First of all an apology is in order for everyone who was expecting a special fashion issue. I had to split issue three into issues three and four to avoid going over our total page count, which pushes the fashion issue into 2017. I promise, though, it is coming.

What can current students preparing for careers as librarians, archivists and museum curators learn from the book as object and the book as art? How can artists’ books and artisans engaged in bookmaking, conservation and curating books inform our ideas of the book as more than its text? How does bookmaking deepen the connection for students between content and form? This article describes a 6-week workshop conducted at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto that explores the book from its earliest forms to artists’ books and includes many descriptions of books constructed by iSchool students.

The Great Book of Ireland, Leabhar Mór na hÉireann, is an extraordinary modern vellum manuscript in a single volume which comprises the original work of 120 artists, 140 poets and nine composers. Produced in Dublin between 1989 and 1991, it has been acquired by University College Cork to be preserved in posterity on behalf of the Irish people.

Conceived originally as a venture to create a saleable artefact which would help to fund the development plans of two arts organizations in Ireland, the original architects of the idea and editors of the end product were Theo Dorgan of Poetry Ireland and Gene Lambert of Clashganna Mills, with Eamonn Martin as business manager. Out of their initial meeting in March 1989 came the first tentative idea of producing an original artefact that would raise substantial funds for their charitable-status arts organizations, while at the same time being a venture worthwhile in itself. What was to emerge was a project of breath-taking ambition and scale – The Great Book of Ireland, Leabhar Mór na hÉireann, completed in 1991.

Artists, poets, and composers were asked to contribute in their own medium what they believed represented their hopes, fears, dreams, or imaginings in the Ireland of that particular time, and which would have resonance in a thousand years - as the longevity of vellum allows. Each page of The Great Book is a unique artefact in itself, often multi-layered or palimpsestial in nature. The whole “united” in design by the work of the scribe, Denis Brown.

This paper will describes the creation process of the book, its subsequent history, and future plans for the book at University College Cork.

Object-based learning lies at the heart of teaching in both historical bibliography and cataloguing classes on the MA Library and Information Studies at UCL. Tom Phillips's work A humument and the novel he chose to use as his canvas, W.H. Mallock's A human document provide memorable ‘object lessons’ with scope for students to synthesize and evaluate their pre-existing learning from inside and outside the modules. It is important that the examples used in class are simple enough to illustrate the strengths of any conceptual model yet complex enough to highlight its limits. It is also ideal if examples can be beautiful as well as useful. A humument fulfills all these criteria and, for students with no background in art or art librarianship, also introduces the artists' book as a genre and artists themselves as an important and interesting user group within information services.

The use of wood engraving as a method of graphic reproduction for books, periodicals and newspapers continued for a surprisingly long time after the development of photographic methods. End-grain boxwood engraving was a truly Victorian phenomenon and an understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, versatility and limitations of this technique may perhaps best be reached through an exploration of its commercial decline. The period 1860–1900 saw a combination of competing technical, economic and aesthetic demands influencing the development of illustrative processes and eventually led to the end of commercial wood engraving. A form of engraving closer to Bewick's original interpretation of the craft re-emerged through the arts and crafts movement and the establishment of private presses during the inter-war period.