This year it was a struggle to find that match, to meet with a book each on our terms. My needs from reading were all over the map—did I want escapism? something to help me process life? Who did I want to be in charge, my brain or the book or both? There were books I devoured even though I didn’t particularly like them. There were books I wanted to read that I just couldn’t bring myself to continue. I wept, I laughed, it was the best of times, the worst of times.

I read the first two books of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavansdatter trilogy this year. Written in the 1920s and set in 14th-century Norway, there wasn’t anything obvious that called to me about them, except that they’d been on my list since I read a review of the Tiina Nunally translations, and I’d just finished reading the Steerswoman books and needed something that was in an alternate world to sink into. The first one, The Wreath, pulled me in and didn’t let me go, even though I wanted to shake Kristin continually. A few months later, The Wife did the same, this time with more wanting to shake Kristin. And then in September I tried to get on with The Cross and I just couldn’t. There was so much to keep track of, the ins and outs of feudal politics in a country I had absolutely no knowledge about, and by this point Kristin’s life seemed to her and to me so hopeless, so without any of the joys the earlier books brought, and it was all too much. 

Tommy Orange’s There There was a different story. I loved it. I read it deeply. And then. And then it was too hard to read about Native American experiences of genocide and survival while also struggling with experiencing Jews as both the subjects and perpetrators of genocide. What does it mean to be an urban Indian, far from the reservations on which Indian life is seen to be based? What does it mean to be an American Jew, far from the biblical lands we were exiled from? What’s identity and nationality and the ongoing horror of feeling separated from your community because you know they are so deeply in the wrong but also mixed in with that an anger and sorrow because you know how and why they feel the way they do, but you don’t know how to broach that distance nor how to convey to outsiders the thousands of years of trauma we tell ourselves? As the book bore down closer and closer on the violence that was being planned, I slowed my reading down to a crawl and then paused and now I don’t know when I’ll pick it up again.

My tale of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is different yet again. The playfulness of that book! The layers on layers and twists on twists, all about reading books and writing books and making books—how could I not love that? Plus, I was reading it along with my book club. But oh! It was a busy summer and then I got Covid and you know what’s hard to do when your brain hurts and is in a fog? Read a book that you actually have to keep track of. I loved it and I wanted to understand it. And so I put it down until it’s been too long now to remember enough to be able to pick it up again. Will I do so in the future? I hope so. On the other hand, life is long and books are never ending and if all I have is a taste of this marvel, that could be enough.

Is it rude to leave you only with the reading failures? Here’s what worked for me this year:

Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds reimagines the origins of the United States and oh, how I mourned what the seventeenth century did to us all.

Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series imagines a whole new reality that is about knowledge making and what’s the line between magic and technology and I loved it. But I’m going to tell you something now, though, because I didn’t know and I was not prepared and I was wrecked: the series just stops. The last book isn’t the end of the quest, but just the last book written. It’s an abrupt ending I wasn’t at all prepared for and I did not like being kicked out of that world.

Barbara Pym is still everything. Quartet in Autumn is hard hard hard. But even lesser Pym is still great and I am looking forward to many rereadings of them for a long time. What does she imagine? That the small details of unmarried women are vast and tragic and comic. 

Mary Renault’s The Charioteer imagines a world in which gay men are worthy of love, self love and partnered love. To write that world at a time when it was so viciously denied? What a gift, then and now.

May we all know how to give voice to the futures that seem impossible so that we can act them into being.

Part of this feeling comes from the year’s circumstances. I went to New Zealand in late January, spending three weeks of summer in the middle of winter, and seeing a bit of a place I knew nothing about and that looks so little like most landscapes I know. My oldest spent the summer in California on an internship, the first time in which he’s not lived with me for at least a few months in a year and the startling realization that he might never live with me again. My youngest went off to college, something that I grieved for in advance only to discover that living by myself is actually glorious. And then right at the start of 5784, there was October 7 and its long bloody terrible aftermath, still ongoing without any clear end in sight and with the full-body apocalyptic horror of shouting helplessly at my own communities. And what’s in store for us in the United States in 2024? It looks a lot like repeating mistakes we should have learned from and more horror and dread.

There’s hope in all this if we look, too. That hope is in the ways people have stepped up to care for each other, in how set-in-stone beliefs are maybe slowly shifting. It’s in the joy of seeing my kids grow and become full, caring, active members of the world. The present is so unsettled that the future is even more visibly in flux, and we have a chance to use this moment to build something new. Will we? Maybe? Maybe not? But the promise is in the act of building, not in the having built. We practice, we strive, we look for our prophets, we get up every day and work. It’s hope. It’s tikkun olam. 

the full list

head over to Bookwyrm to see the full list of my 2023 books; I promise it’s not my handwritten scrawl! (to see my reviews, you’ll have to click on the book, and then scroll down to find mine)

The most astonishing book I read this year was Moby-Dick. I picked it up, decades after first having read tidbits of it for comps in grad school, largely because my youngest had read parts of it in high school and because we were headed to New Zealand. I did not expect the sheer shaggy weird excess of it. Yeah, there’s a plot about revenge and destruction. But it’s also about trying to capture the uncapturable by writing a book nearly as massive and detailed as whales themselves. It took me close to eight months to read it, not because it’s actually that long, but because I read it so slowly, usually at night before falling asleep, letting it wash over me. Such destruction humans wrought, all those people devouring whales to light their homes and make their engines go and all the industry that led us to where we are now, having gobbled up so much of our world’s natural bounty that we’re killing the planet. It was a peek back to a moment when we could have done things differently, and Melville felt on the side of whales in this, in the horror of whale bloodshed. He was also on the side of whiteness, without a doubt, but also so excessively so that my 80s lit training makes me want to say that his insistence on the horror of whiteness and yet the superiority of white people comes out in the strangled ways in which he can’t quite articulate why racially white is good. (Please don’t make me be a lit scholar about this; I’m not a 19th-centuryist, I don’t want to be, I just want to read.) Melville was a horrible person in so many ways. And this book is a piece of genius that I can’t quite hold in my mind.

I read other astonishing books both during and after that one. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet was pure beautiful grief. You know what’s coming and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, just like there’s nothing the characters can do to stop it. It wrecked me. (I tried her Marriage Portrait after this, but I hated it with a passion. It viscerally made me angry when I realized how she was going to get out of the plot she’d created, and I’m still angry now when I think about how she invented someone she could then destroy so that her rich heroine could live ever after. Fuck that.)

And then there were the time travel books. Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility was explicitly about the circles of time and how past and present and future all shift. What’s real? What makes things real? Station Eleven continues to be one of my favorite books, and the ways in which it and Glass Hotel and Sea work together is subtle and important and delightful. There’s grief and loss and yet also there’s hope and a future to build for in all of them.

Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book has more grief and less future in it, and so much pandemic trauma. I’d read the others in the Oxford Time Travel series and so knew what to expect, but also I read this one completely unprepared for the levels of loss in it. I couldn’t stop thinking about how traumatized they all must be, having gone through so much death and fear, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about us today. When are we going to pause to reckon with our pandemic trauma? How are we ever going to heal from the traumas happening in Palestine and Israel? Doomsday Book focuses on faith as the answer and on creating families of choice and need. Is that enough? I don’t believe in a God that swoops down and rescues us, and it’s clear Willis doesn’t either. But my faith as a Reconstructionist Jew teaches me that we can be godly—when we care for each other, we are the holiness that we seek.

Here’s to a future in which we actually choose life, in which we remember our obligation to save a life—not only to not kill but to make possible for everyone to have the chance to flourish, to find the holiness that is in all of us. Our governments might be failing us (they are failing us), but we don’t have to fail each other. 

