habent sua fata libelli

Positions in the Pioneer Valley: Library Director, Hampshire College

2011-10-01T01:05:00.000-04:00

Director of the Library
Hampshire College

Hampshire College, an independent, innovative liberal arts institution and member of the Five College consortium with Amherst, Smith, and Mount Holyoke Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, seeks a highly accomplished professional for Director of the Library. Hampshire College, founded in 1965, offers approximately 1500 full-time students a full range of liberal arts programs through an interdisciplinary, inquiry-based curriculum. Hampshire students have access to more than 6,000 courses, 8 million library volumes, and the academic facilities of all five campuses. The institutions collaborate in many ways, including joint faculty appointments and the sharing of certain facilities and administrative functions. The College is located in the beautiful Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts and contributes to the rich cultural environments of the college towns of Amherst, South Hadley and Northampton.

The Director of the Library is the chief academic and administrative officer of the library. Reporting to the Dean of the Faculty, the director holds responsibility for coordinating programs, scholarship, and service activities within the Hampshire Library as well as within the Five College consortium, one of the oldest and most successful consortia in the country. The mission of the college library is to provide information resources and services in an exciting academic environment that supports Hampshire students in the development of innovative research and critical inquiry skills. The director will provide leadership in developing programs, services, collections, and digital/media asset management; provide leadership in evaluating and assessing library programs, facilities, space utilization, and construction projects, as well as collections, archives, and services; and ensure excellence in linking library information resources and information technology. The qualified candidate will set the library's fiscal priorities and direction consistent with strategic use of resources; foster a collaborative approach to managing the library and its personnel; and participate in fundraising, grant writing and developing donor relations to benefit the library. In addition, the director will be expected to develop collaborative relationships with the National Yiddish Book Center and the Eric Carle Museum for Picture Book Art. Built directly adjacent to the campus (and on land originally belonging to the campus), these two institutions comprise Hampshire’s “Cultural Village” and add to the richness and attractiveness of our corner of South Amherst.

An MLS degree from an ALA accredited (or an international equivalent) program is required; a second master's degree or a doctorate is preferred. A minimum of five years progressively responsible academic library experience in a supervisory/administrative capacity is required. The selected candidate must be a highly skilled leader able to respond to the emerging teaching, learning, and research needs of the College community; have an understanding of the academic process and trends in higher education, and a strong commitment to excellence in library service in support of the College's mission; and demonstrated commitment to fostering the library's essential role in the academic program. This position requires a strong background in emerging technologies as they relate to academic libraries; an understanding of issues related to scholarly communications and intellectual property; proven financial and personnel management skills; excellent interpersonal, communication, presentation, and negotiation skills; and a strong record of scholarly and professional achievement. The qualified candidate will possess the capacity to lead and manage a dedicated library staff; foster open communication and cooperative relationships in the college community, and have a commitment to working with a diverse constituency.

Review of applications will begin November 1, 2011. Hampshire College offers a competitive salary and excellent benefits program. Please submit your cover letter, resume and names/phone numbers of three professional references via our website at http://jobs.hampshire.edu/. Hampshire College is an equal opportunity institution, committed to diversity in education and employment.

The history of our institution and its library is a fascinating one, as we were pioneered many concepts and practices that have since become commonplace. Applications should of course be addressed to the above, but I am happy to share any historical background and insights that I have derived from my service to the institution.

Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship

2011-10-01T00:48:00.000-04:00

In recently, discussing the awarding of the SHARP DeLong Book Prize to John B. Hench, I referred to his great service over many years at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), a service recently honored through the creation of the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship.

It is now time for a new round of applications. From the press release by the AAS:

Scholars who are no more than three years beyond receipt of the doctorate are invited to apply for the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship, a year-long residential fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. The purpose of the post-dissertation fellowship is to provide the recipient with time and resources to extend research and/or to revise the dissertation for publication. Any topic relevant to the Society's library collections and programmatic scope, and coming from any field or disciplinary background, is eligible. AAS collections focus on all aspects of American history, literature, and culture from contact to 1876, and provide rich source material for projects across the spectrum of early American studies.

The Society welcomes applications from those who have advance book contracts, as well as those who have not yet made contact with a publisher. The twelve-month stipend for this fellowship is $35,000. The Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow will be selected on the basis of the applicant's scholarly qualifications, the appropriateness of the project to the Society's collections and interests, and, above all, the likelihood that the revised dissertation will make a highly significant book.Further information about the fellowship, along with application materials, is available on the AAS website. Any questions about the fellowship may be directed to Paul Erickson, Director of Academic Programs at AAS, at perickson@mwa.org.

The deadline for applications for a Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship to be held during the 2012-2013 academic year is October 15, 2011.

What G.I. Joe Read

2011-09-04T02:54:00.000-04:00

As I recently noted, John Hench's excellent study of Books as Weapons, on the US harnessing of publishing for political purposes in the World War II era, just won a well-deserved prize for best book of the year from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP).

Most of us were previously unaware of this colossal effort, particularly as it concerned the attempt to promote American books among the European population. More of us may have come across the cheap editions produced for US soldiers. Still, as even these latter are probably unfamiliar to the average reader, I thought it might be useful to present one of them here. The images are no substitute for the object itself, but they, along with John's excellent research, help to give some impression of what the books were actually like.

As the book explains, the first concerted attempt to provide US soldiers with reading material proved unsuccessful. The "Victory Book Campaigns," a joint effort of the USO, Red Cross, and American Library Association, failed because they "depended on the voluntary contribution of used books by civilians at home," an approach that "proved to be both inefficient and ineffective." (pp. 51, 84). As many a modern librarian or organizer could have told them: volunteer efforts can be unwieldy, the more so when it comes to book donations, which tend to attract precisely the sorts of things that neither donor nor recipient really wants. The weight and wide variations in the size and shape of the books also complicated the logistics of what was to have been a massive undertaking.

The Council on Books in Wartime (CBW), a collaboration among trade book publishers, librarians, and booksellers, therefore decided to make its own selections and produce its own editions, which could be sold to the military. The result was the spectacularly successful Armed Services Editions (ASE). The effort was as noteworthy for its approach and production methods as its results. It was prescient in that it took as its model the still-young paperback revolution and sought to take advantage of the distinctive characteristics of the wartime economy.

Standardization and a creative approach to design proved to be as important as the content:

In contrast to the widely differing sizes and formats of the Victory Campaign, the ASEs were lightweight, mostly oblong paperbacks, printed ‘four up’ and then thrice guillotined to create four books with the series’ characteristic, nonstandard orientation. They were printed on roll-fed rotary presses used in peacetime for magazines and catalogs, which had capacity in excess of the demands of civilian life. They appeared in two different trim sizes—6 ½ by 4 ½ inches (i.e. half the size of a magazine like Popular Mechanics) and 5 ½ x 3 ½ inches (i.e. half the size of a Reader’s Digest and similar periodicals)—which made packing and shipping comparatively easy. The text was printed in two columns on these oblong pages, a design, it was claimed, that did not exhibit the crowded effect that vertical two-column pages displayed. It also held the lines to legibly short lengths. These various design and technical innovations made the production and distribution of the ASEs feasible, even little short of miraculous. (p. 52)

ASE produced 122,951,031 copies of 1,322 titles from 1943 through 1947.

It so happens that I had one such edition in my own library, an item that I picked up for a few cents a good many years ago (I believe: at the League of Women Voters' book sale here in Amherst). It's by Ernie Pyle, the most famous US combat journalist of World War II. Killed by a sniper in 1945, Pyle, as the Indiana University School of Journalism puts it, was "An early "embedded journalist," who "worked alongside the troops, experiencing much of what they did, placing himself in danger as they did. His columns captured the scene and his reporting humanized the war for many of his readers." Pyle produced two bestselling collections of his writing, Here is Your War (1943) and Brave Men (1944-45), which were also issued together under the title, G.I. Joe.

The ASE edition of Here is Your War is in the larger of the two formats:

cover

inside cover

title page

first page, showing the unusual double-column horizontal orientation

back inside cover, with list of selected other titles in the series

back cover

The success of the program was measured not only in copies, but also in consequences. As John summarizes:

In setting up the ASEs, council members were confident that the series would contribute to the ‘mass reading of books in the world to come.’ They were right. Historians have generally credited the ASEs with introducing books to the GIs who had read little before the war, for helping fuel the paperback boom in the postwar years, and for creating a new pool of customers. (p. 53)

Not bad for an improvised response to a national emergency. One wonders what equivalent efforts could be undertaken today to enrich the lives of our soldiers and better equip them for the return to the United States and, eventually, civilian life in the age of the information economy.

Gotta Love Those Romance Titles (or: the price of freedom is eternal kitsch)

2011-08-14T01:52:00.133-04:00

The American politicians and publishers who, in the title of John Hench's prize-winning book, sought to use "Books as Weapons" in the war against fascism, thought they were making the world free for democracy. Of course, they were also making the world free for free markets, and thereby, not just for Hemingway, Steinbeck, Saroyan, and the other authors whom they held up as models of civic engagement and cultural achievement, but also for all sorts of literary trash.

To put it another way: the price of liberty is eternal kitsch. Of course, that's the price of "totalitarianism," too, though in different ways and for different reasons. While I was in Prague this spring, I saw a massive and fascinating exhibition on the stifling of modernism and the avant-garde, first, by the Nazis, and then by the communists.

For many of us, the romance novel epitomizes American literary kitsch. To be sure, the genre and its readership have become the subject of scholarly study: one thinks first and foremost of the pioneering work of Janice Radway, who provocatively argued against the dominant condescension toward both.

Sorry, I digressed: I was starting to risk venturing into the serious, which is not at all my purpose here.

