Author Archives: Warren Stoddard

Biography of a Bookshelf

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There are exactly 548 books on my shelves. I know this because I counted them. I counted them because it felt necessary to me to quantify my collection and in some ways better understand my persuasion towards the book.

Until recently, the book existed for me as a thing that simply was. It had no beginning or end or much history, if any at all. The book was something that was written, and then after it was written the book became something that was read. It was a way of seeing the book only for the words inscribed upon its pages and the thoughts that those inscriptions denoted. It was the book as content. This content was intertwined with the author and the author’s work, their word order and syntax and voice and style. Mine was a view of a “picture of the author as originator,” as Amaranth Borsuk puts it in The Book (61).

I believe that this is likely the most commonly held view of the book. The majority of readers and non-readers alike consider the book inextricably linked to the author—so-and-so wrote a book, I’m reading a book by, have you checked out ____’s new novel? They’re all phrases we’ve heard before and heard often, and for good reason. Often the prose is beautiful, or we are moved to tears or fits of rage by a plot. These are the things that have been created by the author and the things that stick with us after we are done reading the book. The issue here is that, for the person who owns the majority of the books they’ve read, the collector, they will spend far more time acquainting themselves with the exterior of their books than the contents therein, and the overwhelming majority of that time will be taken up by the passing observation of the arrayed spines of the codexes on the shelf.

I suppose then, that I should instead to a close observation of these spines. This is the only way to truly understand the breadth of a collection. You must run the tip of your finger along the spines and you will feel each movement forward and back like it is the beat of a pulse, what Jeremiah Brent describes as “an opportunity for people to look in and see where you’ve been and where you’re going” (McKeough). Let us see where I have been, where I might go.

A CLOSE READING OF MY OWN SHELVES

If we begin with own bookshelf, then we will find very quickly that these books are arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname. A to Z, nothing fancy. What seemed to me at the time of its arrangement the most logical ordering of any book on any shelf if the collector were to go back and be hunting for a particular volume after they have shelved it. I understand this ordering now as a subconscious inability to detach the author from the book. In other words, the book was inseparable from its content, and as we follow the spines and the pattern of their forward and backward movement, there are certain deviations that can be found, breaks in the seeming randomness of book width, areas where one particular publisher or one particular author or one particular style of binding take over for a time.

The first impossible to ignore of these moments is in the middle so the Ds, where we find books by Anthony Doerr. There are two nearly identical first-edition copies of Cloud Cuckoo Land. All that separates them from one other is the knowledge that the author has signed his name on different pages in each copy. One was purchased new, as a thirty-dollar signed edition from Barnes and Noble the week of the book’s release. The other was found in a thrift shop in Ketchum, Idaho and purchased for four dollars years after it was published.

What truly makes a signed copy of a book special is that these are the only copies of the books that the author has actually written in. All the rest are just transcriptions of words originally handwritten or typed, pumped out in identical copies by the thousand. A signed book is a unique book. A signed book is a book that by its virtue of being signed cannot be separated from the author. It is the only book that an author has a tangible relationship with.

There are many signed editions in my collection. Some, that are very special to me, were books written and signed by my friends: Demree McGhee, Matty Matheson, Dan Melchior, Patti Callahan Henry. Some are writers whose work I have admired and sought out to sign my books: Seth Lerer, Lynne Thompson. Other books I have purchased because they are signed by authors who I consider central to the literary canon (and I have a faint hope will be worth a lot of money someday): Ocean Vuong, Louise Erdrich, and Doerr.

My bookshelves at home.

As we move our finger along there are other moments that should stand out to us, beginning just a couple shelves down past the Ds, if we are paying attention. There are areas where authors seem to have wrested control of entire lengths of self for themselves. There are three authors among the hundreds represented in this collection that have more than ten books to their name on these shelves: Ernest Hemingway, Brian Jacques, and Cormac McCarthy. Each of these authors enjoyed at least one period in my life in which it seemed as though I moved through a world colored by their prose.