Happy new year.

It’s been a pretty good reading year for me. I read slowly (so slowly) and just barely hit my goal of 50 books for the year. I don’t usually set a goal for myself, but BookWyrm prompts you to, and I thought an actual goal would help me remember that I do love reading books more than I love watching tv or staring into space, and so more of my evenings have been occupied with reading than the year before.² And I’m glad about that.

I read my usual combination of dross and gold. I also discovered the joys of listening to a book while falling asleep. It takes the right sort of book—one that doesn’t revolve around plot twists or one that you’ve read before and it’s okay to drift in and out of. The biggest problem is finding a good reader in my library’s offerings. I loved listening to Northanger Abbey, but the reader has a very scratchy voice that at bedtime is just not a good fit. I’m listening now to Maria Dhavani Headley’s new translation of Beowulf, and the reader (J. D. Jackson) is great but also, the drama of the poem is not conducive to sleep or to missing the details. On the plus side, I don’t know that I would have sat down and read it, and being able to listen is in many many ways the perfect way to meet the poem.

These are a handful of unputdownable books from this year that continue to talk to me long after I finished reading them:

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland was a slow read for me because I kept stopping to absorb it. I loved it. I hadn’t read any McCullers when I read Shapland’s book, and that didn’t stop me from following Shapland’s use of her to make sense of her own life. If you’re interested in closeted queerness, in archives, in how we see and don’t see the past, you might also love this book. For me, the biggest thing was that it crystalized something I’d been struggling with this year: Why are we devoting precious resources to all these old books and old documents that are my professional life? When the world is burning, when people are fleeing wars, when there’s a witch hunt going on demonizing trans and queer people, how can we justify pouring more carbon-burning energy into studying old books? But when I was at the low point of struggling with this question, I happened to read this book, and it helped shift my thinking away from my training as a literary scholar and book history (the important thing is the book!) to a view that centers people. People, like Shapland, find themselves in old books and documents, and what is of value is not only learning new things about books/history, but learning about who we are today. For some of you this might seem obvious, but it goes against all the training I had to center the past and value what we learn about these textual objects. But making this shift has helped me rediscover the joys and potentials of putting people together with books, and I am infinitely grateful for that realization.

After Shapland, I of course had to read some Carson McCullers, and I went with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. That really was a slow read. I interspersed so many other, easier, books while reading this one. It took a lot out of me. It’s filled with so much loneliness! There’s so much love and light and squandered life and searching for your people and yourself in it—I just loved it and I’m glad I read it. My description probably doesn’t make you want to read it, but if you haven’t already, it’s well worth trying it.

Richard Powers’s The Overstory made me think differently about time and about trees. I don’t know how to put that into words, but putting human lives and our short-term thinking alongside the long long lives of trees made me question all sorts of priorities. I’m so tired of valuing tiny human needs over planetary ones. I don’t mean important human needs like love and shelter and autonomy, but tiny ones like more more more stuff and where’s my profit and what’s the easiest way to get from point A to point B? What would it mean instead if we thought not only in terms of generations of people, but in generations of trees?

Honorée Fannone Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois is as amazing as all the reviews led me to believe it would be, but also even more so. I hadn’t expected it to be so much about historiography, and I loved it for that. I’ve been thinking a lot recently—thanks to so much good writing on the topic—about the potential traumas of doing and facilitating historical research. And the accounts in Love Songs of what it feels like not to be trusted to read the records of your own past, and the pain of reading those records, and the difficulty of getting dominant voices to listen to the multitude of ways that histories are told instead of focusing solely on those written records that were selected to be preserved . . . . All of that is to say, this book is powerful.

I think the book that might stay with me the longest is Lauren Groff’s Matrix. I hadn’t particularly been drawn by the reviews that I’d read of it, but I was so wrong. The book is incandescent. Yes, medieval nuns might not be your thing. But this isn’t really a book about Marie and her abbey. It’s a book about how women make a place for themselves in the world when they are told they have no place in it, about the strength of love and community in all of its messiness. I was so sad when it was done. I was absolutely not ready to leave Marie. I am fully expecting to return to this book again and again.

I read other things this year that I loved—more Arkady Martine, more Becky Chambers, more Tamsyn Muir. Kate Beaton’s Ducks is a work of art. Cat Sebastian is always fun, but her recent Kitt Webb and Marian Hayes combo are not only good queer romances, they’re also deeply satisfying in their radical anti-nobility beliefs. Oh, and I reread Persuasion and remembered how much I love it. It’s the best Jane Austen, and I’m not just saying that because I’m old and second chances are everything.

That’s it. That was my year in reading, or at least, my perception of it now, from the end of it. At some point it’d be a fun exercise to try to think through the last five years or so of reading just from memory, to see which books really have stuck with me. I might have misjudged a lot of my immediate reactions. But that’s the beauty of books, I think. We read them in one moment, and then they continue to stay with us and shift shape for years to come, whether we reread them or not. They are the best time-travelers, and I am grateful each time I encounter a book for the writers who share them with us.

notes

Update 9/11/2022: A pdf of this talk (with images and links) has been deposited in the Humanities Commons at https://doi.org/10.17613/sjs2-8z89.

I had thought I would start this talk with the usual story I tell about the origin of this FemBib project, the tale of why I got interested what feminist bibliography might be. But that was before the legal framework in which I exist as a United States citizen finally broke apart to reveal a new reality, one in which I, as someone with a uterus and ovaries, exist as a person only to the extent that I might have to give it away in order to become an incubator. My bodily autonomy—my personhood, my right to control what I do with my own body and my own life—isn’t mine after all, but only something that I hold in abeyance. And because I have almost always, by virtue of my reproductive system and my sexual activity, been in a state of maybe-or-maybe-not-pregnancy, I am now almost always in a state of maybe-or-maybe-not-personhood.

A quick aside about this maybe-maybe-not: the way fertilization and implantation and counting gestation works, most pregnancies aren’t registered as such, as a missed period or a chemical change, until at least four weeks of gestation. If you haven’t been pregnant, or haven’t been avoiding getting pregnant, you might not realize this. Gestational counting starts from the first day of your last period, not the date of ovulation. So the earliest you can know you’re pregnant—two weeks after you’ve ovulated and in theory the first day of your missed period—you are already 4 weeks on. I say this in part because it’s why the six-week limits that are now going into effect in some places are so insidious. Six weeks, a person might think. That’s plenty of time to miss a period and decide what to do! But no, six weeks is at most two weeks. Language and counting matters. For more than half the world population, every two weeks we rotate between definitely-not-pregnant and maybe-pregnant until the question is either resolved by pregnancy or multiple layers of birth control, and we deserve the right to take care of ourselves.

Anyway. Here I am, today, probably a person, because I am probably not pregnant, thanks to age and my IUD.

I’m also probably a woman because that’s pretty much how I feel about myself. But I also say “probably” because being a woman can be surprisingly complicated. There are behaviors you should or should not exhibit, personality traits that you should or should not have, and if you move from, say, one community to another, you might find that behaviors you had learned as being totally appropriate for women are, in this new group, completely inappropriate. Do you smile with your teeth showing or not? Do you make eye contact? Do you wear pants? Do you show your hair in public? Do you show the right amount of bare skin, or too much, or too little? None of that is straightforward and all of it is constantly monitored.

When I was in elementary school, I went to a friend’s birthday party, and we played one of those stupid games that you play at girls’ gatherings when they’re at the age of trying to figure out how to be. And at some point, the question asked to the group was, “How do you hold your hands when you’re looking at your nails?” The entire group flipped over their hands to look at the backs of their hands with their fingers extended. I curled my fingers in over my palms and looked at my nails that way. And that’s when I learned that I was not good at being a girl.