Anyway, when it comes to the romance novel, many of just appreciate the lame titles and cheesy cover art. The titles may not be as distinctive and clever as those of classic country and western songs, but like them, they do adhere to certain conventions and constitute a sort of subgenre in their own right. In this case, though, one suspects that the humor is accidental, or at any rate, if implicitly part of the publishers' intent, not uppermost in the minds of their consumers.

This spring, as the Amherst Historical Commission prepared to put forward a request for Community Preservation Act funds for the restoration of paintings hanging in the Jones Library (still need to post about that), I took a stroll through the building to re-familiarize myself with the location of each work of art.

Lo and behold, I came across one of the canvases— Paul Dominique's late 19th-century "Arabs Mounted in Battle"—hanging over: the romance collection.

To me, it actually seemed entirely appropriate. Whereas some might see a glaring contrast between this "high" work of art—after all, it's an oil painting more than a hundred years old, in an elaborate gilded frame (what more need one know?)—and the genre literature of mass cultural production below, I see but variations on a theme.

To be sure, the painting is "historically significant" (otherwise we could not fund its preservation), and reasonably competent, but it is a typical piece of orientalism, depicting the exotic "otherness" of Arab culture for the delight of the western viewer. Unlike a book published in a pressrun of tens or hundreds of thousands of copies, Dominique's painting is a cultural product that exists in but one exemplar, and yet for all that, it is interchangeable with dozens if not hundreds of others. In its own way, it is every bit as conventional as the romance novel—and conventional ideals, representations, and sentiments are the hallmarks of kitsch.

And of course the connection doesn't end there. The Arab male has long functioned as a figure combining danger and allure. One need but think of Valentino and the vogue of "the sheik" theme, derived from the novel of the same name by E. M. Hull (whose real name was not the same: Edith Maude Winstanely). In fact, as the publishers of the new edition remind us, "The Sheik is recognized as the immediate precursor to the modern romance novel." Apparently, the theme has even been making something of a comeback. Oy (as they say). [this ¶ was accidentally omitted from the original upload.]

A classic debate in library philosophy has been whether to collect comprehensively or selectively: as much as possible, or only "the best": what Matthew Battles called the distinction between the "universal" and "Parnassan" ideals of the library. On the local level, this most often gets translated into debates about whether to purchase popular fiction, controversial political works, and the like. Romance novels are among the most contentious genres. The limited evidence suggests that most public libraries do have fairly extensive holdings of romances, though precise patterns of acquisition and funding are less clear. Most libraries have a romance novel collection because there is public demand for it and they serve the public; and there's nothing wrong with that.

Damn. I keep getting serious. Must. Stop. Now.

So, back to those romance titles and covers. One of my favorite "tweeps" and library bloggers, Rita Meade, a.k.a. Screwy Decimal (here, the blog; here, the Twitter account; further: 1, 2, 3) has made a minor art of chronicling the inanity and inadvertent humor of romance titles and romance novel culture—to which she adds her own very intentional humor under the rubric, "Romance Title of the Day," e.g.:

• 'Sex in the Middle Ages.' Well, I hope they practiced serf sex.

• 'His Virgin Secretary.' Well, I guess it's something to put on the ol' resume.

• 'His Pregnancy Bargain.' I love when a man puts the "us" in uterus

I promised Rita I'd share some of our local examples.

At any rate, without further ado, here's my modest contribution. My favorite is One Fine Cowboy: He's got a way with horses. . . and with women . . . . Feel free to supply your own commentary. The possibilities are almost endless.

The Dangerous Baron Leigh

One Fine Cowboy

A Pregnant Proposal

Confessions of a Viscount

Your tax dollars at work.

Walking the Walk and Tweeting the Talk

2011-08-12T02:30:00.007-04:00

According to a new survey released this week, web search engines and email are the most popular forms of digital media among the US adult population: some 92 percent of us use them, 60 percent of us, daily. Nearly half of us use social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook. What is interesting is not just the increase in overall use of SNS (nearly doubled from 2008 to 2010), but also the changing demographic: both older and more gender-balanced. The average age of the social network site user has risen from 33 to 38, with half over 35. And, at 56 percent, women's participation now slightly outnumbers that of men. However, only 13 percent of us are on Twitter (though world-wide, we are 200-million strong).

Is Twitter, as so many acquaintances dismissively say, a faddish and foolish exercise in narcissism—a sort of metaphorical modern mashup of the twentieth-century "pet rock" and vanity license plate—or, as others maintain, a valuable social, intellectual, and marketing tool? As an inveterate tweeter, I of course incline toward the latter opinion. The usage statistic alone, absent more granular data, could support either view. If it's a fad, though, it's certainly restricted to a relatively small population, but which: the proverbial "early adapters"? (if so, what is the profile?) gen-Xers? And just how do they use it? One of my "tweeps" (to you non-users: a Twitter friend, someone I "follow" or who "follows" me) perfectly summarized the competing views last month in a nice little blogpost entitled, "How to Use Twitter (and Why It’s Not a Waste of Time." There, she lovingly and originally characterized Twitter as: "the semi-colon of social media – people have an idea of your existence but many have not fully grasped your usefulness and beauty."

We are only beginning to study the significance of new social media, and Twitter is arguably the least-studied and least-understood among them. To be sure, there have been some rather silly pieces about use of Twitter in the classroom (spare me, please; I'd be happy if my students used spellcheck intelligently), but relatively few rigorous studies of its real value in the academic and cultural sphere, proper. I hope to address that question eventually. In the meantime, I instead wanted to do something much more modest, namely: share one example of how my colleagues and I recently employed Twitter for both academic and social purposes.

As I mentioned in my brief post on the SHARP conference on the book in art and science, social media are coming to play an increasingly important role in our gatherings, and not just in a trivial or recreational way. Last year, in Helsinki, we made full use of a variety of media. For example, we live-streamed some of the main events, such as keynotes and plenaries. Most novel, however, was our use of Twitter. Several of us began to tweet coverage of the events, simply because we tweet all the time. Several people who could not attend said that this coverage not only allowed them to experience the events from a distance, but even inspired them to join the organization. We could not have hoped for a more encouraging result.

This year, as an experiment, we decided to make tweeting an official activity. Many officers on the Executive Council—the President, Vice President, Treasurer ("That, uh, that, that would be me," as Bob Newhart used to say), Recording Secretary, and Membership Secretary—are already individually active (to varying degrees) on Twitter, and there is in addition a general SHARP Twitter account as well as a special one for this conference. "Official" here meant: explicitly endorsed and encouraged from above. In order to lend some material incentive to that moral exhortation, we even offered a prize—in the form of copies of the winner of the annual Book Award—to the ten top tweeters. (Among other things, that meant putting our money where our mouth was—and your Treasurer, I can assure you, does not disburse your funds lightly). We generated over 2000 tweets, archived here.

There were many pleasures, chief among them, the rewarding feeling of belonging to a community within a community (which is to say, as far as I was concerned, a more intimate alliance rather than any form of snobbery), and the excitement at the prospect of finally meeting at the conference, or at a separate "tweet-up" after hours, face to face, people whom one knew only by their usernames, and via 140-character snippets of conversation.

In the course of our (real-life as well as virtual) conversations, SHARP Board member George Williams, by day a professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate, who at night dons the cape and tights of heroic editor of the "ProfHacker" blog on at the Chronicle of Higher Education, asked the more active tweeters to write up brief reflections on their use of this social networking tool at the conference for his column.

Here's the beginning of my contribution:

To tweet or not to tweet? If I do not tweet for myself, who will tweet for me? If I tweet only for myself, what am I? Twitter, as one of my non-SHARP “tweeps” says, is the most misunderstood of social media. To wary outsiders, for whom it represents an exercise in egotism, I gently explain that it all depends on what you are looking for and whom you choose to follow. In the 4 years I’ve been on Twitter, it has become one of my most valuable research and networking tools. Frankly, I am much more interested in what total strangers on Twitter are reading than what my Facebook friends had for lunch or their kids did at the birthday party. . . .

George's introduction and the rest of the individual contributions can be found here.

What do you think? Comments welcome.

Books Into Battle: John Hench Wins Distinguished Award for Study of Propaganda and Publishing During World War II

2011-08-12T01:55:00.232-04:00

It's always a pleasure to witness the announcement of the book award at the annual general meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP).

I would have said it's "suspenseful," for that it is, too—for most members and conference attendees—just a little bit less so for me. As a member of the Executive Council of the organization, I get a heads-up well in advance of the actual moment (sworn to secrecy, if-I-told-you-I'd-have-to-kill-you, and all that sort of thing). And, as Treasurer, I have to write a congratulatory letter—and a check in the amount of $ 1000—to the winner:

Books As Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II

(Cornell University Press)

Even though I knew the outcome, this year's award was special in several ways. For one thing, as part of our promotion of Twitter at the conference, we promised a copy of the prize-winning book to the top ten tweeters. The volume thus got even more publicity than usual. For another, the winner was both an active SHARP member and a participant at the conference. Above all, though, I was absolutely delighted because that winner was John B. Hench, a man whose learning and generosity are matched only by his modesty.

When I started my career here in western Massachusetts, a colleague, knowing of my interest in the history of the book, brought to my attention the rich array of activities at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester. I got the best possible introduction to its resources, programming, and staff when I attended a summer seminar. It was invigorating to find myself again in the company of people who understood my research interests, even though I worked on Europe and they worked on the United States.

