A new research space at Wichita State University is helping students learn about books by demonstrating how books are actually made.
The Robert L. Cattoi Book Technologies Lab opened late last year on the sixth floor of Lindquist Hall. It features a collection of bookbinding and printing tools, including wax tablets, typewriters and old-fashioned quill pens.
The lab is the brainchild of Katie Lanning, an associate professor of English, and her colleague Fran Connor. Lanning says she envisioned a space where English majors and other students could learn the physical aspects of creating a text.
“Where it’s not just about studying literature as this abstract work,” Lanning said. “It’s about studying the material objects, the texts themselves, particular editions — how literature gets made.”
During a recent visit, Lanning helped student Alexis Sheldon print her name using a tabletop Book Beetle machine, which replicates an 18th-century Gutenberg press.
The process requires placing each letter onto a plate — but backward and upside-down — and then carefully inking a brayer tool and transferring the ink onto the plate.
You then position the plate into the press, rotate the handle and lower a piece of wood, called a platen, down onto the press. The platen provides pressure that pushes the sheet of paper against the inked surface of the type to create the print.
“It takes forever,” Sheldon said. “It’s really cool, honestly, but manning a huge one would be so much work.”
Lanning said experimenting with classic print-making tools gives students a new appreciation for the work that went into creating ancient texts. In those days, books came together letter by letter, line by line. There’s no delete key, and even the blank spaces are thoughtfully planned.
“One of the biggest surprises for students when they do this is: Blank space is never just there,” Lanning said. “You have to form it with these little pieces of metal. So I never take blank space for granted.”
In a class called “Technologies of the Book,” Lanning teaches a medieval poem titled “Pangur Ban,” about an Irish monk who works as a scribe — and his cat, who works all night hunting mice.
“It’s a charming poem, and it reminds you that people have always loved cats, right?” Lanning said. “But after trying to write a manuscript, you understand a bit more of the frustration and the toil that is also a part of that poem.”
One recent afternoon, graduate student Natalie Feild used a quill pen and ink to write phrases onto a piece of parchment.
“I’ve always loved books, loved literature, especially Jane Austen novels, Brontes and stuff like that,” Feild said. “So to sort of transport myself back is, I think, the coolest part, to do what they did as they wrote the books that I love so much.”
Feild said she is amazed by the amount of effort it takes to create texts the old-fashioned way.
“It’s very time consuming, very precise,” she said. “But I think that just adds to the overall quality and effect of the things, because you know that a lot of time and care was put into it.”
One wall of the Book Lab features framed misprints. Most have backward or upside-down letters, like the Bible verse that says, “Word mape flesh,” and a “Future Shocker” headline that instead reads “REKCOHS ERUTUF.”
The makerspace is already a hit with history buffs and will serve as a resource for the English Department’s new minor in text technologies.
Lanning said one student decided to study typos in Victorian periodicals, because working with the letterpress revealed particular mistakes that printers have made over and over again.
“You just never know what kind of project can come out of a space like this,” she said.
The Book Lab was funded by a donation from Lanning’s family in memory of her late grandfather, Robert Cattoi. He was an engineer who loved reading and appreciated great literature, Lanning said. He read every Agatha Christie mystery and recited poems by Ogden Nash.
“He left his family a legacy of supporting education. And this space felt like a great way to honor that,” Lanning said. “This is a space that combines making things with reading things, so we’ve named this space after him.”
The Book Technologies Lab is open by appointment to classes, students working on individual projects, or community members interested in workshops or lectures. People with questions about the space can fill out an inquiry form on the lab’s website.
