Ready to hit the road to RBS, 2009

Suzanne and I are packed and more or less ready to leave tomorrow morning for Rare Book School (not counting the myriad of minor loose ends). We should be able to load up the van and be on the road in the early AM tomorrow with a destination of Washington, DC (to spend the night with a friend of Suzanne's). We will leave early Sunday to spend the day at Poplar Forest (Jefferson's second home) before return to C'ville for a Sunday afternoon/evening gathering of the RBS attendees.

I will be taking Book Illustration Processes to 1900 with Terry Belanger.

The identification of illustration processes and techniques, including (but not only) woodcut, etching, engraving, stipple, aquatint, mezzotint, lithography, wood engraving, steel engraving, process line and halftone relief, collotype, photogravure, and color printing. The course will be taught almost entirely from the extensive Rare Book School files of examples of illustration processes.

Suzanne will be taking The Printed Book in the West since 1800 taught by Eric Holzenberg.

This course will survey the technological advances in papermaking, illustration processes, composition, printing, binding, and distribution which fueled the development of the modern book industry. It will also give an overview of those phenomena – William Morris and the modern fine press movement, artists' books, the rise of book-clubs and organized bibliophily – which have arisen to balance this industrialization. The classes will make extensive use of RBS's strong collections of books and periodicals embodying the advance of printing in the West since 1800, as well as the plates, tools and other artifacts that enabled that advance.

Needless to say, we are both extremely excited and I may not sleep at all tonight. I'm going to go reread sections of Gascoigne. [Edited to correct Suzanne's course. I am a twit.]