This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Part of what is so compelling about doing research with old books is that the learning curve never ends—there’s always some new challenge, another thing to explain, something else to get to the bottom of. Reading old books… read more
Gutenberg’s Blanks
Even with a print run of fewer than 200 copies, the Gutenberg Bible was a major undertaking. A complete copy, like the Ransom Center’s, includes 1,277 large pages that have text printed on them. Each full page required that approximately 2,500 individual pieces of metal type be set by hand,… read more
Picturing the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries
The Ransom Center’s Spring 2020 Stories to Tell exhibition features some of the earliest printed examples of illustrated English plays.