It was there that I got to know John, then director of publications. I was touched that he made a point of welcoming me personally. (Among other things, it was nice to meet another transplanted Midwesterner turned New Englander.) We saw each other periodically at AAS events and corresponded occasionally in the interim. Throughout the years, John worked tirelessly on behalf of the institution and its patrons, rising to the position of Vice President for Collections and Programs. When he retired in 2006, the AAS honored his accomplishments and the spirit of service that he embodied by putting his name on the post-dissertation fellowship program that he created. As the announcement noted, the budget of that program alone was by then greater than the budget of the entire institution when John came to work there in 1973. It's hard to think of a more fitting way to celebrate his contribution to the organization, the field, and the careers of other scholars.

After I joined SHARP more than a decade ago, I was very pleased to learn that John was an active member. As chance, or irony, would have it, I haven't managed to make it to the AAS as often as I used to, so even though John and I live only about an hour and a half away from one another, I found myself more likely to run into him at least once a year at our conference in places as distant as France or Finland. In fact, I still recall our meeting in Helsinki last year. As usual, we talked during the receptions and coffee breaks, and on at least one occasion, we also had lunch together. In addition, though, John came to my panel, where I gave a rather sweeping and speculative talk, testing some ideas on a subject I was just beginning to grapple with. He made a point of speaking to me immediately afterward and offering words of encouragement. Weighing the fact that John is just about the nicest guy in the world against the fact that he is also one of the smartest, who is invariably polite but does not dispense empty praise, I was simultaneously humbled and elated to conclude that my incipient idea was just perhaps not entirely nutty, and worth pursuing, after all.

My paper and one other on the panel dealt wholly or in part with Nazi Germany. Through SHARP, I had learned more and more about the breadth of John's knowledge and interests. If anything, he seemed to become even more active as he approached and then entered retirement. Having dedicated his career to the service of others at the AAS, he had begun to share results of a fascinating new research project, which involved not early America, but America in the era of World War II. I missed the 2003 conference in Claremont, California, where John first shared that research with SHARP members, but I did hear him speak about it in The Hague in 2006 and Minneapolis in 2007. John also explained the origins of the project in a recent interview:

Hench recalled how the war years had colored his upbringing. His father, a physician who was 46 when he volunteered for military service, was a collector of interesting, quirky books. His library included several of the editions published for soldiers fighting abroad.

Over time, Hench himself amassed a collection of ephemera. The assemblage included “ration cards, pamphlets, that sort of thing — really home-front propaganda — and some books on subjects such as how to behave in wartime: how to give a party, what to write to your husband, to be wary of the charms of an attractive man who was 4-F but otherwise fit,” he said with a laugh.

As he sought interesting material, he ran across a copy of an Overseas Edition. It was completely new to him, and his interest was piqued. After some initial research, Hench realized he had a potential book in the making.

What fascinated him, he said, was the idea that governments took books and culture so seriously as to see them as elements of national identity and weapons in a war of ideas. The title derives from a slogan of the World War II Council on Books in Wartime: “Books as Weapons in the War of Ideas.” As the interviewer explains, "The Nazis were portraying Americans as crass people who sought world domination. The books were intended to give Europeans an idea of the lives and values of ordinary Americans and to promote democracy." In order to counter the German view—and gain a foothold in new global economy—the United States government and military in effect got into the book business:

Some 5 million books published under the imprints of Overseas Editions and Transatlantic Editions were distributed in the ongoing effort. Some were translated into European languages, while many others were in English. They were chosen for the elites, who, it was believed, would influence their families and business and political leaders.

“It would be hard to find another time when the government bought into the professional ideology of publishers, with the power to mold minds and shape history,” Hench said.

It was, as Hench says elsewhere, an attempt to win the peace as well as the war—and new markets in the process.

The DeLong Prize Committee this year comprised Chair Marija Dalbello (USA), Amadio Arboleda (Japan), and Francis Galloway (South Africa), assisted by intern Lucy McClune. SHARP Director of Publications and Awards Claire Squires (Scotland) oversaw the entire process. As the Committee put it:

This is a book about war but it is also a book about the diplomacy of books. As an international and comparative history of wartime publishing, it presents deeply contextualized accounts, offering multiple contemporary perspectives, a true mark of scholarship that constructs the book trade as an international phenomenon. It will for sure make its mark in many fields, but it is deeply embedded in our own.

In making the presentation, Chair Marija Dalbello also cited an evocative passage from the text:

Only weeks after the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, a surprising cargo—crates of books—joined the flood of troop reinforcements, weapons and ammunition, food, and medicine onto Normandy beaches. The books were destined for French bookshops, to be followed by millions more American books (in translation but also in English) ultimately distributed throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The British were doing similar work, which was uneasily coordinated with that of the Americans within the Psychological Warfare Division of General Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, under General Eisenhower's command.

Last fall, the AAS honored John by calling upon him to deliver the prestigious annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture. Both the title—"Random Notes from a Book History Bureaucrat"—and the content reflect John's self-deprecating spirit. Although the focus there was on John's career at the AAS, he also talked about the research behind his new book.

John Hench-Nov. 16, 2010 from American Antiquarian Society on Vimeo.

He talks more specifically about the book in this C-SPAN interview in the spring of last year, commenting on, among other things, the place of the US and its culture in the upheavals of our contemporary world.

[watch video]

Congratulations, again, John, on your well-deserved honors: couldn't happen to a nicer or smarter guy.

Background and resources

SHARP began awarding an annual book prize in 1998. Since 2004, the award has been known as the George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Prize, in honor of the family that endowed it.

List of winners.

On the new SHARP blog, Director of Publications and Awards Claire Squires (Director of the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication), offers some reflections on the history and significance of literary prizes, a topic on which she recently spoke at a conference in Tübingen.

Updates

The SHARP blog now has two perfect follow-ups:

In the first, Amadio Aboleda talks about his experience as a DeLong Prize juror. His remarks are not only germane to that rather esoteric task, but in fact pertain to most of what we as scholars do when we unavoidably have to make sense of works outside our field or area of personal expertise:

By the end of March, I had five books and no idea of how to go about reading them. None of them were in my own field of Japanese book publishing culture and many covered topics about which I knew little or nothing. . . . I was also worried that taking more time than other jurors to read books outside my own sphere of interest might delay a final decision. However, as I delved into unfamiliar pages I was reminded of my wonderful experience as a definition editor of the American Heritage Dictionary. Each editor had to read a certain number of books in a loosely defined area of their expertise every week to "absorb" information. The Dictionary had arranged with the New York Public Library main branch on Fifth Avenue to allow the definitions editors to request books that would be delivered to our office. I had the good fortune of being paid to read books. I realized that reading the entry books as a juror also could be considered good fortune and felt encouraged.

(read the rest: "Ying and Yang of a DeLong Book Prize Juror")

In fact, it is an example that I could cite when explaining to students the task they face in any new class.

In the second, John Hench himself responds to the award:

Like a fine piece of jazz, every book is both a collaboration and an improvisation. If there is anything we have learned from the study of book history, it is to understand the roles that mediators and even meddlers of all kinds play in the process that turns a gleam in an author’s eye into a published book. And anyone who has ever written a book knows that it is also a product of trial, error, and reconcepualization, that is, of improvisation.I would never have written Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets had I not decided, about a dozen years ago, to begin to collect books, magazines, and newspapers published by private and governmental organizations to advance particular wartime agendas. In doing so, I stood on the shoulders of my father, smitten for life by the “gentle madness” of book collecting, whose stateside service in the army medical corps left me with a lifelong interest in World War II. I already knew about most of the wartime publication series.

He goes on to discuss both the substance of his quest and the evolution of his research (much, again, thanks to exchanges of ideas with friends and colleagues), down to the choice of the final title.

(read the rest: "Collaboration and Improvisation")

New Director at the Jones Library

2011-08-12T00:18:00.003-04:00

From: To Find the Principles

On Tuesday evening (August 9), the Trustees of the Jones Library selected Sharon Sharry, of the Greenfield Library to become the new Director of our public library.

I've been covering the search over on the main and history blog site, simply because that's where most other Jones Library coverage has been, given that it has involved primarily historic preservation and local politics.

It's an exciting and welcome development: staff and residents are energized and inspired, and one can only wish Ms. Sharry all possible luck and success. She can lead the Jones knowing that the town is behind her.

Here are links to the main recent posts:

• Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
• Update: New Director at the Jones Library (and some advice on new media needs)
• Initial report on the choice of Sharon Sharry as Director
• Report on candidate presentation by Sharon Sharry
• Report on candidate presentation by Christopher Lindquist

Back From DC With a Sharpened Appetite for Bookish Matters

2011-08-11T23:38:00.005-04:00

It's now been about two weeks since I returned from the annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) in Washington, DC—feeling, as always—as one of my tweeps put it—"post-conf malaise mixd w/urge to wrk," "so grand that I was sad to leave that collegiality."

This year's theme was science, art, and the history of the book, though, as always, conference papers and panels were not restricted to that theme. One of the best panels I attended had nothing to do with any of that and was right up my alley: it dealt with the book trade in the Third Reich. Incidentally, it took place in the first session of the first day, an auspicious start. I won't attempt to report on the conference here for the moment, instead simply hoping to act on that sense of collegiality, inspiration, and "urge to work" by posting here more frequently now on various topics related to the history of the book. I'm afraid that even trying to keep up with the historical and historic-preservation topics on the "home blog"—To Find the Principles—has been almost more than I can manage these days.

In the meantime, a few scenes from the conference.

The Executive Council (EC) at work: President Leslie Howsam in the center, Vice President Ian Gadd, at left.

Key topics included finances (they are sound, and we agreed not to raise membership fees this year); future conference sites (2012: Dublin; 2013: Philadelphia); adapting our listserve to the newer needs and standards of the current digital culture; new initiatives to support student participation and general scholarly research, and the continuing internationalization of the organization.

