Plantin Institute’s book history course online for the first time

[Online]

History of the book

Teacher: Dr. Goran Proot

Saturday March 6, 13 and 20, 2021

History of the Book – one of the Plantin Institute’s students’ favourite courses – is to be repeated in March 2021 in a new format. For the first time, the entire course will be livestreamed (Zoom) and given in English, allowing international students to take advantage of this three-day course.

The course will be taught in the classroom at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, but international students can participate remotely via Zoom. Teacher Dr. Goran Proot approaches the subject in a narrative, accessible and interactive way. The course includes a show-and-tell with books from the Museum, and during the course students are invited to handle books from the teacher’s private book collection as well.

Course topics include the following: activities in a print shop, actual book production, illustration, organisation of the book trade, customers, libraries and book design. The connecting thread throughout the entire course is the ‘book’ as a material object, as an artefact, and as a source of information and knowledge.

Sessions will be recorded and made available to enrolled students afterwards.

You can find more information about this course on our website
https://www.plantininstitute.be/historyofthebook

Please go here to enrol for this course:
https://www.plantininstitute.be/enrol

About the teacher, Dr. Goran Proot

• Dr. Proot started his academic career as a literary scholar, studying Jesuit theatre of the Southern Netherlands (c. 1575 – 1773).
• In 2000, together with a small team, he launched the Short Title Catalogue Flanders (www.stcv.be), a bibliography of hand-printed books in Flanders and Brussels.
• He was the organiser of the international conference Book Design from the Middle Ages to the Future in 2011.
• Dr. Proot was the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Rare Books at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., from 2012 t0 2014.
• At the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris, from 2014 to 2016, he was the director of both the digital library Mazarinum and the conservation lab.
• Since 2016, he has worked as a postdoctoral researcher for the EMoBookTrade Project in Milano (Italy), which studies 16th- and 17th-century European book trade.
• Since 2018, he has been a part-time curator at Cultura Fonds Library in Dilbeek near Brussels.
• Dr. Proot teaches Design Theory and the History of Graphic Design at Sint Lucas (Karel de Grote Hogeschool) in Antwerp.

Plantin Institute of Typography
Museum Plantin-Moretus
Vrijdagmarkt 22, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium
T. +32 (0)3 22 11 468