Instructor: Marshall Weber
Location: New York | Booklyn, Inc.
Mode: In-person
Dates: August 10–14, 2026
Tuition: $1200.00

Description

Booklyn is located on the un-ceded land of the Munsee Lenape peoples. We ask you to join us in acknowledging the Lenape community, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations. 

This is five-day, 6 hour a day (11am–5am) workshop on-site at Booklyn, Inc., 140 58^th St., Building B, 7-G, Brooklyn  

This workshop will examine recent artists’ archives, books, box sets, and zines that can be defined as primary first-person, research material and used to support teaching and instruction across university curricula and multiple disciplines.  

For four days the class will focus on granular, critical aesthetic analysis of materials from Booklyn’s collections of archives, artists’ books, ephemera, and zines, followed by discussions of access, usage, and conservation of those same materials. On the fifth day we will visit the Interference Archive at 314 7th St, Brooklyn, NY 11215, to look at their collections.  

Day 1, August 19^th, Read It and Weep 

We’ll look at a selection of artists’ books that use affective, emotional, and multisensory strategies to deal with complex scientific and social issues. 

Example: https://booklyn.org/catalog/mother-archive/

Day 2, August 20^th, Deal With IT 

There is a major generational shift happening in creative practice in the artists’ book field as younger artists try and deal with the massive input of data from, social media, the internet, the accelerating pace of scientific discovery and the globalization of economies and cultures. On this day we’ll look at the ascendancy of infographics and the integration of text and image in artists’ book practice. 

Example: https://booklyn.org/catalog/enshittification/

Day 3, August 21^st, Shining Star for You to See 

Artists’ books provide myriad kaleidoscopic and global windows to the world, today we’ll look at the role of the artists/authors’ culture, identity, style and voice as they catalyze, and are embodied in, their artworks. 

Example: https://booklyn.org/catalog/the-book-of-five-cursed-moons/

Day 4, August 22^nd, Look Back to the Future Framework 

We’ll do an overview and evaluation of the class, share our resources, and our ideas of how to move forward and look at some classic artists’ books that support (and expand upon) the concepts explored in the previous three days. We’ll also spend a moment talking about the global Art and Special Collections Library network that makes all this possible 

Example: https://booklyn.org/catalog/ten-years-of-uzbekistan-a-commemoration/

Day 5, August 23^rd, Community Archives, living archives, and activist archives. 

We’ll meet at the completely amazing Interference Archive — https://interferencearchive.org/, at 314 7th St, Brooklyn, NY 11215, and I’ll ask all you librarians to search the archives for material that reflects your own lives. 

Requirements

n/a

Offered

2026

Credit

Completion of this course helps to meet requirements for one of the following certificate requirements:

• 1 of 3 elective credit courses for Certificate in Rare Books and Manuscripts, or
• the Critical Librarianship in Praxis requirement for Certificate in Librarianship, Activism, and Justice