The History of the Book Seminar Series is an interdisciplinary realm of study that includes printing and publishing, materials and technologies of the book, the book trade, reading and readers, and collectors and collections, as well as library and information history. The field is focused on human behavior, as well as material culture, and draws on the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The seminar is designed for, and frequently features, NIU faculty and students.

April 4, 2024 @ 5-6pm 
Rare Books and Special Collections Reading Room
Founders Memorial Library, Room 403
Light refreshments will be provided.

Presenter: Laura Wasowicz, Curator, American Antiquarian Society
Talk Title: Riding the “Lava Wave”: Rediscovering the Amateur Press
Abstract: “The Adams and Novelty presses kindly furnished the crater, and through it poured the burning lava.” –John Winslow Snyder, eighteen-year-old amateur journalist, 1873.
With the advent of the Improved Lowe Tabletop Press in 1868, a floodgate of opportunities for personal expression opened for hundreds of children and teenagers across the United States throughout the late nineteenth century. These boys AND girls tried their hands at typesetting and printing works written by themselves. These amateur-produced books contained courtship advice, whimsical nature poetry, comic stories, and highly violent tales of adventure.
I will discuss what I discovered while riding the “lava wave,” cataloging the superb holdings of 200 amateur books held at the American Antiquarian Society, an independent research library in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 2022, AAS received a two-year NEH grant funding the Historic Children’s Voices Project to catalog and digitize printed and manuscript juvenilia. What I have found are stories of ambition, glimmers of literary brilliance, caustic wit, and lives cut short by mental illness or endemic diseases like tuberculosis. Above all, these tiny pamphlets reflect the desires of young people to develop and refine their unique voice as writers, editors, typographers, and entrepreneurs.