Books facilitate learning, circulate ideas, and contain the stories that unite (and divide) societies, yet we often think of them solely in terms of their content and tend to evaluate them based on our own aesthetic preferences. In this course, we will reconsider everything we know about books and approach them as material objects that present quantifiable, observable data, which we can glean using bibliographical methods. These methods involve generating and testing hypotheses about how books are made and used, such as binding practices, printing techniques, and evidence of reader interaction. We will engage with books in a variety of forms—from rare special collections manuscripts to ebooks—and we will question how the physical components of a book work with its contents to create and spread knowledge. Using art, literature, film, and other forms of media, we will interrogate the role and reception of the material book in western society, and we will engage in embodied bookmaking practices (such as bookbinding and printing on a tabletop press) to better understand how these objects are assembled and used as well as how their material elements can be analyzed as forms of data.