From the syllabus

"This course explores the history, production, and reading of the book as an object and an idea capable of traversing centuries of knowledge and culture. As a product both of its time and one that transcends it, the book has a life of its own, an existence shaped by the circumstances in which it comes into the world, as well as the stories of its own survival. Those stories in turn shape the lives of those who engage with the book, the living, breathing human beings who imagine, compose, create, sell, read, write about, and remember it. This then is a course about what it means to live the life of the book and what it might mean to try and live without it."