Among the firsts for this EC meeting: remote participation. Director of Publications and Awards Claire Squires, just returned from a conference in Tübingen, "Skyped in" from to her home base at the University of Stirling, where she is Director of the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication.

The officers have done business by Skype on several occasions, just not at an EC meeting. The real first, however: first cat to attend an EC meeting, and from Scotland, via Skype. Now that's progress.

The EC meeting took place in the elegant quarters of the Corcoran Gallery and School of Art + Design, one of the conference hosts, and site of pre-conference program activities.

In the atrium: "Painting Big": works by Chris Martin. (Ever wonder how they manipulate and mount such mammoth works? Videos on the website explain that, too.)

Conference registration at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, MD, also the site of the opening keynote and welcome reception. Security was extremely tight here because the Library is located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health), so we had to allow additional time for visitors to travel by metro, pass through checkpoints, obtain ID badges, and so forth.

One of the distinctive features of this conference was the co-hosting by multiple organizations. Although most SHARP conferences hold events at multiple sites, there is generally a principal institutional sponsor and venue—often, for example, a university or major library. This year's conference, meticulously organized by SHARP Membership Secretary Eleanor Shevlin and Casey Smith, Interim Chair of the Arts and Humanities at the Corcoran, was a logistical triumph as well as a great intellectual success. Despite the need to move large numbers of people back and forth between venues—many of which, this being DC, involved security checkpoints—there were no disasters or even delays. Movement

Eleanor Shevlin introduces Jonathan Topham (Senior Lecturer in the History of Science, University of Lees), who delivered the keynote lecture, "Why the History of Science Matters to Book History."

The first full day of sessions took place at the Library of Congress.

Welcome, but let's see what's in your pockets and that bag. Security checks even at a library: the contemporary world.

I didn't blog during the conference, and I probably won't write in detail about most of the proceedings. However, we did cover the proceedings live via Twitter, and with great success. More on that in the next post.

Had we but world enough, and time, or paper . . . but right now, I'd just settle for a smaller font (observations concerning a practice of the handpress era)

2011-01-31T12:25:00.000-05:00

One of the wonderful things about social media is serendipity, and I recently found myself in an intriguing online discussion with fellow book historian and Twitter friend Katherine Harris of San Jose State University and a few other "tweeps." She has been researching English-language Gothic tales in early nineteenth-century annuals (in fact, she's on the editorial board of Studies in Gothic Fiction). At any rate, she noticed that it was apparently the practice to ensure that Gothic tales in these publications ended at the bottom of a page rather than continuing but only partially occupying the next; she wondered whether anyone knew of similar practices.

One of my research interests happens to be German serials: chiefly periodicals in the strict sense—newspapers and journals—but also almanacs, gift books, and similar pocket annuals (Taschenbücher).

I replied that I was not aware of any such practice regarding prose fiction in the gift books (and few if any of mine ran Gothics). I had, however, come across a practice that caught my attention, in some late eighteenth-century periodicals. Namely, when running a longer prose piece toward the end of an issue, the printer would suddenly shift to a smaller font and/or narrower spacing. Sometimes the story was the last piece in an issue, and sometimes it was followed by a briefer piece or pieces, say, poetry.

To the average person born digital and accustomed to electronic word processing, this may seem mysterious, but to a book historian of the early modern era, it's simple (and old hat). To oversimplify drastically (or for the uninitiated):

Paper was made by hand in large sheets
The pre-industrial book was composed of gatherings of these sheets, folded in such ways as to produce the various "formats": one fold yielded two leaves ("folio"; 4 pages), two folds yielded four leaves ("quarto"; 8 pages), three folds yielded eight leaves ("octavo"; 16 pages), etc.
Type was then accordingly "imposed" for each side of a sheet. Once it was printed, the type was "broken up" and readied for reuse.

above: printing shop; below: vertical view of press and forme with type set for a sheet in quarto

Printers therefore reckoned in these standard units. So did authors and publishers. To overshoot the confines of one of these printed sheets was to invite trouble. Given that books were composed of sewn gatherings of the folded sheets (signatures), one could not easily add just a page or two. Because paper was expensive (the reverse of today, when materials are cheap and labor is expensive), one likewise could not wastefully add a whole new sheet. Resetting even the offending sheet might not do the trick, and resetting the entire issue was manifestly impossible.

But if one were not prepared to start from scratch, there was evidently a cheap and dirty way to solve the problem: just stop when you notice the problem and cram in all the remaining text as best you can, like excess laundry into a suitcase. Not pretty, but pretty effective. Then hope that no one cares (for the typographically attuned reader of the day certainly would have noticed).

Today, it is easy for us to calculate word count: If we are asked to write 500 or 5000 words, we know how to tell how close we are, and the publisher can easily measure for him- or herself. In the early modern period, experienced authors, publishers, and printers became accustomed to estimating how much a given manuscript would "yield in print," based on the size of the paper and handwriting and the like. The task was complicated in the case of popular periodicals, which had a standard length (typically, some multiple of 8 or 16 pages, depending on format) and were produced on a deadline, generally with manuscript from many hands. The text was often still in the process of being written as the publisher or editor prepared to go to press. Experienced writers may have changed their minds and written more or less than intended. Inexperienced authors (common in this genre, which attracted many occasional writers) may have miscalculated.There were many variables, and thus any number of reasons that problems could arise.

I believe I first came across this problem in the case of the women's monthly journal, Flora (1793-1803; continued as Vierteljährliche Unterhaltungen [Quarterly Entertainments], 1804-5). Various factors could account for the practice. The publishers were relatively inexperienced. Johann Friedrich Cotta (1764-1832), then just a beginner, had taken over the venerable but decrepit family firm barely half a decade earlier, and his new partner and editor of the journal, Christian Jacob Zahn, had even less experience, all gained on the job. Publishing a periodical was a complex undertaking at the best of times, but the more so in the era of the French Revolution, when one of their increasingly important contributors lived in France, and the mails were at times slow or disrupted. The two men were publishers only, and did not own their own presses. Instead, they relied on a number of local printers, which made communication and last-minute changes relatively easy.

cover of first issue

Flora: Dedicated to Germany's Daughters. A Monthly, for Male and Female Friends of the Gentle Sex

(Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1793)

Here, some examples of the practice/problem:

February issue: "Der Keller im Schlosse Salurn. Ein Mährchen" (The Cellar in Castle Salurn. A Tale"). The story begins on p. 155 and ends in mid-page on p. 201. However, from p. 198 to p. 199, the layout switches from 31 to 42 lines per page, a density that continues in the final piece of the issue, devoted to fashion news.

In the March issue, the story, "Viktorine," runs from pages 257 to almost the bottom of 297. Above, pages printed in the normal manner of the issue, a comfortable and legible 25 lines per page. Below, the switch to the denser 31 lines.

The practice is jarring in more ways than one, and would have been even more apparent to typographically sensitive contemporary readers. As one can see, there was thus no uniformity within or between issues. There were approximate norms, but they were freely violated when necessary. And sometimes the results were doubly awkward. The layout of "Viktorine," for example, left space for only the title and first two lines of Schiller's poem, "Die Kindsmörderin" (The Woman Guilty of Infanticide). It was an unauthorized reprint, and one that Schiller himself would hardly have countenanced in this form. When he did come to work for Cotta and edit a periodical of his own a few years later, he had very precise typographical demands, one of which was that poems not be broken up in this manner.

That this general typographical problem cannot be attributed solely to the errors or misfortunes of the novice can be seen from the fact that it persists here in this issue from June, 1796.

"Rettung von Schande, eine wahre Erzählung. Gegenstük zu Verbrechen aus Infamie" (Salvation from Disgrace, a true story. A Pendant to Crimes on Account of Infamy")

This is a serialized piece. The first installment of the story begins on page 252, and here, between pages 262 and 263, switches (in the now familiar pattern) from 25 to 31 lines per page. In this case, however, it ends on the last page of the issue, with 27 lines of text, the author's initial, notice of continuation, and a horizontal line (thus again, making up a full 31-line page).

This is just a quick and provisional posting, as a means of illustrating these practices. If and when time permits, I'll fill in some more of the context.

In the case of the layout of the Gothic tales, there seems (Katherine, correct me if I am wrong) to have been a strong literary-aesthetic impulse. In the case of my periodicals, by contrast, the only motivation was pragmatic, but even that tells us a good deal about book production and audience. Each case, in its way, reveals something about the aesthetics of literature at the beginning of the modern era.

WLLP Television Interview on the Emily Dickinson Museum and the 180th Birthday Celebrations

2010-12-08T13:26:00.001-05:00

Emily Dickinson's birthday

Updated: Tuesday, 07 Dec 2010, 4:10 PM EST
Published : Tuesday, 07 Dec 2010, 3:55 PM EST

* Ashley Kohl

AMHERST, Mass. (Mass Appeal) - In just a few short years, the Emily Dickinson Museum has established a vibrant presence in our community and encourages a broad appreciation for this remarkable poet's work. Jane Wald, Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum tells you more about the rich history it holds...

So You Want to Write a Novel

2010-11-30T01:54:00.041-05:00

The "xtranormal" do-it-yourself text-to-movie animations, with curious characters saying outrageous things in monotones, are going viral. The video that introduced me to the genre is "So You Want to Write a Novel," which is one of the best.

The video skewers a specific but common type of would-be writer: someone with no training, no patience, and no shame. It shows a reality that few of us encounter, but an acquaintance who is a professional writer and editor, told me,

Word for word I've been through it hundreds of times. From now on I'm going to email them the link to the video & skip the stupid conversation!

