At Harvard's Houghton Library, the beauty of the book in all its forms | Arts & Humanities - Harvard Gazette

Colleen Walsh, Harvard Staff Writer reports, First-year seminar gets students to explore some of Houghton Library’s rarest volumes. 

The “Eliot Indian Bible” was the first bible printed in America, in 1663. It was translated into the Algonquian language by the Massachusetts missionary John Eliot.
Photo: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

For the first-year seminar “Harvard’s Greatest Hits,” David Stern wanted his small group of 21st-century hyperconnected undergraduates to put down their tablets, smartphones, and laptops and to pick up a book.

The idea was simple: Get about a dozen first-year students in a room and have them study some of the rarest and oldest volumes at Houghton Library, Harvard’s vast repository of art, culture, history, and more. “I don’t think they ever imagined how spectacular and rich the physical book could be, and how it really changed their ideas of what a book was or is,” said Stern, Harvard’s Harry Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Jewish and Hebrew Literature and a professor of comparative literature.

Stern, who studies books as material objects, said too often students think “all a book does is convey a text.” But he insists a book’s physical form can impart a range of critical information. The way the words are displayed on the page, the illustrations, even the size of a particular volume, Stern said, can affect a book’s meaning or how it’s interpreted.

During the fall semester, students met separately in small groups to explore a specific work, and then reconvened as a class at the library to discuss what they’d observed with help from Stern, visiting scholars, and library staff...

For their final project students wrote a paper on a book of their choice. Below is a sample of their selections, along with images of some of the other volumes they studied throughout the semester.
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Source: Harvard Gazette