The California Rare Book School invites you to join us for a 5 day course at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Paul Shaw will be teaching History of Typography.
This course runs from November 3-7, 2014, and is open to faculty, librarians, archivists, booksellers, graduate students, advanced undergraduate students, and any person with an interest in the topic. Please see the course description below, and visit our website for more information on the instructor and application process: www.calrbs.org
Description: This course will provide a general overview of both the history of typography and of type design in the West from the birth of printing with movable type in the mid-15th century to the advent of digital fonts in the 1980s. It will explore the influence of scribal styles of writing on early typographic forms; the development of the “modern” typographic book in the 16th century and changes and challenges to that format in the 19th and 20th centuries; the impact of technology on the form and use of typefaces since 1800; and the shift from the book as the locus of typographic development to posters and ephemera from the 19th century to the present.
The course will take place in the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Its resources and materials will be supplemented by field trips to the Kemble Collection on Western Printing and Publishing at the California Historical Society in San Francisco and to the shop of a local Bay Area letterpress printer.
Requirements: This course is intended for those with little or no formal instruction in the history of typography.
About the California Rare Book School:
CalRBS is an education program dedicated to providing the knowledge and skills required by professionals working in all aspects of the rare book community, as well as for collectors and students interested in entering the field. Our week-long, intensive courses benefit from a wealth of special collections of rare books, manuscripts, and archival materials in institutions throughout California.