That’s origin story number 1 for this project.

Origin story number 2 is this: My PhD was on Shakespeare and feminist theater and it was called “Act Like a Feminist.” I had some throwaway line in my preface draft about how realizing I was a feminist made my life so much easier. One of my advisors—Barbara Hodgdon, a wonderful scholar and mentor and a fierce feminist—Barbara wrote in the margins of my draft something along the lines of, “What, are you sure? Being a feminist has made my life so much more difficult!” And it probably did, for her, and it definitely can for others—the activism and arguments and facing male sneers and anger. But for me, being able to take what I had always felt and to find a name and framework for it—what a relief! It wasn’t that I was bad at being a girl. I was good at being a girl the way I wanted to be, not the way they wanted me to be. Feminism gave me a way of understanding the world and my current and potential places in it, a way of arguing and resisting and making my own path.

I suspect, if you’re listening to this talk, that you, too, are someone who is aware of the longings people often have to make sense of things. If you’re a bibliographer, you might not also be a philosopher, but if you’re someone who is curious about how things work, you probably are also curious about why things work that way. Why is this book put together in this way? Why does this sheet exist in two different states? Why do we care about collational formulas for letterpress books but not for the intaglio plates in them? All of that is a longing for a methodology to go along with our methods, a wish not only to count the leaves in a book but to understand why it’s important to count some leaves and not others. A way of making sense that isn’t random but meaningful. A way of making sense that isn’t needlessly rigid but that allows for us—maybe even encourages us—to stop and wonder, But shouldn’t I also be counting these other leaves? What happens if I do?

My desire for a feminist bibliographical praxis is a desire to find a way to make sense of the work I do both as a scholar and as a person finding her way in the world, a desire to create a way of working that might help others also understand and expand our sense of the possibilities of what’s around us.

I’m going to pause here to state explicitly what my feminism is, since it’s become very apparent over the years that different people use this term in different ways. My feminism is inclusive of race, sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, ability, and class; is always political; and is striving to improve the world. I want to emphasize one point in particular, since it is a hot point and it’s infuriating: sex is not gender, transwomen are women, and the attacks on women’s right to control their lives are the same attacks on trans people to control their lives.

What this means for my life is that I live through a feminist framework that strives to free everyone from the constraints that gender places on us, and that the scholarly work I do should reflect the values that shape how I engage with the world. What this means for my bibliography is that I think all textual artifacts should be part of a feminist praxis and that all people can be part of this work.

This is a good time to consider another set of definitions: What is bibliography? The simplest answer is that it’s the study of books and their material incarnations. W. W. Greg’s answer in 1945:

The object of bibliographical study is to reconstruct for each particular book the history of its life, to make it reveal in its most intimate detail the story of its birth and adventures as the material vehicle of the living word.¹

And that’s often the way that I’ve taught book history, asking my students to culminate their research with a biography of their book’s life story. But it’s also a definition that is very focused on books. (And as a relevant aside, I don’t want to hear any more intimate details of birth stories; people who have given birth have shared enough intimate details of what happens to our bodies and no one should have to share those moments with anyone in order to be seen as valid.)

In 2020, for the Bibliographical Society of America, Thomas Tanselle wrote a lovely account of what bibliography does, complete with characteristics of different approaches, including analyzing physical clues, describing the material artifact, determining the relationships between books carrying the same works, and writing histories and technical studies of the materials and processes used in bookmaking, bookselling, and book collecting. His expansive definition ends with a more human-focused answer than earlier bibliographers might have provided:

What links all bibliographical pursuits is an understanding of the significance of books as tangible products of human endeavor.²

(And a quick aside here is that Tanselle uses “books” here in the way that I do: as the best handy term we have for textual objects, be they codices, scrolls, tablets, or digital.)

What I hope is clear from this is that bibliography provides the basis for all other kinds of textual work. You can’t really understand the connections between a work and its audience or the intentions of an author or even the words on the page if you don’t know which text an audience was reading or whether a published text derives from an author or whether those words on the page are always the same words in other copies and editions of that work. Not everyone has to be a bibliographer, but we need to draw on bibliographical work in order to do anything else.

My work as a bibliographer can be summed up as trying to inspire in others a desire to explore how textual artifacts can bring us closer to understanding how people and technologies and cultures work. That seems both overly broad and a tad ridiculous sometimes. Most bibliographers probably identify a specific field or research question as their framework. And I do have a field—the first centuries of the printing press. But my research question is more about pedagogy than identifying type or recreating the output of a printing house or naming early booksellers. All of those things are great questions to work on, but they are not mine. My burning question is,

How do I get you to want to do this? What can I do to make you see the possibilities and joys of this field? How can I help you want to make bibliography enticing and exciting to newcomers?

One output of that research question is my book. Studying Early Printed Books 1450–1800: A Practical Guide is for anyone who has to learn the basics of working with these objects, anyone who needs to understand how early printed books were made and why it matters that we know these things, anyone who needs to be able to find and access early printed books, anyone who needs to show up in a reading room feeling like they have the skills to be able to make sense of the books in front of them. I wrote the book I needed to teach with since that book didn’t exist and it was profoundly shaped by my experiences in the classroom. But it was also shaped by my own experiences of trying to learn basic bibliographical skills long after I’d left graduate school.

So here’s another origin story, back from when all things bibliographical were Greek to me: At some point after I’d become a regular reader at the Folger Shakespeare Library but before I started diving into book history, an out-of-town friend needed to fact check a quote, so she asked me if I could pull up the book, confirm the passage, and let her know where in the book it occurred. An easy enough request. But at that point I was not working with anything printed before 1910, and while I had some basic familiarity with old books from my graduate courses—well, one course, really, with Rebecca Bushnell—it had been a long time since I’d looked at any. Reading the text wasn’t a problem for me, but I could not remember what the deal was with signature marks. As in, I knew that I had to cite the page and that I could do that with those numbers printed at the bottom, but I did not know what to do with recto and verso. Was the page opposite B3 B3verso or B2verso? It’s such a basic skill!

But I did not have it at my fingertips and I was much too embarrassed to ask anyone for help—I didn’t yet know other readers, and I didn’t want to expose myself to the librarians as ignorant. There didn’t seem to be an obvious resource to figure this out, so I did what I always do: I figured out how to find other examples of what I needed to know and taught myself to apply that knowledge. I pulled out an article that referenced early printed books and then called up some of those books to look at the passages quoted, and then worked out a pattern that helped me understand how to use signature marks as a reference system. It was a roundabout way of figuring it out, but it worked, I didn’t embarrass myself, and when it came time to teach my students how to do this, I knew both what they needed to know and what mistakes you make when you’re trying to learn about signature marks and format. Now, hopefully, when someone else is in my shoes, they’ll be in a reading room that has my guide on its reference shelves and the title of the book and its orange spine will sing out to them—Me! I’m the guide you need to help you do this! I’m Practical!

So adding to the list of things I probably am, I am probably a bibliographer, depending on your definition, I suppose, and depending on how I’m feeling. Sometimes I’m a bibliographer, sometimes I’m a teacher whose field is bibliography. I definitely relatively recently wasn’t a bibliographer, and sometimes I still don’t think I am.

Another origin story: I started teaching myself book history and bibliography around 2005, when the Folger hired me as a consultant to explore the possibilities for the library to create an undergraduate program. By the time I taught my first course on early modern books and culture in 2007, I was already frustrated with Philip Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography. It was the only book I could find that offered the depth of detail I wanted about the hand-press period, but it was also really a nightmare to use as a beginning textbook: full of minutiae that are hard to understand unless you already know how to understand them. I spent a lot of time obsessively reading it, then taking students through the basics of printing, sending them off to read sections, and then taking them all through it again, all while assuring them that they will get it, they just have to trust me and themselves.