Brian Jacques was the first. From the age of ten to fourteen or fifteen I read and collected 19 of his works. My bookmark from the sixth grade is still wedged inside a copy of Marlfox, one of Jacques’ many fantasy novels set in the Redwall universe. Most of his books are published by Ace Fantasy and are mass-market paperbacks, though there are some larger paperbacks and hardcovers in the mix. A typical Christmas morning as a child usually saw me unwrapping one of these books.

Then came Hemingway. It’s really hard to overstate his impact on me as a reader and a writer, and it’s easy to see as he’s got more books on these shelves than any other author at 21 copies. And if we are to believe that we can derive some knowledge of a person from the mere positioning of books on their shelves, then it will come as little surprise to know I have been an international volunteer in two wars, or that I will be living in Hemingway’s Idaho home as a writer-in-residence come April.

Last is McCarthy, with 10 books on the shelf. The real estate taken up by his books is not as expansive as Jacques or Hemingway, but his influence is easily seen in the prose I write. There is an affinity for the polysyndeton and for the description of landscape and for the American Southwest and I have once driven the whole south Texas map of No Country for Old Men and climbed around the gutters of Knoxville pretending to be Suttree.

There are other moments to notice as we move along these spines, but they are less prominent, they take closer observation, and they say things very quietly. There are a few books of poetry, 8 in total. I have never been drawn to the poem the same way I have been drawn to prose, but when poetry hits, it hits hard. These books are, more often than not, oddly shaped and leap forward from the usual range of depth of the spines. Layli Long-Soldier’s Whereas does this most noticeably, jutting out from a row of books otherwise mostly uniform.

There are damaged books too, here and there. Pieces that look like they have been saved from something. A copy of Felix Salten’s Bambi is missing the covering on its spine entirely. It looks like a sheaf of glued together pages on the shelf. Other books have frayed corners, torn dust jackets, water-damaged covers, but for the most part, the books in this collection are well taken care of.

Toward the end of the shelves we come to the reference books and collections. Best American Short Stories, copies of the Qur’an and the Bible, travel guides to Europe and the Florida Keys, and translation dictionaries that look like they were well-used for a season and then largely forgotten about.

Below the reference books there is a shelf of haphazardly leaning books that are out of alphabetical order with the rest of the shelves. None of them have been opened. They are the books that are (supposedly) soon to be read. The existence of this shelf creates a bit of a misconception, though. It seems to imply that all the rest of the books on these shelves have been read, and this just isn’t the case. A good number have, probably close to 75 percent, but this is a collection. This is not a track record of every book I have ever read, nor is probably anyone’s bookshelf. Mine is not well-curated. The spines are in many colors and some copies are worth money and some are worth nothing, but they all share the trait that I had some kind of passing interest in owning them, whether this is for aesthetic purposes, for the merits of their content, or for the novelty of the manner of their acquisition (where they were purchased/found, who they were given to me by, etc). There are many that I have not read in their entirety and do not ever intend to.

The next shelf down is a perfect example of this. Here we find photo books, coffee table books, and cookbooks: We Came from Fire, Lost in Appalachia, Great Art Explained. I open them often enough, but when I do it is to leaf through their pages to admire an image, maybe find and read one short passage if there is any text in the book at all. But these books were chosen for their aesthetic value, because I like to imagine I will one day have a home in which these will lie on a coffee table or in an area where guests will pass and they will pick up these books and leaf through them with scant commitment. They are meant to be seen and appreciated. And while they can be, and they are, owning them is very much not about reading.