I serve periodically on creative writing senior thesis committees. They are not the people I see depicted here. They are ambitious but extraordinarily hard-working and receptive to advice and criticism. They may not be ready to write the great American novel, but they also do not labor under the delusion that is what they are doing. They are convinced they have something to say, and our job is simply to advise them on how to say it better, which is to say: in such a way that someone else will be willing to listen in the first place.

That said, many of my colleagues appreciated this piece in a sad way. They saw reflected here not their best creative writing students, and rather, many a typical undeservedly overconfident undergraduate in other fields. To be sure, every generation of teachers and artists seems to feel that standards have declined since it went through the education machine. That's a trope. Still, one does worry. It used to be (again, maybe it was a fiction back then, too) that one could expect that students knew how to write, in the sense of knowing how to structure an argument and having a mastery of the basic mechanics and style of writing.

For me, the exchange that struck home was this one:

Author: “It’s going to need a lot of editing: I’m not the best speller.”
Editor: “My throat is starting to close up. The publishing industry really sort of expects you to have the whole spelling and grammar thing down.”

"really sort of expects you to have the whole spelling and grammar thing down": I think I'm going to use that line a lot in my assignments and paper comments.

"The Big (Awful) Picture--2010 | Losing Libraries

2010-10-26T02:32:00.000-04:00

How bad is the state of public libraries in Massachusetts? (=budget cuts, branch closures, layoffs, reduced hours, etc.)

Map it.

(h.t.: MM)

100 Best First Lines from Novels

2010-10-20T00:40:00.000-04:00

From American Book Review:

100 Best First Lines from Novels

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) (read the rest)

Breaking News: Jones Library Director Bonnie Isman Retiring

2010-10-08T20:50:00.003-04:00

Amherst Town Manager John Musante this afternoon informed the Select Board that longtime Jones Library Director Bonnie Isman—whose strained relations with some members of her board of trustees had recently been in the news—announced her retirement as of December 10.

No details yet.

A Very Bookish Day in the Valley

2010-09-25T10:02:00.001-04:00

Getting back to posting, and what better occasion? An embarrassment of riches in the Valley today: the poetry marathon and kick-off events for Museums10's "Table for Ten" program on food in culture at the Emily Dickinson Museum, and a conference on the History of the Book (which I'm co-chairing) at the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.

(And in the meantime, in Washington, DC, it was time for the National Book Festival. When it rains, it pours—figuratively speaking. Here, the weather has been beautiful and unseasonably warm this week.)

Blogging Backlog: a relief not to be alone in this boat

2010-07-21T19:17:00.000-04:00

Just as one almost begins to despair, solace and encouragement sometimes mysteriously descend from on high. It was reassuring to see that others, too, have grand plans and to-do lists whose tasks they don't manage to do—at least not on time.

In this case, I was pleased to see that the reliably provocative and entertaining Bob from Brockley came through for me here.

Unfinished posts no.1: 2009's four star tracks

I have lots of unfinished posts in my drafts folder. I am never going to finish this one, which I started in December, and it is now rather out of date. My plan is to one by one post or delete my unfinished posts, until my draft folder is empty! (read the rest)

Well, I'm just going to start afresh, but the example of determination is heartening. Thanks, Bob.

Now back to real blogging.

17 June 1989: Founder of National Yiddish Book Center Wins "Genius Grant" (and what's been happening since then)

2010-07-18T18:10:00.001-04:00

From Mass Moments:

On This Day...
...in 1989, an Amherst man who had spent more than a decade scrounging in dumpsters, basements, and attics was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Aaron Lansky led an initially quixotic campaign to save Yiddish books and, in the process, Yiddish culture. As Jews from eastern and central Europe assimilated to new homelands, they abandoned the language and the literature of their parents and grandparents. Lansky traveled across the U.S. and around the world rescuing Yiddish books. With his MacArthur money, he opened the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, which houses the world's largest collection of Yiddish literature and is now "one of the most visited and talked about Jewish tourist destinations in the world." (read the rest)

It's nice indeed to see a local colleague and friend honored by being declared historical in his own time. Those of us who have watched the Center grow from a vague idea and a shoestring operation to a tourist destination of world-wide renown and (in its own words) "the largest and fastest-growing Jewish cultural organization in America" can only express our amazement and congratulations. The Center also provides a number of examples—possibly, lessons, as well—for the book-studies and museum worlds. It has always had a core mission—saving and promoting Yiddish book culture—but it has skillfully known how to develop that notion without betraying or abandoning it.

First, two words about the rationale of the project and its appeal.

I cannot fail to omit the origin of the story because it involves Aaron's alma mater and my employer. As Mass Moments tells it:

In the fall of 1973, during his freshman year at Hampshire College in Amherst, Aaron Lansky took the first course on the Holocaust ever offered on an American campus. As the course progressed, he slowly realized that he was more interested in how the Jews of Europe lived than in how they had died.

Therein lies a story, too. First, the part that's not true: Frequent assertions notwithstanding, Hampshire College was not the first to offer a Holocaust course. This was, it would seem, the first student-initiated course, however. It was one one of the strengths of the system that students could propose and organize courses, with the support of a faculty adviser. In this case, as Aaron recounts in his memoir (see below), it was my former colleague (now retired) Leonard Glick. Len told another story about those days: When he was teaching about the Jews of eastern Europe, one of the students who enrolled was Aaron Lansky, who at that time was thinking about law school. The course was oversubscribed, but Len—not only a brilliant man, but one of the most dedicated and accomplished teachers I have ever known—said to himself, "What's one student, more or less? Who am I to turn someone away if he really wants to be here? Who knows how it might benefit him?" The rest, as they say, is history. I always think of that episode whenever a student comes to me for help or signs up for a course just out of curiosity. As the article goes on to say, Aaron found that both the academic and the bibliographic resources for his exploration of "how the Jews of Europe lived" were largely lacking (both it and I oversimplify). Aaron's account of his quest and the development of the Center—Outwitting History (Algonquin Books)—upon which the Mass Moments piece draws, won the Massachusetts Book Award of the Massachusetts Center for the Book in 2005. The brief documentary, "A Bridge of Books," on the Center's web site, provides a convenient audiovisual overview of the saga.

Trying to promote widespread interest in a tongue and culture with which few were any longer familiar (and which had to be physically as well as intellectually rescued from oblivion) might have seemed a Sisyphean task, but it proved to be an advantage as well as a challenge. On the one hand, the average person, Jewish or non-Jewish, had no direct connection with the publications or even the language, which was redolent of an old-fashioned and vanished world. On the other hand, the enterprise began precisely at the moment when it could capitalize on fears of a loss that had not quite come to pass: unlike the shtetls, Yiddish publications were threatened but not irrevocably gone. Yiddish moreover proved to have a multigenerational, multivalent appeal: The cause was a meaningful one for an old but dwindling generation, which had grown up with it. It could likewise become a manifestation of filial piety or cultural-moral compensation for a more assimilated middle-aged generation (moreover the cohort that one most targets for charitable giving). At the same time—and this is perhaps most striking—Yiddish, like klezmer music, proved to have a perhaps unexpected appeal for a younger audience nominally most removed from it and its world.

In retrospect, the sociological and political causes of the latter phenomenon have become apparent. There is of course the possibility of the familiar phenomenon of cultural identification skipping generations. There is nostalgia. But above and beyond that, I would submit that even the nostalgia is shaped by a distinctively postmodern sensibility. Part of the appeal seems to lie in the fact that the new "Yiddishism" (as klezmer musician Alicia Svigals famously called it) allows devotees to express their Jewish identity in ways that are fluid and thus ultra-contemporary and politically safe. To begin with, the vanished pre-Holocaust world of eastern Europe is an ideal object of nostalgia: not only extinct, but extinguished, and therefore presumably innocent. Above all, devotees are able to identify with Jewish "tradition" in a way that allows them to avoid or finesse the potentially controversial issues of religion and Zionism. Religion can be either historicized or interpreted as (i.e. reduced to) "spirituality," freed of dogmas and doctrinal restrictions (hence, also the appeal for a growing gay subculture). As for politics, "progressives" can identify with the strong tradition of Yiddish labor or left-wing activism of every conceivable stripe. And, perhaps more important, the Jewish cultural nationalism of Yiddishism (identity politics frozen in the past, and thus without real political claims, responsibilities, or territorial conflict) is much easier to identify with and defend than is a living nation-state, and moreover one that, remaining mired in conflict, has lost much of its earlier moral luster. Svigals persuasively suggested that the shift from what she calls "Israelism" (i.e. an Israel-centered Jewish cultural identity) to "Yiddishism" reflects changing views of what it means to be both assimilated and Jewish: Earlier, "Israel, with its frontier ethos, macho sabras, strong military, and its statehood was a kind of Jewish America." Now, many people somehow find themselves more drawn to "the old East European Jewish culture with its skinny and unathletic yeshiva boys, its emphasis on the intellect, and its nationlessness." Different strokes for different folks.

Salutary as it is, then, the attempt to redress a narrow focus on Holocaust victimhood by directing our attention to "the world we have lost," entails potential ideological mystifications and practical pitfalls of its own. (I should stress that this is an abstract or general point, not a criticism of the Center.) The bottom line is that, even while remembering (or imagining) different things about "the world of our fathers," older and younger generations have thus come together around Yiddish in a way that no one could have imagined and might not otherwise have been possible.

In a sense, that is precisely the point: The Center of course tries to be all things to all people, a goal not accomplished easily or without controversy (among other things, critics charged that it downplayed the prominence of radical leftism in Yiddish culture). It has, all in all, done an admirable job of expanding its scope. To be sure, it has developed numerous initiatives arising from its central task: The year after Aaron received the MacArthur grant, it launched a pioneering digitization project. In the meantime, it has developed effective language-instruction courses and internship programs.

