Our Approach

The Kelly Library Print Studio is an active letterpress print room and teaching space. From typesetting to fixing type, preparing paper, and inking and cranking a hand press, the Print Studio offers students – particularly those in St. Michael’s College’s Book and Media Studies program – a chance to learn using traditional fine presses like the C.M.C. Jobber Platen Press (ca. 1945), pictured here.

All students, faculty, and staff who hold a valid TCard can use the 3D Printers in the Robarts Digital Studio.

In order to preserve and pass on skills in letterpress printing and the care of its collection of nineteenth-century hand presses, the Robertson Davies Library has partnered with the Book History and Print Culture Collaborative Program to apprentice students in the Program and the Massey Junior Fellowship to the College Printer.

Johannes Gutenberg was our first geek, the original technology entrepreneur, who had to grapple with all the challenges a Silicon Valley startup faces today. Jeff Jarvis tells Gutenberg's story from an entrepreneurial perspective, examining how he overcame technology hurdles, how he operated with the secrecy of a Steve Jobs but then shifted to openness, how he raised capital and mitigated risk, and how, in the end, his cash flow and equity structure did him in. This is also the inspiring story of a great disruptor. That is what makes Gutenberg the patron saint of entrepreneurs.

Major transformations in society are always accompanied by parallel transformations in systems of social communication – what we call the media. In this book, historian Frédéric Barbier provides an important new economic, political and social analysis of the first great 'media revolution' in the West: Gutenbergs invention of the printing press in the mid fifteenth century.

Four seismic shifts have rocked human communication: the invention of writing, the alphabet, mechanical type and the printing press, and digitization. Poised over this fourth transition, e-reader in one hand, perfect-bound book in the other, Merilyn Simonds ― author, literary maven, and early adopter ― asks herself: what is lost and what is gained as paper turns to pixel?