Building of RIT's Bookwheel

In 2018, a team of RIT undergraduate engineering students, Ian Kurtz, Reese Salen, Matthew Nygren, and Maher Abdelkawi, set out to build two bookwheels using Ramelli’s design for their senior Mechanical Engineering design project. They sourced as many historically-accurate materials as possible, namely European beech and white oak. They utilized modern techniques when using historic methods would have been too burdensome. For example, they could have cut the wooden gears by hand, but modern power tools like laser-cutters allowed them to save a significant amount of time in the building process.

The team built two bookwheels: one is housed as part of the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection, located in the Wallace Library. The other was built for the Hope Robbins Library at the University of Rochester. Those at UoR were excited for the opportunity to have a bookwheel of their own to use as a teaching tool.

The RIT team’s designs have been used far beyond Rochester. The Museum of Languages of the World, located in Russia, built their own version using the RIT plans, and the University of the Pacific in California has also expressed interest in acquiring one for their own collection.