There is a final shelf of books owned for these same purposes. This shelf sits high on the wall and is prominently centered. On it there are many leather-bound editions from the Easton Press, the Franklin Mint, and other publishers of collectible special editions. Of Mice and Men, The Hobbit, War and Peace, The Sound and the Fury—books considered classics of high enough stature to be reprinted on pages with their edges gilded and bound in leather. Their spines carry hallmarks that seem to harken back to an earlier day. Raised bands give texture to the spines and allow the words on them to be divided in a way that is pleasing to the eye. And while these are very well-made books, just like the photo books they are not meant to be read cover to cover. They are opened once in a great while and leafed through, maybe to find a stirring passage, maybe to look at the illustrations the publishers commissioned for them, but these books are owned largely for aesthetic purposes, and they look vintage, and the look old, and the look important, but in reality these are just mass-produced (albeit beautifully) collector’s items that carry little to no historical value, although they do look like it.

In a corner of this top shelf there are three more stacked books. They are rare first editions of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. These are also meant to be seen more than they are meant to be read. I especially enjoy telling the story of finding that first edition copy of A Farewell to Arms, which was tucked away in a booth in an antique store, listed for twelve dollars. I bought it immediately. It is worth hundreds on the market (thousands if it had its dust jacket), but it is priceless to me for the manner of its acquisition.

There are many other first editions on these shelves. Things that either are now, or I hope in the future will be of historical value, and in some cases they function as an emergency parachute of a retirement plan if these authors should become collectible someday far into the future. Classics include The Things They Carried, Jarhead, and a first paperback edition of The Old Man and the Sea to go along with the edition of Life magazine Hemingway’s novella was first printed in. There are modern titles that I picked up with the hope that these may someday become a treasured possession: About Grace—Anthony Doerr’s first novel, James by Percival Everett, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Buckeye, The Passenger—McCarthy’s penultimate novel.

Where the leather-bound editions intend to impart the air of historicity, these books, often unassuming, or in the case of The Things They Carried, really ugly, actually, truly, are a part of literary history. If we based them solely on their content and their position as artifact this would be something to be admired in a collection, but they do not have the sophisticated, highly curated, historically emotional appeal of the leather-bound editions. The book, and by extension the bookshelf, is only what we see.

But there are other things on these shelves too. Things that are not books at all. A camel-bone-hilted dagger from an Omani souk, pewter statues of motorcycles, a shot glass from the Icelandic Phallological Museum with an artistic penis printed on its side, photographs from war zones, a manually-wound golden Jaeger-LeCoultre alarm clock, a wooden sign that says THE STODDARDS’ made by my father forty years ago, a slim stack of records, a trunk that holds even more keepsakes and mementos, a tisbeh, binoculars, piggy banks, framed postcards, and much more. All these things add to thw whole of the shelves. They function as one artistic unit, and the books on them are impossible to separate from the other objects they are displayed beside.

The bookshelf is not just a place for storage or organization. It is a collection. It is a display. It is an art piece.

In the same vein, the book is not simply a repository for information. It too is an art piece. It too is meant for display. The book is a thing to be collected.

THE BOOK AS COLLECTIBLE

In August of 2025, The Guardian published an article on the decline of reading for pleasure among Americans. In it, author Benjamin Lee cites data from a study conducted by researchers at the University of Florida and University College London that found a three percent annual decline from 2003 to 2023 in readers who read for pleasure outside of work, falling to a low of around 16% in 2023, with information gathered “from more than 236,000 Americans who participated in the American Time Use Survey.” The study analyzed readership beyond just the book, including audiobooks, print magazines, and other forms of reading material. This is something that has widely been lamented by pundits and scholars nearly everywhere, with many wondering if we were seeing the death of literacy, and by extension, the death of the book and print media. Those with a pulse from the turn of the millennium on can probably remember a time they heard the oft-repeated phrase “Print is dead.”

Of course, we know that it is not. As Jessica Pressman states in just the second paragraph of the introduction of her book Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age:

“In the twenty-first century, we no longer need books, physical codices, as reading devices. We have other means of reading, writing, communicating, and archiving. But that doesn’t mean some of us don’t want books. And that want manifests everywhere. Indeed, at the moment of the book’s foretold obsolescence because of digital technologies—around the turn of the millennium—we saw something surprising: the emergence of a creative movement invested in exploring and demonstrating love for the book as a symbol, art form, and artifact” (1).

