This course problematizes the repositories from which historians derive empirical evidence and interpretive authority. It asks how we might think of archives and libraries not as inert containers of information to be mined, but as social processes and historically evolving institutions shaped by contingent material-cum-textual practices of truth-making. Case studies spanning a wide spatial and temporal arc will offer a comprehensive introduction to a transnational historiographical field and a set of conceptual frameworks and methods for further work at the intersection of Book History, Anthropology, Archival Studies, Media Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies. Readings will focus on topics such as the emergence and transformation of imperial archives, the long shadow of Eurocentrism in both Book History and Archival Studies, the role of scribes, archivists, and cataloguers as cultural intermediaries, the entanglements between state, corporate, and family archives, and the constitutive role of myriad archival practices in varied regimes of evidentiality and governmentality, from medieval scriptoria to Indigenous digital platforms. In particular, the course will thematize the centrality of mobility — of textual/visual artifacts, technologies, genres, scribal practices and practitioners — across presumed divides (manuscript:print:digital; pre:modern; metropole:colony; north:south; east:west) in the making of "documents" and "archives," "books," and "libraries" as objects of study.