Most significantly, NYBC has transformed itself into a general Jewish cultural programming center, whose mission is now "to rescue Yiddish and other modern Jewish books [emphasis added] and open up their content to the world." Without abandoning its Yiddish focus, it has come to promote and consider, in relation to Yiddish, the whole realm of Jewish culture. It hosts discussions of Jewish literature from around the globe, screenings of Jewish films, readings by contemporary Jewish authors, performances of Jewish music, from traditional to contemporary, and the like. One of the main challenges for cultural organizations of all sorts, from museums to historic sites, is how to remain loyal to the parts of their missions that remain relevant, while discarding or updating those that have become outmoded. (I have touched on this problem with respect to historic house museums on the history blog and will return to it shortly.) In the case of the Yiddish Book Center, it was, happily, a case of adding to what worked rather than needing to discard what did not, and yet, one can hope that the model will prove instructive and exportable for other institutions.

In recent years, the Center has gone quite some way toward addressing the charge that it needed to become intellectually more rigorous. It has done a great deal both to strengthen its own endeavors and to forge collaborations with scholars in Jewish studies, both here in the Five College consortium and elsewhere. The need was all the more urgent because Jewish historiography and Jewish literary studies long lagged methodologically behind their counterparts (1, 2).

Here's my wish for the future: I would hope to see the Book Center become more involved in the field of book history and book studies, proper. There is so much in the history of Yiddish that could be pertinent to scholars interested in the study of authorship, reading, and publication (including popularization and translation), as such, as well as valuable comparable material for those focusing on specific other cultural contexts. Jews, after all, were known for practicing both di- or heteroglossia and multilingualism: they had a sacred and scholarly tongue (Hebrew) conducted their own daily business in one or more other languages, whether that of the in-group (Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, Ladino, etc.), or that of the surrounding population. They eagerly adopted printing in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Yiddish presses flourished in the 17th century, although a full-blown written and printed Yiddish literature came into its own only after about the mid-nineteenth century, precisely in the age of rising nationalism and secularism.

That said, it's a collaboration that we in the book-studies field may need to initiate. The Center itself has been plenty active in the course of the past two decades.

okay, trying again

2010-07-17T23:09:00.010-04:00

The best of intentions . . .

Far, far too many distractions this past semester, so we'll try again. For the sake of convenience, I'm going to try to post book-related pieces here but will give a brief notice of those with historical concerns over at the main site on To Find the Principles.

Still Catching Up (again)

2010-01-07T13:58:00.003-05:00

The best of resolutions notwithstanding, I've found that other duties and historical postings have been occupying most of my time (it was just one of those years), but in the spirit of new resolutions (not yet in vain, as we're still in the first week of January), I'll try to get things moving by posting more short pieces.

"The Making of a Picture Book"

2009-10-04T01:39:00.005-04:00

This is the web resource accompanying the exhibit at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Library, in conjunction with the Friends of the Library event today, but I'll post the link separately here, as well:

"The Making of a Picture Book"

University of Massachusetts Friends of Library Events and Reception Sunday

2009-10-02T01:33:00.004-04:00

UMass Amherst Libraries Hosts Book Discussion and Reception October 4

"Behind the Book: Creativity and Compromise"

On Sunday, October 4, from 2:00-4:00 p.m., the Friends of the UMass Amherst Libraries host the 11th Annual Fall Reception in Memorial Hall at UMass Amherst. The keynote speaker, author Corinne Demas, will give a talk "Behind the Book: Creativity and Compromise." The program starts at 2:30 p.m.; the event is free and open to the public.

Corinne Demas, professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and fiction editor for The Massachusetts Review, is the author of two collections of short stories, two novels, a memoir and numerous books for children. Her Ph.D. in Literature is from Columbia University. Demas' books includeAlways in Trouble (2009), Valentine Surprise (2008), Yuck! Stuck in the Muck(2006), Two Christmas Mice (2005), Saying Goodbye to Lulu (2004), and a memoir, Eleven Stories High: Growing Up in Stuyvesant Town, 1948-1968 (2000), among others.

The event is also a reception for a related exhibit, "The Making of a Picture Book: The Marriage of Text and Art" on display on the Lower Level of Du Bois Library from September 14 to December 18, 2009. The exhibit will
feature a behind-the-scenes look at the making of picture books by local authors and illustrators Leonard Baskin, Kathy Brown, Corinne Demas, Patricia MacLachlan, Richard Michelson, Dennis Nolan, Katy Schneider, and Jane Yolen. For more information.

As part of the program, Lewis Mainzer, past president of the Friends of UMass Amherst Libraries, will be honored with the 2009 Siegfried Feller Award for Outstanding Service. This award, established in 1998, is given annually to individuals who have made outstanding volunteer contributions to create awareness and build support for the UMass Amherst Libraries.
For further information, contact Emily Silverman of the UMass Amherst Libraries at (413) 545-0995, or essilverman at library.umass.edu.

RSVPs are requested (but not required) by September 26, to Susan McBride at (413) 545-3974 or friends at library.umass.edu. UMass Catering will provide refreshments. Books by Corinne Demas and authors related to the exhibit (Jane Yolen, Richard Michelson, and Patricia MacLachlan) will be available for sale by Amherst Books.

Catching Up

2009-10-02T01:32:00.003-04:00

Because I've had to devote myself to other topics and tasks, I haven't posted much here of late, but now that the academic year is in full swing, the pace here, too, should increase.

The Invention of Printing

2009-04-25T13:06:00.002-04:00

New posting on my Public Humanist blog:

All of us “know” that the invention of printing was an epochal development in human civilization. Gutenberg and/or his invention of circa 1439-40 ranked at the top or very near the top of the lists of “greatest” of the millennium that journalists eagerly compiled. But how much do we really know?
Whenever I reach this topic on my syllabus, I ask my students: Just what was this achievement? They invariably give me a set of increasingly specific answers: printing? the printing press? movable type? I reply, variously: “nope,” or “close, but no cigar” (often adding: the Chinese had that centuries earlier). (read the rest)

Pencils from Cremated Human Remains

2009-04-25T01:52:00.003-04:00

Causing quite a stir lately: reports on artist Nadine Jarvis, who creates pencils using the ashes from cremated corpses as the lead. "Carbon Copies," she calls them (an average of 240 per body, in case you were wondering).

Maybe this is the only way that writing can confer immortality on a person.

Perils and Pleasures of Autograph-Hunting

2009-04-24T23:34:00.013-04:00

From CNN (7 March): "Saudi men arrested for seeking female writer's autograph":(CNN) -- Saudi Arabia's religious police detained two male novelists for questioning last week after they attempted to get the autograph of a female writer at a book fair in Riyadh, according to local media reports.

Both novelists, who were held for questioning but not charged with a crime, are demanding an apology from the conservative Muslim kingdom's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The commission, feared by many Saudis, is made up of several thousand religious policemen charged with, among other things, enforcement of dress codes, mandatory observance of prayer times and segregation of the sexes. (read the rest)

In general, it is the reticence of the author that "the autograph hunters" must fear, though, here as in other affairs, many things can go awry. In P. G. Wodehouse's story of the same name, the unfortunate student seeking to bribe his housemaster with a celebrity signature ends up in trouble with both parties and forced to copy out classical literature as punishment (though a sort of reduced sentence signals a modest accidental victory). In the case of Saudi Arabia, the situation would presumably be more dire, but the seekers appear confident that no real consequences will ensue:

One of the writers, Khal, told Al-Watan that he doesn't believe the new leadership endorses actions like those of the commission members who detained him.

"It seems that the relationship between the committee and the intellectuals is based on animosity and hostility and perhaps that is shown from the fashion in which they treated us," he said.

One hopes--although in a society in which there can be a serious debate as to whether an influential cleric actually issued a fatwa calling for the death of Mickey Mouse (the fact may be [feebly] disputed; the fact that one has to debate that fact is not), one could well understand the caution of the collector.

Admittedly, my favorite tale of at least implicit or de facto autograph-hunting involves an audacious request that, although less objectively dangerous and less successful than either of the above, surely surpasses them in the quest for a place in the annals of something or other.

In 1940, a young Fidel Castro wrote to the President of the United States:

My good friend Roosvelt:I don't know very English, but I know as much as write to you.
I like to hear the radio, and I am very happy, because I heard in it, that you will be President for a new (periódo)
I am twelve years old. I am a boy but I think very much, but I do not think that I am writting to the President of the United States.
If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american in the letter because never have I not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them. . .
[after giving Roosevelt his mailing address, he also helpfully offers to point the President to some big iron mines that could be useful for ship construction]

(And of course, Cuba still awaits that influx of aid from Washington.)

Top that one, I dare you.

Emily Dickinson Museum Now on Twitter

2009-04-20T22:46:00.004-04:00

It's National Poetry Month, and the Emily Dickinson is in the midst of an especially ambitious and successful program: the "Big Read," in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Amherst 250th Anniversary Committee (more on individual events on another occasion).

The Museum has also gone modern. Although Emily once famously called publication "the auction of the mind," she also had a fascination for and mastery of the compact form, which poses such steep challenges to the writer. In a way, then, it is both ironic and fitting that the Museum is now on Twitter, in which every utterance must be contained in a mere 140 characters.

EDM thus joins over 200 of its sister museological enterprises--not to mention Ashton Kutcher and CNN Breaking News, recently locked in battle over their quest for mega-followings (nominally gathered in the service of charitable giving).