So when an acquisitions editor from Blackwell asked me what I thought the field of book history needed, I said an easier Gaskell, something that you could actually teach today’s undergraduates with. And Emma Bennett—whose faith in this project was a real gift—said, Oh yes, I’ve heard that from others as well, do you want to write that? And I immediately and repeatedly said, No, no way, I am not a bibliographer, I do not know enough, I cannot do the things that bibliographers do. And I kept saying that for years until I finally realized, hey, I can do this, I do know enough because I am an expert in what students new to the field need to know!

And then, after a lot of trials and tribulations, I wrote that book. I have, on other occasions, talked about how nerve-wracking that process was and how full of doubts I was and how anxious I have been about the inevitable errors that are in it. (Mistakes are part of living and part of printing, there’s just no way around it, for better or for worse.) But my point with this story is to pause over how closely linked trying to understand bibliography was with feeling like I couldn’t own my expertise. If bibliography was a house full of experts and excitement, I couldn’t find the door to let me in because it felt like I had to already know where the door was, hidden among the vines, in order to be able to open it. I never felt any hostility in my search for that door, but it also took me a long time to figure out how to get into that house.

And that is one of the foundational principles of my feminist praxis—to minimize the barriers to doing bibliographical work. Ours is a funny field, based on skills that were for a couple of generations not taught in postgraduate programs, and that even now you often have to go elsewhere to learn—places like London Rare Book School. This specialized knowledge had gone out of fashion, especially in the US, in part because it refused to consider itself as belonging to the world of theory and feminism and Black studies and queer politics that other parts of academia were exploring. It is only just now—over a century past the codification of the bibliographical field—that we are seeing studies that can be described as Black bibliography, and queer bibliography, and feminist bibliography. Only now, when the study of English literature and of history and even of print culture have long since been immersed in this work.

Bibliography strove, in its formative years, to distinguish itself from the work being done by collectors and librarians by insisting on its scientific objectivity, on creating a practice that was replicable and built on clear principles of truth-seeking and precision. Bibliographers were not dilettantes or catalogers; no, they were professional men of learning. That objectivity and boundary-setting might have helped gather the field into itself as it was being codified, but it also expressed itself as a resistance to change for a long time. And it leaves an uneasy legacy for those of us who are not professional men of learning.

I’m going to come back to that, but I want now to think about what types of objects the field has encouraged us to study, because these origins have also created problems for those of us who might wish to study texts other than the canonical ones, other than the world of incunables and Renaissance and Restoration drama that formed bibliography’s basis. Certainly in the decades since Fredson Bowers codified descriptive bibliographical practice, bibliographers have expanded its utility for 19th-century works, for instance, and American imprints. But any field’s roots shape how it grows, so let’s take a look at some of the assumptions of descriptive bibliography as it was collated into a field by Bowers and his successors.

First up, a definition:

Descriptive bibliography is a set of practices and principles guiding how we describe printed textual objects, using bibliographical features to determine how a book was printed and what the ideal copy is (that is, how states and issues of an edition are related to each other).

There are a few key things to note: it focuses on print and on text, it finds evidence in the object itself and not archival records, and it expresses those relationships in part by trying to reconstruct a copy as intended to be at the moment it left the printer’s or publisher’s hands for distribution. It’s easy, when you’ve been immersed in this work, to be so accustomed to these practices that you miss what is omitted from it, so let’s flip this to point out what is not included in standard bibliographical practice: it’s not interested in manuscripts; it doesn’t care about images, especially when they were produced separately from the text; and it doesn’t care about what happens to books after they leave the print shop.

A few examples of the sorts of things that have been excluded from traditional bibliographical inquiry [Ed. note: I adlibbed this section, so what’s written as text here varies from what I spoke; all images are linked to their sources]:

This 1705 volume of violin solos doesn’t appear in the ESTC because it’s entirely intaglio, not letter press—that is, it was printed on a rolling press with plates, and as such, doesn’t fall within traditional bibliographical inquiry. [Please note that although I said in the talk that this was in the ESTC because of a letterpress imprimatur, it in fact does not. There are other examples of that sort of book, however; just search “violin solo” in ESTC and you’ll see what I mean.]

John Christopher Pepusch, Solos for a violin with a thorough bass for the harpsichord or bass violin. London: J. Walsh, 1705.

University of Pennsylvania, Oblong M219 .P425 (public domain)

Even in works that include letterpress text with intaglio prints, the images fall by the wayside in cataloging and description. In this copy of Soldini’s De anima brutorum commentaria, the intaglio image on the left is of a collection of animals printed in blue; the initial letter on the right is printed in a lighter blue.

Francesco Maria Soldini, De anima brutorum commentaria. Florence: Gaetano Cambiagi, 1776. (sigs. a7v–a8r); Getty Research Institute, QL785 .S7255 1776 (public domain)

But in this copy of the same work, the image on the left is different and the initial letter is printed in sepia ink. If there were textual features that differed so distinctly from copy to copy, they would surely be recorded and carefully studied. Even though plates are printed separately from letterpress text, and therefore often separate from the book’s structure and attached to bound books in different orders, the use and distribution of plates could be a fruitful object of study.

Francesco Maria Soldini, De anima brutorum commentaria. Florence: Gaetano Cambiagi, 1776. (sigs. a7v–a8r); Smithsonian Libraries, QL785 .S7255 1776X (public domain)

What about woodblocks printed simultaneously with the text on a common press? Here is a woodblock printing of a corn-cockle from a 1568 printing of Dodoens’s herbal, printed from a block that is still held by the Plantin Moretus Museum. Despite the fact that woodblock printing is done on the same common press as type, and despite the long history of block reuse, bibliographers have generally been uninterested in woodblocks aside from when they can help with printer identification.

Rembert Dodoens, Florvm, et coronariarvm odoratarvmqve nonnvllarvm herbarvm historia. Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1568. (sig. C8v); Getty Research Institute, QK41 .D64 (public domain)

Woodblock, Agrostemma githago [common corn-cockle], ca. 1568 (recto); Museum Plantin-Moretus, MPM.HB.04094 (public domain)

To the left, a 1618 Dodoens printed with the same block; below, a 1633 Gerard herbal.

Rembert Dodoens, Cruydt-boeck. Leiden: Franciscus Raphelengius for Christopher Plantin, 1618. (sig. Y4v); Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, G 51476 [C2-516 a] (public domain)

John Gerard, The herball, or, Generall historie of plantes. London: Adam Islip, Joyce Norton, Richard Whitakers, 1633. (sig. 4Y2r); Getty Research Institute, QK41 .G3 1633 (public domain)

Margaret Cavendish frequently emended her printed works before distributing them. Here we see a pasted-in slip reading “Written by my Lord Duke.” on the left, and a hand-written correction of “civil” to “cruell” below. Because these interventions happen in between the end of printing and the start of distribution, they fall outside of traditional bibliographical inquiry, despite the rich opportunities they provide for studying the creation and circulation of Cavendish’s work.

Margaret Cavendish, Plays, never before printed. Written by the thrice noble, illustrious, and excellent princesse, the Duchess of Newcastle (London, [1668]); Folger Shakespeare Library N867; both photos taken by Heather Wolfe (CC BY-NC)

These bibliographical parameters that I’ve just outlined come from the field’s interest in answering questions that were often driven by a fascination with Shakespeare and establishing which of the printed versions of his plays were the closest to what he intended; hence the focus on text not image and on the workings of letterpress print shops.

