Looking for Text Work in Twentieth-Century Secretarial Manuals with Erin McGuirl

Five College Faculty Seminar in Book History

Erin McGuirl is the Executive Director of the Bibliographical Society of America, the oldest scholarly society in North America dedicated to the study of books and manuscripts as physical objects. She has published in Printing History, Atlas Obscura, the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, and in Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton University Press, 2021). The results of her recent work, "Women's Work in Film Production & The Documents of Film History" is forthcoming in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies in September 2025.

She has worked at the Columbia University's Avery Art & Architectural Library's Classics Collection and then at the New York Society Library (NYSL) as Special Collections Librarian. At the NYSL she led a project to redesign and launch City Readers, a digital humanities tool for the study of reading and readers at the Library, New York City's oldest cultural institution (founded in 1754). She also works with Robert M. Rubin and his collection of screenplays.