Pressing Matters: The Impact of Print Across the Atlantic

On view in the Leventhal Special Collections Cases May 14 – September 13

The printing press has produced books and pamphlets, newspapers and ephemera, that have documented and shaped the pressing matters of their age. From London to Boston, printing shops popularized epic poems, utopian novels, and slave narratives that would connect reading communities across the Atlantic. This exhibition features printed objects that reveal how their makers captured the attention of their audiences through authorial frontispieces, detailed engravings, and tantalizing title pages. If you look closely, you can see the worn edges of pages, marginal scribblings, and pasted newspaper clippings that reveal their use over time. Together, these objects demonstrate how the printing press has impacted the debates of its places and times, providing a medium for matters, ranging from religious freedom to racial oppression to oceanic exploitation, that continue to press us today.

This installation is a result of a collaboration between the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the Boston Athenaeum. Graduate students in Prof. Alex Mueller’s “History of the Book” course selected and curated these objects for exhibition.