Binders in a Bind: Making Books in an Age of Print

Johann Gutenberg and his team famously mechanized the process of putting text to page, producing, among other marvels, the Gutenberg Bible. But the revolutionary printing press created a bottleneck, as binders struggled to keep pace with reams of text. Pratt, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, will examine print's rise on the material bindings themselves and on business practices in England's book trade, showing how surviving bindings, printed ephemera, and a range of official records reveal aspects of the retail book-buying experience that have long remained opaque to historians.

This is the Zeidberg Lecture in the History of the Book and is part of The Huntington Research 2025-2026 "Active in the Archive" lecture series.