Galloway, N.J. — Don’t tell Tom Kinsella that printed books aren’t useful anymore.

“They’ll last longer than that thing in your hand,” the Stockton University Distinguished Professor of Literature said, referring to a student’s smartphone. “If you don’t throw it in water or put it in a fire, if you keep it in a reasonable environment, a book is going to last a long, long time.”

Kinsella is the director of Stockton’s South Jersey Culture and History Center (SJCHC), which for 13 years has run the only student-staffed local history printing press in New Jersey.

Recently, the SJCHC has published about five to 8 books each year focusing on historical topics ranging from the environment and Jewish farming to architecture and memoirs — all with extensive assistance from students through internships and coursework. About 40 books have been published in total. The center also annually publishes SoJourn, a journal devoted to the history, culture and geography of South Jersey.

“Students are introduced to the details that make books work,” Kinsella said. “Students learn how to proofread, and edit, and how to complete design and layout. They make decisions about fonts, margins, headers and footers.”

And while these might seem like small choices, Kinsella believes they are transferable skills for students of all majors.

“You are making decisions about the look and feel of something you’re communicating, whether that’s in a book or a podcast or even a social media post,” he said.

Stockton senior Dickson Moreno put those skills to work last spring while helping produce "Stories from Gibersonville on the Mullica River," a memoir by former Port Republic Mayor Gary Giberson. The book is one of several published by the center that explore the history and culture of the Pine Barrens.

Moreno, who said he’s “fascinated with the creation of printed material,” helped design the cover and select the font and design for the book’s body text. He also spent considerable time editing and proofreading, which was a challenge because Moreno didn’t want to cut the author’s voice.

“It’s a memoir and there are a couple of words that technically are misspellings, but that’s how people talked then,” said the Literature major from Atlantic City.

Moreno said he enjoyed the internship because he believes that college isn’t just an academic place to attend lectures, but it’s also where you can create knowledge and inform the local community.

“The center’s printing press is really important because it’s one of the channels to give a voice to people who live locally,” he said.

While many of the center's publications explore the region's history, others take a more unconventional approach to preserving the past. One of those is "None of Us Are Frights," a new poetry collection by Taylor Carmen Savath that examines the history of disabled sideshow performers.

“Tom’s students got a bit more of a weird adventure out of me,” said the 2016 Stockton graduate with a degree in Literature and a concentration in Creative Writing.

Savath had been thinking for years about a book of poetry on the history of disabled freak show performers. She was born with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy and because of her disability, she said she has felt a connection to those she writes about in the book.

“This is South Jersey history down to its bones,” said the adjunct professor who teaches Disability Studies. “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is still standing on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. I walk by it all the time. Ripley was one of the bigger names in the human exploitation industry, so that history lives in this place.”

The book, featuring a disturbing photo of an elephant hanged by a traveling circus on its cover, gives a voice to the tattooed man, the conjoined twins and the aerialists of early circuses. In addition to Savath’s poetry, the book also contains historical photos.

“I wanted people to know that these were real people, and I wasn’t making them up in my brain,” she said. “These are people who existed.”

For Stockton sophomore Alyssa Shivers, editing Savath's poetry collection required more than checking spelling and punctuation. The placement of words on a page could change how a poem was read and experienced.

“Some of the poems were longer than one page, but we had to decide where we wanted to break them,” said the Literature major from Springfield. “Should the text be more in the middle of the page? Should it be left-aligned? What fits the tone of each specific poem?”

Savath was thrilled with the results.

“It took so many peoples’ brains for this weird little baby to come to fruition that I’m so proud of,” she said. “I know that students got to make actual choices here, and I think that’s really exciting.”

Shivers also thoroughly enjoyed working on the book, adding that if Kinsella asked her again she would do it “in a heartbeat.” The skills she learned during the internship were invaluable and could help anyone in any major.

“You’re always going to have to write, and you’re always going to need to know how to word things properly to get what you want to communicate across to other people the correct way,” she said. “I think it’s really important for everyone to remember that writing is human. It makes us human.”

View a complete catalog of books published by the SJCHC. Other books printed this year include “Seven Bridges Road,” which details the cultural and environmental history of the Sheepshead Meadows area of the Mullica River Estuary, “Quaker Sons Go to War” about the Allinson family of Burlington County during the Civil War and “Delaware River Tugboats,” an illustrated history of these hard-working boats. The books are available through Amazon and at Second Time Books in Mount Laurel. For more information about the center, the internship or purchasing a book, contact Kinsella at thomas.kinsella@stockton.edu.

— Story by Mark Melhorn, photos by Abbigail Erbacher

Read more about the South Jersey Cultural and History Center