The Making Books research centre brings together scholars, creative practitioners, and cultural professionals to explore the concept of the book as both a created artefact and object of study.
We are interested in readers and reading practices, in print and digital culture, in technology and remediation, in book design and the book arts, in issues of access and preservation, and in the broader intellectual, cultural, social, economic, legal, and political frameworks that shape the world of the book and book futures.
Bringing together a diversity of perspectives including book history and bibliography; typography, design and the book arts; theories of creative practice; the digital humanities; digital writing and new forms of literature and storytelling; and contemporary publishing practices, the centre explores the book’s past, present, and future.
Each research centre at Bath Spa University has a named Public Engagement (PE) Champion. Our co-director, Laura Little, has taken on this role for the Making Books research centre. PE will be a major factor as we move toward the next REF, recording and developing the types of public engagement we are undertaking.
Professor Ian Gadd. English, College of Liberal Arts. Academic Director of GALA.
Ian specialises in the literature and history of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He considers himself to be both a bibliographer and book historian.
Dr Laura Little. Publishing, College of Liberal Arts.
Laura is an editor, illustrator and designer. Her research specialisms are in children’s picturebooks and artists' books.
30 September-19 October
Corsham Court campus
An exhibition celebrating one of printing's most famous visual icons: the printer's fist or ‘manicule’
Find out more
"The centre is interested in the diverse forms that books can take, the people who make them, the act of making itself, and the places in which books are created, made, disseminated, and accessed."
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A Show of Hands
The Digital Humanities Roadshow
Letterpress Printing
Love Letters