Touch and the book

In this session Dr Gill Partington (IES) and Prof. Adam Smyth (Balliol College, Oxford) will consider how practice based research can overlap with and broaden the field of book history. Through their individual creative practice and their collective work as editors of Inscription: Journal of Material Text, both will explore themes of touch and tactility. How can we reimagine reading as an embodied, tactile act? And how to revisit the history of book production in ways that foreground rather than effacing the hand of their maker? The touch of readers and printers is often an elusive theme for book historians,  recreated from fragmentary traces, but can creative methods help us to catch hands in the act?

Gill Partington is Fellow in Book History at the Institute of English Studies. Her research focuses on unorthodox histories of reading and unconventional book formats, and she is co-founder and editor of Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History.

Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford. He works on the connections between literature and material texts, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries, but also more widely. He is the author of The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives (2024), and the editor or co-editor of five collections of essays (including Book Parts, with Dennis Duncan). Adam is the co-founder and co-editor of the creative-critical Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History, and is a founder member of the 39 Steps Press printing collective.