Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Newberry Library
Newberry Library (Chicago, IL)
Interactive and sculptural prints pervaded the European reading market of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Single sheets and book illustrations featured movable flaps and dials, and functioned as kits to build three-dimensional scientific instruments. These hybrid constructions—part text, part image, and part sculpture—engaged readers; so did the polemical, satirical, and, occasionally, erotic content. By manipulating dials and flaps, or building and using the instruments, viewers learned to think through images as well as words, interacting visually with desires, social critique, and knowledge itself.
Suzanne Karr Schmidt is the Newberry Library’s George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts. British Airways once heralded her book as “unusual and distinctive.” Her other publications include Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life.