Sponsored by The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation

Books and single-sheet prints with moving parts date from the beginning of printmaking practice. Drawing on the holdings of the Newberry Library, and collections worldwide, this talk will discuss the ways early modern printers and designers laid out, printed, and assembled these flaps, dials, and constructible objects. Evidence survives in the form of manuals, paper evidence, woodblocks, uncut sheets of movable parts, and in the constructed books themselves. Little known today, interactive prints formed a pervasive, tactile component of visual culture addressing humorous, political, religious, and scientific topics of pivotal interest to the public of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.

Suzanne Karr Schmidt is the George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at The Newberry. She was previously assistant curator in the department of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she curated the exhibition Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Everyday Life. She is the author of Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance (Brill 2017). Suzanne holds a BA in the history of art and architecture and visual art from Brown University, as well as MPhil and PhD degrees in the history of art from Yale University.