Teaching and Reference Collection
The book collection includes 300 items ranging from zines to almanacs to cookbooks to children’s books to artists’ books to activist leaflets to amateur newspapers. While it also includes multiple editions of selected literary works 1600-2025, the holdings are chosen less for their literary value than for what their material form can illustrate about publishing, writing and reading. If you browse our online catalogue, you’ll see that some contain marginalia or doodles, others have been lovingly repaired by a child, others invite a user to reshuffle their pages or to reflect on what counts as a book, a text, a work. We can assemble picture-books for a children’s literature course, or samples of early modern printing for students eading Shakespeare; or if you’re teaching Song of Solomon your students can compare its serialization in a glossy women’s magazine with the trade hardback and a paperback reprint.
Rutgers faculty interested in integrating the Book Initiative’s teaching collection into their classroom can find out more here.
If you browse our online catalogue, you’ll see that some items contain marginalia or doodles, others have been torn and repaired, others invite a user to reshuffle their pages or to reflect on what counts as a book, a text, a work.
Because this is a teaching collection, the books are meant to be touched; students and faculty are welcome to handle any of our items in any way they see fit. A subsidiary collection of already-damaged books is also available for students to cut up to examine their structure and learn about the processes and agents involved in book making.
Finally, the Book Initiative houses about a hundred scholarly works on media history in our reference collection, which will help introduce students to the history of publishing, printing, and reading as they intersect with the topic of their courses.
Anyone interested in having access to the collection and to our teaching resources, please reach out to book@cca.rutgers.edu.