Rare Book School (RBS) is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based at the University of Virginia. It supports the study of the history of books, manuscripts, and related objects. Each year, RBS offers about 30 five-day courses on these subjects. Most of the courses are offered at its headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia but others are held in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. Its courses are intended for teaching academics, archivists, antiquarian booksellers, book collectors, conservators and bookbinders, rare book and special collections librarians, and others with an interest in book history.
The school was founded in 1983 at Columbia University by Terry Belanger, and moved to the University of Virginia in 1992. In 2005, Belanger received a $500,000 MacArthur Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for his work in supporting the study of the history of books and printing by offering training opportunities to rare book and special collections librarians and curators, antiquarian booksellers, academics, bookbinders and conservators, and book collectors. Belanger retired as director of RBS at the end of August 2009; his successor is Michael F. Suarez, S.J.
History and mission
Terry Belanger founded the Book Arts Press at the Columbia University School of Library Service in 1972 as a laboratory for various programs concerned with the history of books and printing, descriptive bibliography, the antiquarian book trade, and rare book and special collections librarianship. Belanger became University Professor and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia in 1992. The BAP and its collections moved with him to Charlottesville, its name was changed in 2000 to Rare Book School, and for the most part the Book Arts Press name was restricted to RBS publications.
At UVa, RBS supports courses concerning the history of the book and related subjects. It carries on exhibition and publication programs under the Book Arts Press imprint, and it sponsors public lectures—notably the annual Sol. M. and Mary Ann O'Brian Malkin Lecture in Bibliography. But its principal activity is an annually-offered schedule of about 30 short non-credit courses on subjects ranging from the history of bookbinding to modern fine printing. The majority of these courses are offered in Charlottesville, but courses are also currently offered in New York City (at the Grolier Club and at The Morgan Library & Museum), in Baltimore (at the Walters Art Museum and Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, DC (at the Freer Gallery of Art/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery), in Cambridge, MA (at Houghton Library), in New Haven, CT (at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library), and in Bloomington, IN (at the Lilly Library). Many of its faculty are world-renowned in their field, and it has extensive teaching collections. Its students apply competitively for admission to the school's five-day courses. RBS students, typically about 40 years old, include curators and rare book librarians, established and young academics, antiquarian booksellers, book conservators and binders, and book collectors. The school employs a course evaluation system in which attendees write detailed prose accounts of their experience at the school. Their comments are then mounted permanently and in their entirety on the school's web site.
Collections
RBS has a collection of printing presses and equipment that includes a replica eighteenth-century wooden rolling press (constructed according to plans in Diderot's Encyclopédie), a 19th-century Washington iron hand-press (such presses could be broken down and loaded into a Conestoga wagon), and a 20th-century flatbed cylinder proof press (a Vandercook SP-15, favorite of modern private-press letterpress printers). RBS staff also run printing demonstrations on a full-scale reproduction of a wooden common press (of the sort Benjamin Franklin might have used) owned by UVA. RBS's printing-house comprises 200 cases of printing type (including the 48-case Annenberg collection of wood type), a small Brand etching press, and various pieces of hand bookbinding equipment.