And there is data to back this up. Publishers Weekly stated in 2022 that “unit sales of print books rose 8.9% in 2021 over 2020 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Units sold were 825.7 million last year, up from 757.9 million in 2020. BookScan captures approximately 85% of all print sales. In 2020, unit sales were up 8.2% over 2019, which saw 693.7 million print units sold” (Milliot). Emily Temple, writing for Literary Hub in response to this data, asks, “So what’s going on here? Why are Americans buying more books, but actually reading fewer of them?” She and the team at Literary Hub had no compelling answers, but the evidence seems to point toward a rise in bookishness, or the value of being seen as a bookish person. From this, we can extrapolate that the book has become less about its content or the consumption of its knowledge, but rather about the act of collecting. Why else would someone buy something that is meant to be read and not read it? Because the purchase, in all probability, was meant for display.

There are probably a million Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok posts that proclaim the same thing: buying books and reading books are two separate hobbies. This is not due to some innately capitalistic American need to purchase, but from the more deeply human tendency to collect. We collect many things: some people collect mementos that remind us of a journey or accomplishment; some people collect coins and old currency; some people collect classic cars; some people collect taxidermy and human teeth; some people collect wristwatches and jewelry. In collecting, often things are first acquired for their beauty. They are admired and fondled and gushed over, but this is not what keeps them in a collection.

A person who buys a classic car but never drives it or works on it has no real connection with the vehicle other than an appreciation for its aesthetics. Likewise, if a man buys a wristwatch but never wears it, it is very easy for the collector to then sell the watch. What gives a collection value are the stories we are able to tell ourselves about the things in that collection. We imagine who might have handled that ancient drachmae and what it might have been used to purchase in its day. We imagine what that bobcat stuffed and sitting on a mantel might have done in its last days, or we recall the frigid morning of the hunt that brought down a sixteen-point buck. As Walter Benjamin says of his collection, “Once you have approached the mountains of cases in order to mine the books from them and bring them to the light of day—or rather—of night, what memories crowd in upon you!” (66). Without this connection, these items are just items, without a story, without a memory, they are soulless decoration.

So when we collect books, we are telling a story about ourselves. We are saying that we are well-read, knowledgeable, intelligent, that we are capable of great thinking or of appreciating the rhythms of the written word, that we are patient, that we can sit in idle contemplation divining things from the world and through the divinations of others.

And unlike many things we collect, the book is able to be displayed, en masse, to anyone who comes into our home. Collections of books are outwardly facing, while other things are inwardly facing. You would be hard pressed to find the space to display an entire collection of vintage vehicles, you would be foolish to display a collection of incredibly expensive watches and jewelry without a high-tech security system, and the same goes for the display of coins, and walking into a room full of dead animals is an experience that teeters on the edge of being rustically charming and macabre.

Unlike these other collectible mediums, books are relatively safe, cheap, easy to acquire. The bookshelves still allow us to show off in some ways, if we have rare or old books in our collections, and they give us the opportunity to show people what it is that we value without feeling like we may be over-exposing ourselves or becoming audacious. Nobody ever went into a room and said that the amount of books made them feel uneasy (probably). But I know many people who have gone into rooms of taxidermy and felt a little squeamish, plenty who saw mounds of gold and silver and were turned off by its garishness.

When we collect books, we are able to do so for appreciation of their aesthetics, history, or content, and each of these is equally as valid as the other. With the rise of the digital age and its various subscription services, we have fewer and fewer opportunities to own anything physical—to collect—especially if it is a form of entertainment. Books allow us to reclaim some of that agency we have lost. And even if we never read them, we are able to appreciate what they symbolize or how they look. We are able to collect them and form a story of ourselves around them.

