Rare Book School - History and Mission

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. When 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, changing its name in 2000 to Rare Book School (RBS), and for the most part restricting the Book Arts Press name 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, and in Washington DC (at the Freer Gallery of Art/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery). The school is known for the excellence of its faculty, many of whom are world-renowned in their fields; for its extensive teaching collections; for its hard-working, effective full-time staff, and for the high quality of its students (who apply competitively for admission to the school’s five-day courses). RBS students, typically about 40 years old, include curators and rare book librarians, academics, antiquarian booksellers, book conservators and binders, and book collectors. The school employs a widely admired – though rarely imitated – 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.