This panel was proposed in order to push the boundaries of book history, particularly in the direction disciplinary crossover and to address questions of labor. While book history has always been interdisciplinary, we also felt that the topic of our forum’s specialties fit perfectly with this year’s MLA presidential theme, given that it is a methodology especially suited to consider the labor of mediation in institutions like libraries, museums, booksellers and universities. The theme therefore impelled us to consider the ways book history might intersect with museum studies, library sciences, or other work done by experts and nonexperts in cultural institutions today. This desire was prompted by cutting-edge work in museum studies, as represented by groups like Death To Museums, which (among other things) calls for a fundamental rethinking of the hierarchical structures of museum labor in the interest in “decolonizing the museum.” Many museums are doing away with unpaid internships and reconfiguring their understanding of the role of facilities workers and guards. We believe that book history would benefit from a similar examination of the hierarchies that assume the author and editor to have nothing to do with paper manufacture or book binding. To that end, we chose three scholars, two in English departments and one in library science, to discuss topics in the 18th, 19th and 21st centuries, in England, the US and Germany respectively. The panel will have a five-minute introduction by Brylowe explaining its genesis and suggesting that our work as professors is not supported by but actually joined with the labors of the structural trades and facilities people who maintain the infrastructure of our institutions. The rational for each 20-minute paper as follows. Each scholar’s work addresses an aspect of the working conditions necessary for print mediation and each paper demonstrates a new way of “doing” book history. Leuner’s paper looks at the dangerous work of 18th-century colored ink makers, and she uses The Honour and Advantage of Agriculture (1764), printed in green ink, to examine the overlap between the ink-maker and agricultural laborer’s working conditions. As such, she considers the “dangerous chemistry” of ink-makers and identifies their work with other specialized laborers in industrializing England. Next, Roylance takes up the issue of 19^th-century printers’ public performances of their labors, as performed on floats in civic parades. We are very excited by the way Roylance uses performance studies to study printing. Finally, Kohlwein looks at the Viennese library cataloging systems as a representation that encodes the work of collecting and finding printed works. In inviting a specialist in library science to discuss book history, we hope to forge a truly interdisciplinary panel that invites an unstructured conversation about the labor of cultural mediation for the last 20 minutes.