Reimagining Book History Creatively for Twenty‐First‐Century Publishing Students

ABSTRACT Teaching book history to twenty‐first‐century publishing students often proves a delightful challenge as some grapple with appreciating how this history is relevant to not only their pursuit of a career in the publishing industry but also the publishing industry generally. An effective method to elicit a practical empathy from students is to explicitly place what they understand to be the modern publishing process into diverse historical contexts. This Forum article provides practice‐based examples how we can reimagine book history and apply a hybrid pedagogy that engages publishing students creatively. In transactional workshops, students perform an embodied, self‐reflective art of ‘doing’ a living book history through student‐led hands‐on activities that prioritize process over ‘product’: ‘destructive bibliography’ to re‐envision contemporary ‘knowledge work’ in historical artefacts and identify the distinct parts of books; ‘working as a scribe’ to reveal the distinct affordances inherent to scribal and print production and their respective socio–material contexts to manufacture knowledge; and ‘scissors‐and‐paste journalism’, for which students practise an un/re‐making editorial curation – emulating nineteenth‐century periodicals’ reuse and aggregation of content. This article offers my ethnographic journey, as publishing practitioner and academic, both to reveal to publishing students how book history is just as living as the present, and to assist with developing their awareness of how this living history embodies not only change but also continuity with, and connection to, twenty‐first‐century practices.