History of the book: a handful of favorite links

Sarah Werner’s DIY newsbook. I don’t know about you, but my head really hurts when I try to figure out how 17th-century printers arranged multiple newsbook pages on a single sheet of paper. No better way to understand than by assembling your own.

Ms. Werner (who sometimes uses the moniker Wynken de Worde in the online world) has a marvelous blog about early modern books and culture at http://sarahwerner.net/blog/. No wonder: she’s the undergraduate program director at the Folger Shakespeare Library, an associate editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and editor of The Collation. 

Anchora, a blog on early modern books and their readers. A generous and exciting site from Adam Hooks, assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa, who gives every online indication of being a fabulous teacher.

Habits of Reading in Early Modern England, the website for a 1997 Folger Institute program,  features an introduction by Steven Zwicker and a terrific bibliography of secondary materials, though keep in mind there’s been some terrific scholarship in the past 15 years by Adam Fox, Adam Smyth, and others.

And for amusement, a glimpse into the nature of IT support in the middle ages. You can find a version with English subtitles, but it’s funnier in Norwegian.