For over a century, scholars have been working with scientists, conservators, librarians, and other specialists to try to uncover books’ hidden stories — to try to read more not only into their texts, but into their covers, colours, ink, pages, and bindings, as well as their pollen, mould, wormholes, and stains. 

Often these collaborations seek answers to questions about who made and modified these written artefacts, with what materials and techniques, and why. 

At other times, they have been focussed on addressing challenges surrounding books’ conservation, care, and access as fragile and irreplaceable representatives of cultural heritage. 

A significant number of these investigations focus on how to improve our own research methods — to understand and minimize the harm they might cause, to make the most of the knowledge to be gained, and to plan projects with sensitivity to researchers’ ethical responsibilities to the books and the communities that they were created to serve.

‘Book science’ is becoming increasingly recognized as an umbrella term uniting these various fields and areas of interdisciplinary study of historical books and other written artefacts. Many Hidden Stories research areas intersect with book science methods, and so it is best described as a crosscutting theme or thread within our work (and hence in our ‘Resources’ section on this site).

Read on for a description of our Fisher Summer Seminar on Book Science from June 2024.