There are very good reasons why descriptive bibliography forms the basis of so much bibliographical and textual study and why it studies the selection of objects it does. You can’t compile lists of texts to study if you don’t know what you’re putting on that list (Is it a work’s first printing? Second printing? Maybe it should be the second edition?). You can’t understand how the copy you’re looking at relates to other copies of that book until you understand where it fits into that work’s genealogy. And you can’t edit (or analyze) a text if you aren’t sure whose words are on the page, the writer’s, the compositor’s, the result of pied type. Without this level of close observation that descriptive bibliography supplies, we wouldn’t have answers to many of the questions that bibliographers have wondered about, like were Shakespeare’s plays pirated and how can we get back to Shakespeare’s words without this darn veil of print?

I’m kind of laughing but I’m also serious in pointing out that this focus on Shakespeare has shaped much of how bibliography was developed and in wondering whether that serves us well. At the same time, I want to make sure we remember that much of what we know about the practices of early modern printing come from the long hard work of past bibliographers. We are all standing on their shoulders, and their work forms the basis of much of what we know about the history of western printing and the book trade.

So how did our founding bibliographers answer these questions about past printing practices? In part by looking at lots and lots of books. One of the most important principles of descriptive bibliography is that you want to look at as many copies of an edition as possible so that you can have a full picture of what the variations between them might be and then you can figure out what those variations might be telling us. And that makes sense—if you only look at 3 of 5 extant copies, you might miss the cancel that appears in copy 4 and the variant imprint on copy 5. (It’s also a mammoth logistical problem, then and now; more on that in a moment.)

Looking at lots of books is not only part of describing an edition. It also has been how we’ve come to understand what early printed books are. Early bibliographers examined books, came to conclusions about how they were made, and then used those conclusions to interpret and assess other books, and then people like Philip Gaskell and me use those conclusions to write books to train people to study books. I find it easiest to think about this process along these lines: look at specific instances of books to create general principles that you can apply to other books. It’s one of the things that makes bibliography a useful tool: you don’t need to examine all instances of printed texts in order to understand the general workings of printed texts. And it’s a pretty standard way of thinking about the scientific method: Look at some number of things, derive a principle of how they work from that observation, and then use that principle to understand the things you haven’t looked at yet.

But there are also some tricky bits to this process. For starters, it’s no accident that I chose icons that look similar for that top row, but that the items all on the bottom, the ones that are being analyzed by the principles derived from the books at the top—those icons all look different, from each other and from the books at the top. One of the dangers of working from a small set to derive practices and theories for working with a larger set is that the smaller set often does not represent the full variety of the larger. Here we have bibliographers focused primarily on English early modern playbooks working with those and related texts from the period up at the top. And here we are at the bottom, using those principles to understand all sorts of textual objects, including broadsides, almanacs, jobbing work, books with moving parts, books that are composed of plates, hybrid books that are both manuscript and print, books that have been altered by their creators in that moment between production and circulation—and maybe even newspapers, stereotypes, offset flyers, and e-books.

Put another way, descriptive bibliography depends on books being repeatable objects, things that exist in enough copies that that variations are noticeable. But what if textual objects aren’t repeatable? It also focuses entirely the acts of production. But what if the importance of some objects is in how they are modified in the hands of users?

In other words, are the concerns that drove those early principles useful to us today? The texts that formed the basis of descriptive bibliography are primarily canonical, male-authored, bound codices. What are the biases of those texts that might shaping how we understand, say, Melesina Trench or Phillis Wheatley Peters? What should we do with texts that only ever circulated in manuscript? Texts printed on woodblocks over a period of years and years? Texts that are not ink on surface, but knots in thread? Sure, we can say that those aren’t the concern of bibliography, but what does it do to our field that the basic terms of our analysis don’t speak with the basic terms of analysis of other textual studies? And when those other categories of text are categories where we find a lot of work by people other than white men living in the west?

My point isn’t that bibliography cannot or should not address these other categories and concerns. My point is that it was not built to do that, and that maybe instead of devoting energies to expanding the terms of descriptive bibliography, we should ask ourselves if there are other methods suited to our work. Do we want to wrest the work of anonymous authors circulating in manuscript into this framework? Do we really want to make Chinese woodblock books squeeze themselves into fitting into these principles? Are we just going keep ignoring textual artifacts that don’t belong to the categories of texts that we were studying 150 years ago?

Let’s return to my earlier comment that the aims of bibliography have been the aims of professional men of learning and what this means for those of us who are not in that category.

Anglo-American bibliography has of course included women among its practitioners since its earliest years and some of the resources we rely on today were created by women and scholars working on different categories of texts. Henrietta Bartlett, Dorothy Porter, Katharine Pantzer—these are some of the biggest twentieth-century names in the field. And there is increasing research being done on their work and histories, as well as those of other women involved in bibliography and the book trades. I have no doubt—and you shouldn’t either—that women were involved in the making and circulation and study of textual artifacts since they first began to be made and circulated and studied. So my point is not that women have not done and cannot do any of this work.

But bibliography as we have been practicing it requires a huge amount of time and money and travel in order to do it. The premise that you must look at as many copies as possible and that you must look at them in person means, for instance, that anyone with any sort of caretaking responsibilities has a hard time doing that work. If you have young children, or teens, or a partner, or elderly parents, or anyone who needs you to help feed or drive or generally make sure they stay healthy and alive—if that’s your life, you can’t do this work easily, or sometimes not even with difficulty.³ And women are overwhelmingly the ones who are primary caretakers.

Let’s talk about the ways in which basic bibliographical work does not tend to be rewarded in academia—at many places, doing an edition will not count for a thesis, compiling a descriptive bibliography will not count for promotion and tenure, even publishing a bibliography of understudied works—something that future researchers can build off of and create new studies from—those bibliographies have a miserable time finding publication venues. How do you do this work if it doesn’t get you a degree or a job or the funds to do the necessary research?

And should we talk about the state of academia and research in general? Jobs that offer stability and a living wage are few and far between. You can function as an independent scholar, but if you want to get money from a funding agency for it, you almost always have to give up all your other paid work while you’re on the grant. That’s a system that can work great for standing faculty, who have a salary and benefits and a multi-year contract. But for the rest of us, completely giving up the hustle that makes up your income—whether it’s freelance work or a day job doing graphic design—isn’t really an option. For those of us in the United States, where access to health care is often predicated on having a job that provides medical insurance, anything that disrupts your benefits can have lifelong consequences. And again, women are overwhelmingly the ones who are working in precarious jobs, which makes access to research funds absolutely a feminist issue.

Oh, and let’s note that rare books spaces are often designed in ways that model gentlemen’s libraries,⁴ that are guarded by people who are too often the only people of color in the library, and that have security practices that require monitoring people’s appearances and behavior. Now imagine you are someone who is a first-generation student, or who is Black, or who is genderqueer. Imagine your comfort levels in constantly entering these spaces and being stared at.

I’ll wrap up on two final notes:

The first is that it is important—necessary, even—to have more people doing this research from a broader range of perspectives. Part of this is because different experiences allow people to see different things in our collections. Jenn Shapland’s memoir My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House Books, 2020) is an incredible account of her research into Carson McCullers and her reflections on her own queer life is a powerful example of what this means: Without Shapland’s own experience of being queer and closeted, she would not have recognized the signs in McCullers’s writings and archives that led her to see McCullers as queer and to find the love letters she and her partner sent.⁵ And without seeing McCullers in the archives, she makes clear in her memoir, Shapland would not have been able to understand herself, to reshape her own life, to create the creative and scholarly and fulfilling life she’s living now.