ANALYSIS OF MY COLLECTION

On a randomly selected shelf in the J-L range of my own collection, there are 35 books, of these 35 I have read 29, and this trend holds through most of the shelves in my library. The catalyst for my collection and acquisition is most often because I want to read the book, to consume it for its content, to marvel at its prose or its plot. In acknowledging this, I must also acknowledge that this must skew the perception of my collection. It is a collection based almost entirely on the status of the author, and in appreciation of that status I am saying something about myself, that I am intelligent, that I enjoy high literature, that I am well-read.

But there are many books on these shelves that I will probably never read, never even open. The Malice of Fortune by Michael Ennis is one good example. I know nothing about the book or its author and I am certain I’ve never even opened it up, but the spine is interesting and I bought it at an estate sale for one dollar. Bullfinch’s Mythology and The Agony and the Ecstasy are another two I do not care to read, but I do want them to be on my shelf so that they can proclaim something about me and what I value, maybe that I care for the classics of antiquity and that I am appreciative of great art and story.

I also have to look at how I’ve chosen to display this collection. In organizing the books by the last names of their authors, I have subconsciously centered the author over the book itself, and if we evaluate the things that stood out in my earlier biography of my bookshelf, we must do it with this knowledge in mind. What would have leapt out at me in this close reading if these volumes were arranged by color? What about by subject matter? As this collection is set up now my central interests (aside from the words and value I place on certain authors) can only be gleaned from assessing the collection as a whole.

While I have always seemed to center the book’s content, I have not only ever collected books I intended to read. In Syria with the YPG, our unit collected any printed book in English or Kurdish, just for their virtue of being in languages we could all universally understand. The same was done with printed English books in Ukraine. I usually played a central role in the acquisition and collection of the books, but they were intended as a communal library for everyone, so I made no distinction other than their language. As a result, when it came time for me to find something to read, I often went to books I otherwise would not have looked twice at. Titles that come to mind are The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Shantaram. These were books collected for their language (content), but also for their mere existence, and so the subject matter they tackled was wide-ranging and eclectic.

My collection at home follows what is to me a very chronological progression. I know which books I have had since I was ten, which books I have had since I was twenty, and which ones I have had since I was thirty years old. They follow an arc as a reader and a writer. Though may have informed my writing, thee are certain books on the shelf that I have purchased only to get to know an agent’s interests, or to try to learn a new technique from the prose.

In all this, I am left with something to wonder. I appreciate the aesthetic of a bookshelf, of its many knickknacks, of this collection’s ease of reference granted by its organization, but I wonder what I might find different about my books if they were displayed differently. How might I refer to them in new ways? How might I even better appreciate the aesthetics if these shelves were set up to be maximally pleasing to the eye? If they were organized purely for aesthetic purposes or all bound in leather, what then would the collection’s appearance say to those who saw it? Different assumptions might be made of me, my persona as a collector may be less tied to my persona as a writer and a reader, even though for me, these are inextricable from one another.

I may never be able to truly separate the book from its content. It hits just too close to home. But I do feel that through my education and analysis of my shelves and others, I can appreciate the book for the things it is in addition to content. The book is a collection of words, of images, of thought. But the book is also another form of art too—one that is visual, like a great tile mosaic of sorts. The book is an object in and of itself. And that object is one that can be collected as any other, that can have its own narrative tied to it or fabricated from it, that can be obsessed over, that can be admired, fondled, fawned over. We can turn a page and appreciate the quality of its paper or the gilded edges or the leather binding or the dust jacket somehow fifty years old and still pristine or the history that comes attached to the book, how this book once changed the world, how reading it, or even owning it, changed yours in some small way too.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter “Unpacking My Library,” Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books. 1931.

Borsuk, Amaranth, The Book. MIT Press, 2018.

