Reading Dr. Pressman’s Bookishness has tied everything taught and read over the semester up with a beautiful, perfect bow. While reading the chapter, it was cool to see all of the authors Dr. Pressman had mentioned and/or assigned for the class. Upon seeing the multitude of authors in the Introduction and Chapter 1 of Bookishness, it felt like this semester was a window into Dr. Pressman’s research process and mindset as she had set off to write a book, at first about the “death of the book,” and later became about “bookishness.”

I was intrigued by Dr. Pressman’s explanation and exploration of “shelfies,” which she explains are “a self-portrait in front of one’s bookshelves or a photograph of the books on one’s shelves” (pg 35). This “bookish version of the selfie” (pg 35) is one of many examples of the fetishization of books happening in the social media sphere. Dr. Pressman uses the example of selfies taken with a display of books in the back, which both fetishize the book and can be telling of a person’s outward persona. This concept has evolved to be included in video format from long YouTube video-essays to small clips on TikTok, shelfies remain a part of “digital self-making” (pg 35), just in a newer format. It is rare nowadays to find an “academic” YouTuber without books in their background to appeal to ethos. Yet, despite the dark wood that encases a multitude of books and spans the whole frame, plenty of these videos end up being lukewarm summaries of a situation, book, concept, etc. These disappointing interactions have made me realize how other modes of bookishness appear. Though we’ve looked at bookwork, novel books, artists’ books, books as clothing or jewelry, or more, I forgot that people can still fetishize a plain book. An excellent example that reminded me of this fact was Gatsby’s library of uncut books. People fetishized books then as they do now, but that fetishization has grown and spread into the digital, where everyone is constantly performing their ideal persona and trying to translate that into their reality.