by Lauren Coats, John David Miles, and Brittany O’Neill
This case study documents a collaboration among Louisiana State University’s (LSU) special collections, main library, and English department to develop a curricular project that introduces students studying books as material objects. LSU’s rare books curator, humanities librarian, and an English professor developed a series of assignments investigating the material pasts of books, libraries, and readers, that was embedded in a literature class titled “America’s Bestsellers.” Assignments included a partnership with the “Book Traces” project, housed at the University of Virginia, which seeks to explore and document how historical readers left “interventions” in the books that compose libraries’ general collections. The case study emphasizes the value of studying books as material artifacts, highlighting how this approach can augment students’ understanding of literature, aids in their primary source literacy in finding and retrieving sources, and provides them insight into the different ways that individuals and institutions value books. The authors discuss the evolution of the project, its limitations, as well as what classes might most stand to benefit from similar such work.