Lee, Benjamin. “‘Deeply Concerning’: Reading for Fun in the US Has Fallen by 40%, New Study Says.” The Guardian, 20 Aug. 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/20/reading-for-pleasure-study

McKeough, Tim. “There’s an Art to Arranging a Bookshelf. Here’s How It’s Done.” The New York Times, 15 March, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/realestate/bookshelf-queer-eye.html

Milliot, Jim. “Print Books Had a Huge Sales Year in 2021.” Publishers Weekly, 6 Jan. 2022, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/88225-print-book-sales-rose-8-9-in-2021.html

Pressman, Jessica. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2020.

Temple, Emily. “Americans Are Buying More Books—but Reading Fewer of Them Than Ever. What Gives?” Literary Hub, 12 Jan. 2022, https://lithub.com/americans-are-buying-more-books-but-reading-fewer-of-them-than-ever-what-gives/

What I Still Need to Learn for My Final Project

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I’ve chosen a topic for my final project, but I feel like it is a subject that could potentially be sprawling, as almost all subjects surrounding the book are. I need to be careful when researching collectible presses that I do not allow my focus to stray too much. I need to learn the histories of these presses, particularly the Easton Press, as that will be my central focus. I would like to be able to tie this aspect of bookishness into the larger conversation around vintage aesthetics in America, without allowing the project’s scope to expand too broadly. I need to do some research into appreciation of vintage and antique goods as well as consumer preference toward good with vintage aesthetic that are made with modern production techniques.

In this project, I will be doing multiple bibliographies and comparing my findings between editions and evaluating what that could say about the intention behind the creation of these books. I feel like a lot of my research will be hands-on implementation of the things we have learned in class this semester, and that will be very labor and time-intensive. I need to learn what publishing and binding practices were in use at what times, but in the past century and in the more distant history of books. I would like to learn the best way to compare two books bibliographical characteristics.

I am very curious to see how the Easton Press facsimile of the old purchaser-bound folio will measure up in terms of quality of the product, or even if it potentially surpasses the quality of the older book. Since these things are (for the most part) affordable for those that want them, have corners been cut in their manufacturing to keep costs low?

Final Project Proposal

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I feel that one of the main hurdles of this class has been the transition from seeing books for their content to seeing books as artifact and object.

For my final project, I would like to do a deep dive into the publishing of books as collectibles. As opposed to most of the other books we can buy that are being published today, these are meant, from the first view, to be seen as objects, rather than carriers of content. Presses like Folio Society, The Frankin Mint, and Easton Press all produce fine editions of many popular books; their pages are gilded, their bindings harken back to an earlier time, and many of the works are illustrated, but for most consumers, these are not things to be read, they are objects to be kept, looked at occasionally, and mostly, to sit on a shelf and project a measure of learnedness, worldliness, and status.

I will focus my research primarily on the Easton Press, as I have many of their books at home. I will delve into the history of the press, when it came about, and how the culture of the country of the time might have related to bookishness then and how it relates or does not relate now. I will compare collectible versions of books to their “non-collectible,” first edition, and mass-market counterparts when available, evaluating the physical differences and what those differences say about how the book is meant to be owned and shelved.

I will conduct some primary research into the acquisition process for Easton Press editions, looking at discourse communities that revolve around the collecting of these books, what their members’ commonalities and differences are, and what the acquisition process/price says about who these books are intended to be consumed by.

Thesis: The widespread publication of collectible editions speaks to a preference toward the vintage aesthetic in American culture. This is a further proliferation of the bookishness that we have seen on the rise in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. These are books meant to be seen as objects, not reading material, and the people who consume these products choose them for the aesthetics of being well-read and learned, prioritizing these aesthetics over the functionality of the book.

