“There is more to life than medieval books, but it’s a good place to start.”

I am a Professor at UBC School of Information (iSchool), Vancouver. My primary interests are medieval book design and communication in the premodern world, before the introduction of printing in Europe. My research and teaching is hands-on, with real objects on the table. A good day is having medieval dirt on my hands. If you want to know more about my work, check out my research profile. If you are interested in watching some lectures I gave, some of them are available here (in Dutch and English).

I have been blogging since February 2012. My first posts appeared on MedievalFragments, a blog maintained by my research project (the blog was closed 29 August, 2014). In March 2013 I started a Tumblr blog with shorter posts and attractive images. They are frequently featured in printed and online media, including CNN, The Daily Mail, Huffington Post, Colossal (and here again), Engadget, Paris Review and The Verge.

This blog was started 22 August, 2014. Posts written prior to November 2025 are 1000-1200 words long and deal with topics related to my research. A selection was published in Books Before Print (Leeds: ArcHumanities Press, 2018). I am currently trying out posts in a different format, presenting reflections and my thinking about medieval books. Ultimately, this blog aims to show you what is so special and attractive about medieval books. Images are in part taken from online databases. However, I developed an interest in photography of old books and those are found here, too.

Social media are means to share the beauty and relevance of medieval books with a broad audience beyond academia. You can read more about my views on social media in this Neatorama interview and this Buzzfeed article on historians ‘who are killing it online’. I killed my Twitter account in November 2022, when things went crazy there. I joined Bluesky in November 2024, after a short stint at Mastodon.

The images on my blog are taken from public websites (these photos are accompanied by a link to the source) or made with my own camera (these can be recognised by the label “Photo EK” or “Photo by the author”). To re-use an image from a public database, follow the link and check out the publication policy before reposting (it may have changed since I downloaded the image). You are welcome to use the images that I made myself: they are published here under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license.

Thanks for visiting and happy reading!

Erik Kwakkel