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Antiquarian booksellers and library staff in Southern California have been talking for years about starting up a rare book school on the West Coast.

Now, the talk has ended.

UCLA will open its classrooms in July and August to students interested in the newly founded California Rare Book School, a UCLA Department of Information Studies project.

“You have to stop talking. You have to start doing,” said information studies Professor Beverly Lynch, who so far has written three successful grant proposals for the new institution.

The school will offer five intensive week-long courses, including “Book Illustration Processes to 1900” and “Books of the Far West,” with an emphasis on California.

Classes will be hands-on, with a maximum of 15 students in each.

Some will include field trips to area libraries housing important collections.

Anyone can apply to enroll in the school, but Lynch said she expects many of the students to be professionals in the field hoping to gain experience in an area – rare books – about which few have knowledge.

Courses will also be offered next summer, and administrators hope to make it permanent if they find there is a market for the school, Lynch said.

There is no simple definition for what a rare book is, according to a guide published by the Association of College and Research Libraries. Books achieve a degree of rarity if demand for them outweighs supply.

“In the final analysis, the most essential factor is the book’s intrinsic importance, for only books with some acknowledged importance will have a consumer demand that creates market value,” the guide states.

Lynch, a book collector, said learning how to catalog and otherwise handle rare books in special collections is becoming increasingly important as more material becomes digitized.

In the future, fewer people will visit libraries to look at general collections, which will be available online. More patrons will want to look at unique manuscripts, books, maps and other items important not just for their content, but for their original format as well, Lynch said.

Cataloging rare texts requires a different set of rules because people are interested in the books as artifacts – the form, not just the content, is of interest, said Deborah Leslie, head of cataloguing at the Folger Shakespeare Library, who will teach a California Rare Book School course on the subject.

Terry Belanger, founding director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, said he will be teaching a class on book illustration at UCLA this summer that will focus in part on helping professionals and other students understand why pictures in old books appear the way they do.

The type of paper on which an image is printed, along with the amount of time that has passed since publication, are just two factors that affect what the drawing looks like today.

“The paper will age over time and change color, so old books have a sort of manila or cream color which may not have been the case 500 years ago when it was new,” Belanger said.

“We’re looking at an image through a filter. ... It’s important to train yourself, at least mentally, to remove the filter,” he said.

For more information on the California Rare Book School, including how to apply, visit www.calrbs.org.