Revisiting My Fascination with the Book

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This week’s readings, especially Bookishness have forced me, in many ways, to return to the very first blog post of the semester in which described my own relationship to the book. Books and bookshelves have long been a staple in my life, and I have lugged around the same collection of books from apartment to apartment to house to house and in six or so moves left and right across the country. I feel very much like the collector in Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library.” I’ve been collecting first editions and rare books for a long time, and I’ve come to them in myriad ways. Often, it is books that somehow, bafflingly, garner “no interest, no bid, and the book was put aside,” but unlike Benjamin’s protagonist, I did not wait but leapt at the opportunity to find a book “in the secondhand department and [benefit] from the lack of interest” (65). I once found a 1929 first edition copy of A Farewell to Arms in an antique store for $12. On the free books shelf in the lounge in the Arts and Letters building I have found, rather recently, a first edition, dust jacketed copy of The Things They Carried, a first edition of Anthony Swofford’s memoir Jarhead, and a few weeks ago in a thrift store in Idaho I found a signed (!!) first edition copy of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land for four bucks.

These things carry immense value to me beyond the monetary. In large part, this is due to the culture of bookishness and the time I was brought up in. For much of my adolescence the conversation surrounding print’s impending death was very loud and very present: “A history of normative values associated with literary media … transferred to a new site of conflict: print versus digital” (Pressman 16). As a young boy you naturally must choose a side in any argument or debate or conflict, and so I chose print. In the midst of this conversation, it is important to note that I grew up extremely rural and had dial-up internet until 2012, which very likely swayed things for my mother and I, making it impossible to quickly download files, play games online, watch YouTube, etc. We did not even get cell service at the house. You had to walk up to the top of the hill for to get bar or two.

Regardless, I became a staunch supporter of printed media. I begged my mother for a Sports Illustrated subscription in the misguided belief that I could be the one to stave off the demise of the printed magazine. “If they don’t print it, and only post it online, how will I read?” I remember lamenting.

“The history of the book is about power and politics,” as Dr Pressman writes in chapter one of Bookishness (33). And, at the time, only the powerful and the well-off and the urban could afford the kind of all-the-time connectivity we saw have such a rapid uptick in the aughts and 2010s. I was none of those, and so for me, printed media became a thing that I consumed because I was poor, because we could not afford then the fancy newfangled things that people were claiming would upend the world order. It is interesting that this has now flipped on its head, that many of the poorest in this nation and around the world have access to internet and the technologies that were once unobtainable. That now, following the “death” many in the news once warned us of, print is doing just fine. It is not the same as it was, and many magazines and publishing houses have shuttered, but there is still a market for these things I once feared would become obsolete.

Through all this, I have held on to these books (and added many more), though their meaning has changed over the years, and, like Banjamin’s protagonist, these books have come to me by many avenues. There is a level of intellectual projection done by them. The crowd I often find myself surrounded by is frequently shocked that I read at all, let alone that I am a writer. There are memories in them. Many were passed down from my mother, who stole them from the LD Bell High School library in 1979. Her name is still on the card on the frontispiece. They have been gifts from friends, colleagues, family members. I have found them on the street. I have spent amounts I wouldn’t like to disclose on a few of them. I have stolen others from friends’ libraries. I have written some of them. My friends and my teachers have written others. I have come to them or they to me in many ways, but what is central is that these books remind me of a world into which I was born and which now seems as if it hardly exists at all.

The digital age has completed its ascent, and I latch on to the book out of nostalgia, familiarity, or fear. There is something comforting in looking at their many-colored spines as I write this. I could not have that same comfort on a device, no matter how they rearranged the front screen of the Books app. All of these varied feelings simply cannot be applied to a phone, to a screen, something that when we buy it, we know will someday soon become obsolete, because what the digital grants us in access it strips from us in permanence.

Will my grandchildren one day fire up my laptop and go through my files, watch some of the movies I have downloaded, play some of the computer games? Hell no. Let’s not lie to ourselves. But I do like to believe, if only because I have done it, that one day they might lift a book out from the shelf that was once in their grandfather’s collection, and open it and find his name and turn the same pages that my hands have turned. There is some kind of immortality in that, no?

