This book was born in the Rare Books Room at Butler Library in Prof. Elisheva Carlebach's seminar on the history of the Jewish book. Prof. Carlebach introduced us to the treasures of the Columbia rare books collection, including and especially, Hebrew printed works of the sixteenth century. These are the focus of this book, which tells the story of how printing fashioned the Jewish bookshelf as we know it. Printing was not merely the duplication and distribution of pre-existing manuscripts, it was the creative adaptation and transformation of those manuscripts by printers. Ranging from Catholic Bologna to Protestant Basel to the Jewish heartland of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, First Impressions uncovers the history of that creativity. Along the way, it demonstrates how volumes that were long thought to be eternal and unchanging were in fact artifacts of historical agency and contingency, created by and for human beings.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/F/bo196813779.html