It's just too bad that the real Emily was so reticent and did not live in the age of Twitter. I would love to be able to read her concise and uncompromising tweets on these declarations by Ashton Kutcher & Co.:

"At the end of the day, we all have ego, we all have some level of ego," he said. "But if we can use our ego to actually create good charitable things in the world in some way, and use our ego -- originally, I defined Twitter as an ego stream when I first saw it. But then what I realized is if we can transform that into something that's positive that can actually effectively change the world, that can be a really valuable tool."

and

"I think it's really important that Twitter is not about celebrities. It's not a platform for celebrities," he said. "In all these interviews and things, it's been celebrity -- you know, people know have been on TV. It's really about everyday people having a voice. And I don't want it to be dwarfed by celebrity."

Sean 'Diddy' Combs, who joined Twitter and threw his support behind Kutcher, told Larry King that he views Twitter as an important medium for him to share who he "really" is, and give fans a direct line of communication to him. "It's a chance for people to know the real me," he said. "Due to my own fault there's such a persona of the Hamptons and the bling-bling and the "Forbes" list and who I'm dating. There's more substance to me than that. Over time I've just wanted to make sure that that has gotten out."

One can't exactly imagine one of them writing,

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you-Nobody-too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd banish us-you know!

How dreary-to be-Somebody!
How public-like a Frog-
To tell your name-the livelong June
To an admiring Bog!

And that's just the point (though in 210 characters, alas).

As for me, in the end, I'm just as glad to let Dickinson speak to the ages through her poetry, and to let the Museum speak to those who value her work and her world--on Twitter or anywhere else.

Serendipitous Finds on the Decline of the Newspaper

2009-04-18T11:04:00.002-04:00

Some follow-up reflections, posted on the history blog.

"What does the death of newspapers mean for historians?"

2009-04-01T21:19:00.014-04:00

My latest blog post for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. The topic assigned me was, "What does the death of newspapers mean for historians?" though Mass Humanities gave it the online title, "The Checkered Past of Newspapers":

When people ask me what the death of the newspaper means to historians, I respond, what do you mean by death? or newspaper? I’d say, first, reports of its death are greatly exaggerated because (unlike Mark Twain) it can exist simultaneously in multiple forms and locations. The decline of the traditional newspaper is largely a phenomenon of western consumer society.

(read the rest)

An eclectic set of images--"World History of Newspapers"--can be found via the "Gallery" rubric, always on the top page of The Public Humanist. Here are a couple of examples from Massachusetts:

Appropriate for our Lincoln year and Lincoln-obsessed political climate: A classic newspaper from the era of partisanship. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator of 7 July 1865 celebrates the “Great Funeral” of “The Foul Spirit of Secession,” which died “of a severe attack of the Great Union Army, in convulsions the most violent,” on 3 April (Union troops took the Confederate capital of Richmond on that date), and offers a “Tribute to Abraham Lincoln. Extract from a Memorial Address . . . delivered at the Hall of the Mechanics' Institute of St. John, N.B., June 1, 1865, at the invitation of the Citizens, by Charles M. Ellis, Esq. of Boston."

The Northampton Free Press, of 1872. Here one could find a potpourri of local news, politics, literary poetry and prose, and a wealth of advertisements that are a treasure trove for genealogists and historians of local history and daily life. The colossal format--over two feet tall--also helps to explain the old stock images of people sheltering under a newspaper in a rainstorm or during a nap in the park. Harder and harder to do nowadays, with less durable paper and the trend toward smaller formats.

Chronicling the History of the Book as Object

2009-02-04T17:58:00.006-05:00

From my first posting on the Public Humanist blog:

Commentators, friend and foe, have made much of Barack Obama’s calculated appropriation of the legacy of Lincoln. What most struck me, as a book historian, was his decision to take the inaugural oath on the bible that Lincoln used in 1861.

In the Senate Chamber, Jill Biden struggled with a massive family bible (in Maureen Dowd’s catty phrase, “the size of a Buick”). The small “Lincoln” Bible, by contrast, was not Lincoln’s (still in his luggage) or even American (it was published in Oxford), . .

(read the full article)

Amherst 250th: Say What You Mean

2009-01-13T01:33:00.001-05:00

Thanks, Pb!

I'm sure that the people organizing Amherst's 250th Anniversary celebrations were just so excited to win a major gift that they forgot to proofread:

As a historian of the book--and someone who from time to time has to read linguistically and conceptually challenged student papers--I am of course fascinated by the difference between oral and written language. More attention to stylistic felicity might have avoided this embarrassment.

Anyway. . .

Please be more careful next time.

2009-01-03T01:42:00.003-05:00

At the end of last year, Shiraz Socialist, trying to add some levity to the grim situation of the world, offered a cultural-political questionnaire. Among the highlights, one devoted to books and censorship:

It’s that time of the year when you get bumper issues of magazines, the reviews of the past twelve months and, of course, the Christmas quiz.

So here, for Christmas, is our special quiz.

ARE YOU A CLERICAL FASCIST?

Answer the following 10 questions to check your clerical fascism credentials!

1. Before being published a book should be:-
a) Vetted by a board of clerics for blasphemy
b) Vetted by academics for offensiveness
c) Eh?
. . . . .
10. The Golden Age was:-
a) 8th century, Baghdad
b) 1917 USSR – there was something to hope for
c) 10 September 2001 – though there was plenty of crap around, it wasn’t this particular kind of crap

(take the full quiz)

As 2009 begins, the questions seem bound to remain relevant for a long time.

Merry . . . Whatever . . . Again!

2008-12-25T23:13:00.004-05:00

Although the modern reader could be forgiven for interpreting this image as some sort of cutesy multiculturalism in this age of Chrismukkah, the reality is rather different--though there is a connection.

As an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin from 2005 explained, the concept goes back over a century to a time when increasingly assimilated German Jews appropriated Christmas celebrations in their own secular manner. (The original term was Weihnukkah, of which Chrismukkah is just an anglicization.)

In recent decades, the term has become respectable--half-serious and half-humorous--and taken on a life of its own.

This image of the menorah evolving into the Christmas tree comes from a postcard sold by the Museum, and the original intent was critical rather than celebratory. The caption reads:

"Darwinian: Zionist caricature on assimilation, from the periodical, 'Schlemiel' (1904)"

That these issues still arouse strong sentiments can be seen from this rather less subtle blog entry by Jeremy Cardash and its responses at the Jerusalem Post.

In any event, greetings of the season on whichever holiday(s) you happen to be celebrating.

Mail Goggles Trump Beer Goggles

2008-12-15T03:12:00.000-05:00

Ever written and sent off a text message you later regretted, mainly because you were too drunk or just too tired to think straight? The folks at Google have now come up with a solution, which is the equivalent of the numerical keypads on some cars: an interface that requires you to perform some simple mathematical operations before it will allow you to launch your little Gmail missive into cyberspace:

Reporting on the new service in October, software engineer Jon Perlow included among examples of "sending messages you wish you hadn't": "the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together" and "that late night memo -- I mean mission statement -- to the entire firm."

He adds, "By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it."

Although the new system may reduce the number of embarrassing incidents, it does raise other questions:

• What implications does this have for journalists such as conservative "Vodkapundit" (aka Stephen Green), who "drunkblogged" the political debates this past season?

• And as a historian, I of course have to ask: Would the past have turned out differently, if our forebears had had this technology to force them to pause before dipping the quill in the inkwell or rushing off to the telegraph office? I tend to think first of the winestained eighteenth-century police informants' reports that Robert Darnton discovered in the Parisian archive. But what of the world-historical: Could Mail Goggles have prevented, say, the "Zimmermann Telegram"? The Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in 1914?

• And most important: what can you do about people who show no good judgment, day or night, drunk or sober?

Why the world and your life stink (and part of it's your own fault)

2008-12-13T01:30:00.002-05:00

There's a great deal of debate (much of it pointless, some of it merely pretentious) about the supposed relation between the rise of new media, electronic communication, and the decline of civility and real community. Some writers, such as Sven Birkerts, have made of this sort of jeremiad a life's passion. Others, mostly journalists, make a career out of that sort of

Occasionally, the greater insight and best antidote come from the realm of humor rather than scholarship.

From the inimitable cracked.com:

David Wong, "7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable".

samples:

Scientists call it the Naked Photo Test, and it works like this: say a photo turns up of you nakedly doing something that would shame you and your family for generations. Bestiality, perhaps. Ask yourself how many people in your life you would trust with that photo. If you're like the rest of us, you probably have at most two.
Even more depressing, studies show that about one out of four people have no one they can confide in.

#1. We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives.
That's not sarcasm. Annoyance is something you build up a tolerance to, like alcohol or a bad smell. The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it.
The problem is we've built an awesome, sprawling web of technology meant purely to let us avoid annoying people.

#2. We don't have enough annoying friends, either.

#3. Texting is a shitty way to communicate.

#5. We don't get criticized enough.
Most of what sucks about not having close friends isn't the missed birthday parties or the sad, single-player games of ping pong with the wall. No, what sucks is the lack of real criticism. . . . I've been insulted lots, but I've been criticized very little. And don't ever confuse the two. An insult is just someone who hates you making a noise to indicate their hatred. A barking dog. Criticism is someone trying to help you, by telling you something about yourself that you were a little too comfortable not knowing.

#6. We're victims of the Outrage Machine.
A whole lot of the people still reading this are saying, "Of course I'm depressed! People are starving! America has turned into Nazi Germany! My parents watch retarded television shows and talk about them for hours afterward! People are dying in meaningless wars all over the world!"
But how did we wind up with a more negative view of the world than our parents? Or grandparents? Back then, people didn't live as long and babies died more often. Diseases were more common.

