The atmosphere at Rare Book School, which was founded at Columbia University in 1983 by the scholar Terry Belanger and transplanted to Charlottesville in 1992, is casual and egalitarian, despite the presence on the faculty of some of the world’s leading experts in the history of the book. But woe to those outsiders who take casual liberties with the basics. Younger staff members admit to playing a drinking game based on the howlers in “The Ninth Gate,” a biblio-thriller starring Johnny Depp as a rakish rare-book scout given to carelessly cracking spines and looking up 17th-century hand-press books in Books in Print.

And don’t get anyone started on Umberto Eco’s “Name of the Rose.”

“It’s a great story,” Jan Storm van Leeuwen, the retired keeper of the binding collection at the Dutch Royal Library in The Hague, said when the subject came up one night at dinner. “But his description of the library is full of mistakes.”

Initiation into the devilishly complex particulars of book history is acquired in the school’s lectures and lab sessions, where students learn to look past the words on the page to recover the moment when ink met paper. In a Hogwarts-worthy reading room on an upper floor of the university’s Alderman Library one morning, students in Advanced Descriptive Bibliography were bent over books with tape measures and mini light sabers called Zelcos, scanning the pages for watermarks, lines and other clues that can potentially trace a given sheet back to a specific paper mold in a specific mill.

The goal of Advanced Des Bib — or advanced “boot camp,” as students put it — is to reverse engineer precisely how the pages of the book were folded, cut, printed and gathered. The whole process is then described in a string of symbols that, to the newcomer, can look less like a reconstruction of an ordinary day’s work in an 18th-century print shop than like instructions for building a small nuclear reactor.

Downstairs in a seminar room Richard Noble, a rare-book cataloger from Brown University, quoted a warning against writing formulas — as the descriptions, which are published in scholarly catalogs, are known — that were “hirsute with commas.”

“You want the important information to jump right out at you,” he said.

Other courses allowed students to linger over the more frankly sensual properties of old books. In Mr. Storm van Leeuwen’s class on the history of bookbinding, a session was dedicated to passing around felt-lined baskets filled with exquisite hand-marbled papers from the 18th century to the present, many drawn from his own collection.

In History of the Book, 200 to 2000, Mr. Dimunation of the Library of Congress and his co-teacher, John Buchtel, the head of special collections at Georgetown University, raided the University of Virginia’s vaults to stage a parade of precious objects that was like a slide show come miraculously to life: a loose leaf from a Gutenberg Bible; a copy of the first printed edition of Euclid’s geometry, from 1482; a 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle.