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

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")

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)

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

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...

100 Best First Lines from Novels

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)

A Very Bookish Day in the Valley

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.)

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

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.

Emily Dickinson Museum Now on Twitter

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.