(read the full article)

(Hat tip: my clever students)

What to read (and things I wish I'd said, written, or done)

2008-10-19T01:25:00.017-04:00

Whenever one despairs of intellectual stimulus, the right thing just somehow comes along:

For the past 30 years, the Bookseller magazine has awarded a prize to the oddest book title it can find. The first ever winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
Mind-boggling as that is, it is far from the strangest. Now the top prize has been won by the 1996 magnum opus Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, . . . More.

Damn. You couldn't make this stuff up (which is to say: I wish I could; the last time I tried was in college, with a brief [that word alone doomed it to failure] German philosophical treatise, entitled, Wissen und Pissen, which won plaudits from those who understand both topics, but remained a fragment).

Of course, for those who can (or try), there are works such as that by Tad Tuleja, late of neighboring Belchertown; a hamlet whose unappetizing name alone prevented me from seeking a domicile there (though it has since become quite the fashionable place, mainly because it had land for large building lots). His The Catalog of Lost Books: An Annotated and Seriously Addled Collection of Great Books That Should Have Been Written, But Never Were (1989), with a preface appropriately entitled, "À la Recherche des Tomes Perdus," includes such treasures as "The Cretan Eraser: Inventories of Knossos," "Bulimius: The Art of Stuffing," "Heloise Hausenhintsen: The Helper's Helper" (that one may require a certain generational context), "William Shakespeare: Hamletta," "Pocahontas: The London Diary," "Alfred E. Neumann: What, Me Worry?" (another lost reference on the very young, now that other and better satirical entertainments abound), "Marilyn Monroe: A Prolegomena to Semiotics," and "Lumpy Gravy: The Mushroom Hunters."

He outfoxed himself, however, with James Bereford's Miseries of Human Life. As an astute reader pointed out (I guess one just has to know the 19th century and how those people thought; a few of us make it our business and pleasure to do so) it was in fact a real book from 1816 that fooled both author and reviewer. Tuleja was smart and gracious enough to acknowledge the error--but also sly and proud enough to inform the letter-writer that there was in addition a deliberate false attribution--that is, in this case, a real title--lurking in his catalogue. Are you clever enough to find it? (Hint: It's not "Guy-Martine Ratatouille: Cacophony of the Spheres.")

And for those of you who still want to make up some good titles, be aware that it is an uphill battle. Here are some past winners from the list of real titles:

1986: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality (Brunner/Mazel)
1988: Versailles: The View From Sweden (University of Chicago Press)
1989: How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art (Ten Speed Press)
1990: Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual (Lace Publications)

(Not for nothing was that one of my favorite decades, greed and Reaganism notwithstanding. After the lean years of the nineties, which perhaps produced fewer striking titles, the new millennium is already generating a bumper crop.)

1994: Highlights in the History of Concrete (British Cement Association)
1995: Reusing Old Graves (Shaw & Son)

2002: Living With Crazy Buttocks (Kaz Cooke - Penguin)
2003: The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories (Kensington Publishing)
2004: Bombproof Your Horse (J A Allen)
2005: People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It (Gary Leon Hill - Red Wheel/Weiser Books)
2006: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (Harry N Abrams)

Best line of the year

2008-10-19T01:22:00.002-04:00

A friend's reference to How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read reminded me of this anecdote from another acquaintance in academe. While still a graduate student, he became deeply disillusioned (note: this is supposed to happen much later) when he heard one of his professors respond to another:

"Have I read it??!! I haven't even taught it."

New England Celebrates Noah Webster 250th

2008-10-17T23:59:00.002-04:00

Cross-posted on the history blog.

Dickinson Break-in Update: Finally, the Facts

2008-09-21T11:45:00.002-04:00

Press stories at last confirm what early clues suggested: that the break-in at the Dickinson Museum early this month was a random act of antisocial behavior.

The Daily Hampshire Gazette reported Saturday that the man who broke into the Museum was the same one who attempted a break-in at a private residence a short time later:

A University of Massachusetts student faces criminal charges for allegedly causing $600 in damage at the Emily Dickinson Museum after attempting to force his way into the building in the early morning hours of Sept. 5. Police say he was very drunk at the time.
[ . . . . ]
The man first smashed a window and door at the museum in an unsuccessful attempt to get inside, and in the process lacerated his right hand and bled extensively. A bookcase inside the museum was tipped over when he reached inside to unlock the door. Police said the cost of cleaning up the broken glass and the blood was $600.

(Full story: Scott Merzbach, "Man to face charges for museum damage")

Dickinson Break-in Update

2008-09-12T20:41:00.001-04:00

No news, actually.

The Amherst Police Arrest and Call Log records the initiation of a breaking-and-entering incident at the Museum as of 8:30 a.m. on Friday, 3 September (incident # 08-545-OF), and today's Amherst Bulletin notes same in its famous police blotter. However, no details are available, and no reports seem to have appeared yet in the traditional media.

Breaking News: attempted break-in at Dickinson Museum

2008-09-06T16:50:00.001-04:00

There was an attempted break-in Friday morning at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, specifically, the 1813 Dickinson Homestead in which the poet spent most of her life.

Partial and unofficial information suggests that this was a case of disorderly and antisocial behavior (one might speculate about alcohol or drug abuse) rather than any sort of attack on the museum, as such.

The publication of Brock Clarke's provocatively titled and darkly comedic novel, Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England(2007)--which begins with the narrator's confession, "I, Sam Pulsifer, am the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts"--of course set preservationists everywhere on edge, though he was welcomed to the Valley as part of his book tour last year.

Fortunately the Dickinson Museum is adequately protected and well monitored, but the incident underscores the need for vigilance. Many other small museums and historic structures, whether due to meagre resources or for other reasons, lack proper security measures against both human mischief and natural disaster. Installation of such systems even in the best of cases poses stiff aesthetic and technical challenges. And of course, large-scale natural disasters can overwhelm even the best security measures. Preservationists breathed a sigh of relief when Hurricane Gustav failed to develop into the catastrophe that was Katrina. They are still struggling, not without controversy, to save what can be saved from the destruction of three years ago.

The near misses this past week in both New Orleans and Amherst remind us just how fragile and precious our historic resources are. That they have survived this long is due in no small measure to good luck, but we cannot rely on good luck alone to protect them in the future.

Font Fun

2008-07-31T01:29:00.001-04:00

"Font Conference," from College Humor

Having posted this one, I of course cannot resist the temptation to add a link to Cheshire Dave's classic take on "Cooper Black."

Coming Attractions: SHARP 2008

2008-07-30T01:55:00.000-04:00

Coming soon: a report on the conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) in Oxford last month.

Hiatus and Return

2008-07-30T01:51:00.001-04:00

Due to a variety of unanticipated external factors, the blog went into a sort of hiatus shortly after it went up (among other things, the BookMarks program and blog required more attention). However, things are back on track again.

Although we of course cannot and should not attempt to cover all the pertinent news items that appeared in the interim, we will occasionally refer to some of the more important by way of brief recaps or contextual introductions to new topics. Happy reading.

Re: Introducing the book (Covered by NRK News)

2007-09-17T11:12:00.001-04:00

The story behind the surprising success of a comedy skit about books in the Middle Ages. From Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK).

Medieval helpdesk with English subtitles

2007-09-17T11:05:00.001-04:00

What better way to begin than with this surprise international hit? First posted in a Danish-subtitled version of the original Norwegian with English subtitles appended, it rapidly made its way through book circles in early 2007. It's as funny now as it was then, reminding us that our problems are not unique, and that, in an age of rapid technological change, we can best find our bearings if we begin by historicizing our own position.

Description: From a show called Øystein & Meg (Øystein & I) produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting television channel (NRK) in 2001. The spoken language is Norwegian. It's written by Knut Nærum and performed by Øystein Bache and Rune Gokstad.

After the surprise success of the various bootleg versions, Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) posted this "official" one.

The next post provides background and commentary from NRK.

SHARP 2007 Minneapolis

2007-08-27T01:44:00.000-04:00

The natural place to begin would have been not just with, but at, the annual conference of SHARP (the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing), the leading international organization for the study of the history and art of the book. Full disclosure: You will be hearing regularly about that organization in these posts. I am the Treasurer and also a member of the Executive Council.

We met at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis from 10-14 July.

Alas, this blog was not up and running them. Suffice it to say that the week was meticulously organized and immensely enjoyable, fully satisfying the very high standard set by our most recent conferences in The Hague (2006) and Halifax (2005).

Highlights (in addition to the papers) included:

• a roundtable on the nature and art of the book at the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts (MCBA), one of the pioneering such establishments in the nation, in an elegantly renovated downtown historic building;
•the keynote address by Adrian Johns (University of Chicago);
•a lecture by novelist Louise Erdrich;

Fortunately,there are several ways to learn more about the conference and its proceedings even if you were unable to attend:

(1) The conference program is still on the web.

(2) In addition, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of our colleague Jim Kelly (Humanities Bibliographer at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst), SHARP is in the process of digitizing records of all conference sessions and, whenever possible, noting or linking to publications that arose from the papers.

(3) Several reports will also appear in the coming issue of SHARPNews--now distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press.

The tireless SHARP webmaster Patrick Leary has also posted photos online (to accompany some from earlier years).

In the meantime, although conference organizer Michael Hancher did not "live-blog" during the conference week itself (it is not clear that he found time to sleep, though it can be proven that he ate at least once, because he was kind enough to take a few of us to an excellent restaurant down the street from MCBA), he has created a new blog to highlight the current and future book-related exhibitions in Minnesota.

And of course it is never too early to start thinking about next year's conference, which will take place at Oxford Brookes University. The call for papers (deadline: 30 November) is already posted.