Especially now, we need to point to our past and show its full variety—that women, and queers, and trans people, and people of color—-we have always existed, we’ve always been part of life and part of books and part of history. And when we find that words from the seventeenth-century are being selectively read to defend some sort of fake ”originalist” sense of what they would have meant in that time period, we have obligations to do a better job of expanding that past to show it in its full variety that is there, to do a better job of bringing the public into that work and bringing that work out into the public.⁶

And finally, I want to come back to counting and to categorizing. We categorize things as bibliographers as a basic function of our work. But categorizations are not neutral, and they are not locked into place. Just because we used to see books as existing in one way doesn’t mean that they have always existed in that way. Just because we are insistent that these definitions meant something in the nineteenth century doesn’t mean that they have to mean that same thing today. Just because white property-owning men controlled most of the official records of and decisions around books and laws in the past doesn’t mean that those are the values we need to replicate today. We cannot do the work that we need to do for the future of bibliography if we cannot expand how we support that work and who is included in that work. Thank you.

notes

So how does reading fit into all this? For me, it meant that I read a lot less—barely 50 books, well under my peak of 100+ and under what I think of as my typical rate in the 70s or 80s. This is partly because I just didn’t want to read. I was restless. I wanted to escape but also I was tired of escaping. I also, to be honest, spent a lot of time self-medicating myself through pandemic anxieties and loneliness, and so I wasn’t always in a condition to really dive into reading.

But I also read some really great things. I joined a librarianish book club and although I haven’t always managed to read our monthly selections, I have read book-related books that I might not have otherwise, and I have vastly enjoyed the company. So for the first time, I’m including some workish/non-fiction in my reading round-up, which shouldn’t be taken as a sign that I haven’t read any work-related books in the past handful of years, but that this is the first year in which the category of reading-that-is-exciting-and-enjoyable-and-potentially-bibliography-related-but-fun-even-if-not is a real one. I keep meaning to write a post about my thinking around feminist bibliography and how that connects to mutual aid and other pandemic lessons, and I maybe actually will. But in the meantime, this is the first year in ages for me to really feel sparks of excitement when reading things about book history and I am really happy about that.

But the main point of this reading list is to keep track of my fiction reading, since that’s what I tend to lose track of. It’s weird, that fiction can be such a blur for me. Not all of it—the ones that hit stay, if not in all their details, in some larger picture that makes sense of why it made an impact. But there’s so much of what I read that just mushes together. I don’t read for self-improvement, I don’t read because I need to keep up with the discourse, I don’t read because I think I should. I read because I want to lose myself in a book. Sometimes I only need a book to occupy me during the minutes I’m reading. Sometimes I crave a book that will pull at my brain and heart while I’m not reading it. Sometimes I don’t know which book will be which until time has passed. Add to that my habit of sometimes reading so fast I can’t retain what I’ve read more than a short period of time, and sometimes I can’t actually remember what a book was or what I thought of it if I don’t have it written down. And I have PhD in English that, as I tell my kids, gives me a license to make up new words and, I guess, to feel okay about how I read, because all forms of reading are what you make of them, and if you want to scold people for never reading when what you mean is they don’t read the same works you do, then I am here to tell you that you’re full of it.

Anyway.

Here’s what comes to mind from my year of reading in this year of fear and hope and disappointment and ennui:

Arkady Martine. I read her first book, A Memory Called Empire, over the summer and am just now starting the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace. I had seen a bunch of recommendations for Memory but brain farts made it hard to feel ready to pick up. But!!!! For someone who thinks of herself as a reader and who thinks about allusions and literary echoes and who also is interested in archives and memory-keeping, this really hit the spot. Not to mention the details around how empires are built and maintained and and and and. What I’m saying is that if you’re interested in these sorts of things, this is a series that explores those questions and their intersections with identity and community and love.

Dean Spade. I got really into mutual aid this year. Not just as an idea, but as an ethical and daily practice that I’m trying to shift into. You might have seen me post on social media about a group that I’m part of and how it’s fundamentally changed my sense of how we can be in the world. (The Consistent Money-Moving Project! It’s based on the premise that a small, steady, pool of money can make a significant difference to people’s lives; you can follow us on instagram and someday on our website, when we get around to focusing on that instead of redistributing money.) I hadn’t really thought about mutual aid before the pandemic. I knew about it from the Black Panthers and the various Occupies. But as a way about thinking how we are responsible to and for each other and how we can make our own just worlds? That was new to me. (And for real, it has had a big impact on how I’m thinking about FemBib, and that post really is actually coming.)

Becky Chambers. I got so many recommendations to try the Wayfarers series and this year I jumped in. I’ve only read the first two—my SFF child devoured the entire series as soon as I told him to try the first—but I am pretty sure that I will continue to love them. The one that really sticks with me is the second in the series, A Closed and Common Orbit, which is about artificial intelligence and bodies and what makes a body your housing and what makes a family your family and a home a home. Could you get more important questions?

Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology is about the same things but from the direction of a series of lectures by a materials engineer and feminist and pacificist. I don’t remember why I thought if I read this that it would me think about feminist bibliography, but it did. (My guess is that this is due to Deb Chachra and I am really looking forward to her book on infrastructure.) It also helped me understand why the science fiction books I’m drawn to are the ones that speak to me. I’m not really interested in toys, but if there are new technologies that help us imagine new communities that get us one step closer to a reparative and equitable world? I’m there.

Kelsey McKinney’s God Spare the Girls is not about what might come to mind when we talk about technology, but it is about systems of faith and gender and how a young woman negotiates the chasm that is widening between how she thinks the world is and how she is recognizing it and herself to be. Gentle and fierce, more complicated than it initials presents as, and compassionate even as it judges—it’s a book I keep recommending.

And Stephen Graham Jones‘s The Only Good Indians is a genre I don’t usually read (I love a murder mystery; I hate horror) but it pulled me through the scare and gore (it actually felt usually like gore in service of the story) and the result was a story about community and history and destruction and the power of stepping outside settler frameworks and categories to reclaim the past and redress wrongs.

Catch me on a different day and my choices might change. But when I close my eyes and remember 2021, these are the ones that float to the top. And when I imagine what the world of 2021 will have created, what I hope is that these lessons about communities and reparations and equity are the ones we will prioritize.

Here’s to building a future that we are excited about.

I’ve written before about the value of reading whatever it is that strikes your fancy in the moment that you need to read:

I don’t need to have everything I read be important or moving or revealing. Sometimes I just read to pass the time. I’m a big believer in reading whatever and however you want. There is joy and value in reading, regardless of what you’re reading. It shouldn’t be a vitamin that you take out of obligation to be healthier or more morally upstanding. It should be everything from the desserts you reward yourself with to savory treats to substantive fiber and calories that give you the energy and health to get through the day. What book is your perfect cocktail that you sink into? Which book is the steak that you ingest slowly and deliberately? Where’s the book that is the cotton candy that evaporates the moment you touch it leaving you sweet and sticky and mystified that it disappeared so soon?

from last year’s reading review, “reading for endings”: https://sarahwerner.net/blog/2019/12/reading-for-endings/

But it was extra hard this year to figure out what it was that I wanted to read in the moment of reading. I, probably like many of you, had no room to wrestle with the serious in my reading life when my waking life was so consumed with death and racial injustice and missing my friends and loneliness and the horrors of my government. But equally so, how could I read fluff when my daily life was so not about fluff? That didn’t feel right, either. I need to process and I needed rich language and I needed to wrestle with life.

I’ve also written before about how reading is tied up in my sense of who I am and reading fiction is part of how I make sense of the world. When my father died and I lost my ability to read, it threw me into a tailspin—that story is the tale of “being a reader, again and still” as well as the rediscovery of myself as a reader—and I have been patient with myself since then but also always wary that I will once more lose that ability to sink into a book when I need it. I think having been through the ups and downs of reading and trauma before made it a bit easier to process what this year has done and is doing to who I am as a reader.

Looking back on what I read this year a handful of things jump out at me. One is that this is the year I discovered Elly Griffith’s series about Ruth Galloway, a prickly forensic archaeologist at a uni in East Anglia who of course ends up being repeatedly pulled into helping investigate local murders when the police force needs her assistance in determining the dates of the dead bodies they find. I love Ruth. These books became comfort reading for me in part because of Ruth and in part because I learn a lot about the past of that corner of Britain in reading them.

Some of the other books that stuck with me offered comfort in a different sort of way. I don’t think comfort is the first adjective, or maybe even any adjective, that most readers would use to describe the first two books in Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb trilogy. But there’s something about how the group of adversaries in Gideon the Ninth—especially Gideon and Harrow—come to work together that does offer a kind of comfort at a time when it feels like we are all fighting against each other in a race for resources. The comfort offered by Harrow the Ninth is of an entirely different sort. It’s the comfort of watching someone suffer through mourning and working—very badly—through how to live with loss. That hardly sounds like comfort, but if someone you’ve loved deeply has died, Harrow’s struggles will resonate in ways that might be cathartic.

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is also about loss, although it doesn’t feel like that at first. If you haven’t read it yet, I’m not going to say anything more about the plot, because you need to live through its meandering and unraveling. But the ending made me weep in its nuances. Would I have felt the same if I hadn’t read it in the middle of a deeply circumscribed life? I don’t know. Probably, maybe, yes. She is such a gifted world builder and writer that I think she would have brought me there regardless.

The main character of Anna Burns’s Milkman also lives in a deeply circumscribed world, albeit one vastly different from Piranesi’s and my pandemic one. I was never a young woman in the Troubles, but I was a young woman caught in a cesspool of expectations, and Burns captures that element of growing up so well and draws from that all the rest of the ways in which the narrator is trapped mercilessly by things she wants to escape but cannot that I found it claustrophobic to read. That isn’t to dissuade you from reading it. Rather, it’s a recommendation. Read it slowly, take breaks if you need to. But I found it exactly as amazing as all of the awards for it said it was.

I’d put off reading Emily St John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel because I was worried it wouldn’t live up to Station Eleven, which continues to be one of my favorite novels. And I was worried both that I couldn’t stomach something about pandemics and the end of the world and that it wouldn’t be about that world. But it is marvelous, a novel that is adjacent to the world of Station Eleven, a rewriting of that novel that expands it and dwells on the multiplicities of stories and layering of narratives. It felt like a novel about possibilities, even when the choices that were taken were sometimes ones that led to sadness.

All year I’ve been thinking about Sandra Newman’s The Heavens, which was one of my favorites when it came out. (My quick thoughts on it are in last year’s post.) I haven’t finished it yet and I’m dreading it a bit, now that I know how it ends. I don’t think I’m going to find anything comforting in this reread, but I wasn’t expecting to. I didn’t find it a comforting book the first time. It felt deeply sad to me, full of a desire to save the world but enmeshed in a vision that we make worse everything we touch. Poor Kate, to be unable to save the world, to be the only person who remembers how good things used to be, to be the only one who grasps the possibility of a better life. But maybe at least she got to see that vision?

The one bright thing for me this year has been the young people I know who do see that possibility for a better world and who have been building mutual support communities to get there. Can they wrest the world to a better place? Maybe. There have been dramatic changes this year. They’ve not all been bad. I don’t think reading makes us better people, and I don’t think reading will save us. But I do think that reading can help us imagine other futures and other pasts and maybe that will help us move out of this hellscape into something better.

And then came the plague. So I’m writing a note now about how things will look in the workshop in light of travel not feeling safe and universities and libraries not being open for in-person teaching as we’ve been used to it. If you’ve been considering this workshop but are unsure how it fits into the Covid world, please read on.

tl;dr Remote participation is ok; we will talk about remote/digital-first teaching; sign up for workshops/seminars by September 15th.

Here’s the official blurb that’s in the SAA Bulletin:

Do you want to teach with rare materials but feel unsure if your library has suitable texts? Are you scared of bibliography but want to be able to encourage students to think about the materiality of texts? By doing advance readings and exercises and then sharing assignments with the workshop, participants will develop approaches to teaching with special collections and tools to do so confidently, whether or not they are based at institutions with loads of early books.

I kept hearing from Shakespeareans (and librarians) that they wished they could teach with their institution’s special collections, but that they didn’t have the right collections—no early printed Shakespeare, no early printed books, no Shakespeare, no whatever it was that they thought was necessary. But none of that is needed! There are lots of great ways we can teach about Shakespeare with rare materials that are not Shakespeare or are not old. You can use 19th- or 20th-century Shakespeare to explore concepts of how a text’s appearance shapes readership and indicates cultural values; you can extrapolate back to how 17th- and 18th-century readers experienced Shakespeare in print. You could look at a bunch of different genres of older or newer texts to think about the ways in which different categories of text appear in different modes of print and manuscript and then think about putting early Shakespeare in that context or imagine creating the plays or poems in different material circumstances. I am not exaggerating when I say that I believe that there are endless ways to successfully teach Shakespeare or early modern courses with rare materials at any institution. And it is worth it to do so!

Anyway.

My goal in the workshop remains the same as it has always been: to create excitement around using libraries and rare materials in literature courses and to empower teachers and librarians to experiment and collaborate. Students who work with old stuff, however you want to define that, tend to come out of the experience feeling genuinely excited about themselves as researchers and investigators. That’s good for them, for teachers, and for libraries. It might feel scary to those of us who weren’t trained that way, but I promise we can all learn the techniques needed to succeed.

Now, with this new and shifting landscape we’re in, how are we going to create that sense of excitement and empowerment if we can no longer gather in groups in poorly ventilated rooms to look at texts together? This is the continuing and urgent question that many of us are wrestling with. And it will be part of the workshop, too. Digital collections are not the same as analog ones, but we can still make them effective and interesting. (As part of the online #SHARPinFocus week that substituted for the planned SHARP conference, I ran a session on “Teaching Material Texts without the Material” that had lots of discussion around this topic and some great ideas for those of you invested in materiality-heavy courses; the video was recorded and there were notes with links to resources and brainstorming in a google doc as well, all available now through the SHARP in Focus web page.)

Our workshop will do some brief readings about teaching with special collections, participants will do an exercise or two designed to build familiarity with their collections, and it will culminate in sharing syllabi or assignments that have been created for the workshop. There won’t be a paper, and there will be feedback and an opportunity to add to your pedagogical repertoire. It’s really a win-win situation. (Plus, as you can tell, I’m really enthusiastic about this and am looking forward to cheerleading for you and learning from you.)

A few other coronavirus logistics that are important: SAA has waived its usual requirement of in-person participation. I am anticipating that many of us will not feel safe or be able to travel to Austin for the meeting, and I building into the workshop structure the ability for it to work for remote participation. SAA has also created a “zero dollar” membership level for those experiencing financial hardship during this. (The details of this are on the front page of the June Bulletin; the full issue has information about the program and other logistics.)

If you’ve never done SAA before, make sure you read through the site to see how it works (you sign up for 4 ranked choices and get assigned to them as they are open; there’s no application or proposal; you do need to be a member to sign up, but, again, there’s a no-fee option this year). And feel free to ask me questions about this workshop or about SAA in general.

Thanks for reading my boosterish post and I hope I’ll see some of you there!

