conversation about generative AI.”

The interdisciplinary mix enriches the discussion. Students from math, computer science, and environmental studies each bring different perspectives, creating conversations that wouldn’t happen in a literature class alone. “Most of my students are extremely thoughtful about generative AI,” Beckman says. What surprises literature students, she notes, is discovering that computer scientists and engineers wrestle with the same questions: “the role of creativity in the work that they do, and where ownership is really important.”

We are, Beckman argues, living through a cultural moment with unprecedented consequences for how we preserve and understand literature. The internet, which promised infinite preservation, is fragmentary and unstable. Websites vanish. Digital files become unreadable. Cloud storage companies change policies.

“When you digitize something, you lose specificity, texture, the materiality that carries meaning,” she says. “We tend to think only about what we’re gaining technically, but we're losing things too.”

The stakes go beyond preservation. When books become mere containers—content that could live anywhere—it becomes impossible to explain why Shakespeare’s empty parentheses matter, or why the chaotic typography in King Lear creates meaning. More importantly, we lose the critical ability to recognize how technology shapes—and sometimes distorts—the information we receive every day.

Students grapple with these questions in concrete terms. When Beckman asks whether they should buy a 15th-century manuscript leaf on eBay, one student argues yes, in the name of reassembly. Another says no—we don’t know how to care for them properly. What would happen if we digitized a medieval scroll? What is lost? How should we balance access with preservation?

“As you move through this class, I want to show you how these questions are very much alive,” Beckman says. “Accessibility versus preservation. The economy of books. You have to use your ethics to navigate these questions.”