I began to teach book history courses at Columbia University's School of Library Service (SLS) in 1971, when Dean Richard L. Darling gave me a brief to develop a master's program in rare book and special collections librarianship and antiquarian bookselling at the school.

After more than a decade of rapid expansion, new college and university teaching jobs in the humanities rapidly disappeared in the United States in the early 1970s, with the result that a number of first-rate students (caught in the PhD pipeline) devolved into our new SLS rare book program with doctorates in hand; nearly half of the other students in the early days of the Columbia rare book program came in with at least a subject master's degree. Assisted by a succession of excellent students, I set up a bibliographical laboratory to support SLS's courses in historical and descriptive bibliography, borrowing iron printing presses, foundry type, printing-house furniture, papermaking and binding equipment, and a name – the Book arts press – from a defunct Columbia University Libraries venture established in the 1930s by Alice Bonnell, Helmut Lehmann-Haupt, and other Columbia rare book librarians. Over the next two decades, I more or less learned how to determine format and establish a collation; make, marble, and decorate paper; set type, impose, and print on a hand press; identify and date type faces, illustration processes, and binding styles; and etch, engrave, and cut relief blocks – all in service to laboratory sessions that everyone in the rare book program was required to take.

In class, I taught book history. A recently released 30-minute black-and-white 16mm film, The Making of a Renaissance Book (1969) was very useful. The challenge was to find adequate readings for students to look at outside class. A number of grim old reliables were readily available in 1971: surveys like lawrence Wroth's Colonial Printer (1931 and 1938), lehmann-haupt's Book in America (1939 and 1951), and S. H. Steinberg's Five Hundred Years of Printing (1951 and 1961); books on specialist topics such as Daniel Berkeley Updike's Printing Types (1922 and 1937); Dard Hunter's Papermaking (1943 and 1947);