Over the past couple of years I’ve given a few lectures and led a few workshops on the topic, and I wanted to collect some of that work in a single place to help others join in this work.

In December 2018 I gave the Lieberman Lecture for the American Printing History Association. You can watch “Working toward a Feminist Printing History” on YouTube (with or without captions); there’s also a transcript linked in the video description. I am grateful to Jesse Erickson and the APHA for extending the invitation to deliver that lecture.

That talk has been adapted into an article that will be coming out in Printing History sometime this summer, I believe. I’ve deposited the pre-print of “Working toward a Feminist Printing History” in the Humanities Commons’ CORE Repository. I’m really excited to have the talk appear in print (and Printing History is actually a print-only journal, gorgeously produced, which is fun), and PH Editor Brooke Palmieri was immeasurably helpful in shaping the talk into an article.

As an outgrowth of this feminist printing history work, I’ve been actively exploring what a feminist bibliography practice would look like. This past fall I did a sort of flipped plenary for the Behn-Burney conference, starting off with my walking through some of the background for and ideas behind a feminist bibliography, and then doing a group “drive” of a book through a document camera where we could as a community examine an artifact and then explore what feminist questions could come out of it.

The Bibliographical Society of America sponsored a workshop that I led at the Folger Shakespeare Library in the fall of 2019, which was a great group experience, albeit something that I can’t easily replicate into a readable piece for folks who weren’t there. But it was a chance to combine hands-on work exploring textual objects with a group discussion about feminist theory and pedagogy.

And I just remotely gave a talk as part of UCLA’s Feminist Bibliographies event, a panel that brought together my work with that of Kate Ozment and Tia Blassingame. It was livestreamed and the recordings of the talks will be shared as well. All three of us are wrestling with similar desires from different angles. I was very sorry not to be there in person, but grateful to Devin Fitzgerald for creating the event and to the library and special collections staff that made it possible, including the tech that let me Zoom in. (I’ll drop in the link to those talks once they’re up.)

The common thread through all of this is explicating a method that frees feminist inquiry from a sole focus on text and authors and printers. Instead, we can create an approach to bibliography that asks feminist questions about what we choose to study and the systems that get books from their origins to our hands today. We can shift from modeling expertise as bibliographers to modeling questioning, and in so doing, we can bring in newcomers to our work and expand the types of work that bibliography does. For me, one of the key elements of being a feminist is ensuring everyone has access and the tools needed to succeed. I try to model that in my way of teaching and leading workshops and giving talks.

There will be other workshops, and when normal travel and campus life resumes, I hope you’ll think about whether this is something you’d like to bring to your institution, either as a small workshop or a larger group event. In the meantime, read the pre-print and think about how a feminist bibliography can shape your own bookish practices!

[update: One of the subsequent talks I gave, “Feminist Bibliographical Praxis” at LRBS in June 2022, is online as a video and as a transcript.]

I also stopped recording my reading in list form while reading and instead used my instagram account with the hashtag #cursorybookreviews along with just the briefest of comments.¹ When I started thinking about what I read this year, I discovered that, true to form, I could hardly remember what was this year and what wasn’t. But my ability to remember plots and other details was even shakier this year without a list. I tried to remember what stood out without referring to records and just couldn’t. Ali Smith, Madeline ffitch, Sandra Newman.

That’s okay. I don’t need to remember everything I read. I don’t need to have everything I read be important or moving or revealing. Sometimes I just read to pass the time. I’m a big believer in reading whatever and however you want. There is joy and value in reading, regardless of what you’re reading. It shouldn’t be a vitamin that you take out of obligation to be healthier or more morally upstanding. It should be everything from the desserts you reward yourself with to savory treats to substantive fiber and calories that give you the energy and health to get through the day. What book is your perfect cocktail that you sink into? Which book is the steak that you ingest slowly and deliberately? Where’s the book that is the cotton candy that evaporates the moment you touch it leaving you sweet and sticky and mystified that it disappeared so soon?

There are definitely books I read this year that have stayed with me, even without having to consult a list. Sandra Newman’s The Heavens is astonishing—a meditation on past and present, healing and harming, volition and loss. (Plus I loved the Elizabethan London and characters that make up one of the plot strands, which is pretty rare for me.) I’m looking forward to rereading it and seeing how it shifts now that I’ve been through its trajectory once. Don’t read it if you’re looking for a happy ending. Do read it if you love gorgeous language and complex lives.

I discovered Madeline Miller, first Circe and then The Song of Achilles. They are definitely not a series but they are two sides of a problem—how does fate define you and how do you live when you think you have no choice? I really liked Circe, but I fell in love with The Song of Achilles. I also could barely read it, especially as it progresses. You know what’s coming, Achilles and Patroclus know what’s coming, and no one can stop it. I had to put it down to breathe and then pick it up again because I couldn’t resist it. I wept through the end while I was on an airplane and I want to recommend it to everyone.

I had a similar experience with Madeline ffitch’s Stay and Fight. “Yes! Full of fury and love” was what I wrote for #cursorybookreviews, and it’s still the best way I have of describing it. There are so many bad choices being made by all of the characters, bad choices because they have no other choices or because they’re desperately trying to find their way out of world that tells them they can’t be. I loved it even as I was screaming at it.

I read some delicious lighter stuff this year, too. Alyssa Cole’s Reluctant Royals series is fun (and serious too; romances aren’t simple fluff). Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon series are great mysteries, especially if you like National Parks. It’s a good thing we (still, despite that fucker-in-charge) have so many parks, because I don’t want this series to ever end; there are 19 so far, and I’ve only read the first four. Sara Gran’s Claire de Witt series is not exactly light and not exactly a mystery series. They are fabulous and mysterious and full of epistemological wrestling.

It’s only now, looking back to see what stuck with me, that I realize how much I was and am thinking about endings. The mysteries that solve things tidily, even as the lead characters can’t solve their own lives. The novels about fate and resistance and change. These are themes that are written about so often—how do we make and change our lives?—so it obviously says something more about me and my moment than it does about the current state of books.

2019 been an exhausting year for me. It wasn’t as rough as 2018, but it’s been a year that took me through separation and divorce and disruption and discovery. January was miserable, April shifted into better terrain, and August starting bringing joy. I don’t know what will be coming next and yet I am not afraid of who I will be.

There are no tidy endings in my life. Everything is messy and everything is great. At the same time, the world is a disaster and we are descending into a man-made hell of ecological nightmares and white supremacy. I still look for the helpers and I find them. Sometimes the books I read help me do that, and sometimes they make room for me to rest and breathe. I hope you all have books that help you span the breadth of what we need to do in our collective lives.

notes

I’m going to try doing that again, only this time in newsletter form. The tl;dr version is that you can head over to sarahwerner.substack.com and sign up for Early Printed Fun to get periodic (twice a month?) emails from me about some bit of early printed nerdery. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’ll replicate some of what I used to do here and at The Collation.

The longer version is that I decided to do a Substack newsletter because I’m hoping, if I can build up enough momentum, to introduce paid subscriptions. There will always be free posts, I promise, because I can’t bear the thought of not providing some free excitement about books. But I also am shelling out money to run EarlyPrintedBooks.com and I would like, at a minimum, to recoup those costs. Substack makes it easy to have both free and paid subscriptions, and that’s really appealing.

I’m going to putter along with all free posts for a while and see how it goes. There will be posts about printing puzzles, about cool books, about images on EarlyPrintedBooks.com, about teaching strategies—the one I’m working on right now is about the variety of ways in which images are digitized and why they show up the way they do on my site. I’m hoping all the posts will give you food for thought, maybe food for teaching, and definitely quick, fun reads!

So please sign up and tell your friends! I’ll try not to make you regret it!