What is Lost and What is Unseen

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When I taught ECL 220, I had a section of the class devoted to understanding the Great Migration, where we looked at Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and other Black authors of the early half of the twentieth century, how they became voice for a generation of Americans who were systemically denied one. However, it became apparent when I was preparing for this section of the course that by only analyzing the written word of Black Americans and how they experienced the Great Migration, we would be continuing to turn a blind eye to many others who never had the opportunity to put their experiences down in prose. I think this is a critical misstep to avoid when considering the literary canon in regards to Black authors.

In Shadow Archives, Cloutier states that Kevin Young “proposes a triadic taxonomy of ‘shadow books’: the unwritten, the removed, and the lost He suggests that the legion books by African American authors that ‘fail to be written’ symbolize ‘ the life denied [them], the black literature denied existence.'” This, Cloutier argues, is why it is so important to visit special collections and learn to understand the unpublished work of these writers. However, I think that, particularly for the time period, it is important to focus on other aspects of storytelling, particularly music.

For Black Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and today), access to the written word was very difficult to come by, especially in the Jim Crow South. As a result, we have very little literature from this time, from this place. Richard Wright is one of the rare exceptions to this and had he not moved away from the South we may never have gotten Native Son or Black Boy.

When we look at the archives of these Black authors, we must also wonder what was not included in the archive, or what was destroyed, and we must consider all of Black literature from the time period through this lens. The fixity of the book also lends its contents a fragility. A book can be burned, can be shredded, can be thrown in the river, so even for those lucky enough to successfully learn how to read and write in a world that told them they should not, their words were always under threat.

With music, especially the blues during this time period, there is an ability to circumvent these policies and threats. Music, unlike the book or the written word, is very difficult to regulate. Black storytellers of the time used this to accomplish the fixity that the book promised white and educated members of the society. Lead Belly, an infamous blues artist, was the first to record “Midnight Special” and “Cotton Fields,” songs he heard while in prison in Arkansas, which would later both be covered by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Without Lead Belly’s recording of these songs, they would likely be lost. Much of what transpired during the time of the Great Migration, particularly in the South, would be lost without being transcribed in song. The victims of the worst racism were often the poor and uneducated. They did not have the same opportunities to move to places like Harlem and Chicago. RL Burnside wrote songs on the porches of his Mississippi homes, playing in juke joints not much bigger than a chicken coop. Blind Willie Johnson, who was blinded by his stepmother throwing lye into his eyes, spent most of his life homeless and in abject poverty, but his “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground” was included on the Voyager spacecraft to best exemplify the human emotion of loneliness to extraterrestrial life.

The point is, that when we look at the special collections of Black authors of this time, yes we must consider how their writing was shunned and ostracized by the literary world, as Cloutier explores, but we must also consider the lives of the even lesser privileged among the Black community, which, more often than not, means the experiences of people from the South. And so to properly consider the “literature” of the time, we must also consider the oral storytelling present in these communities and those that came before, where stories were passed from generation to generation in slaves’ quarters, often retellings of tales handed down from passages across the Atlantic in the hull of slave ships, often things that had been handed down from a more ancient tradition in Africa, where these stories would be told more as performance, often accompanied with stringed instruments and drums, following rhythms that, over time, would persist all the way until the advent of the blues in America some centuries later, where these chords would intermix with those of poor white people in Appalachia during front porch sessions, ultimately giving us country music and rock and roll and hip hop.

We think of the book as fixed, but we cannot ignore its obvious shortcomings in some areas, especially when a people who have been denied access and denied a say in the world are trying to make their voices heard. Fixity can be lost, and to fill in the gaps we must look around and listen.

(Got a little confused on the reading assignment for this week, so I’m uploading late.)

Archive as Opportunity to Disrupt the Status Quo

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I did my undergrad at Texas State, and I kick myself, often, for having failed to capitalize on the opportunity to use our library’s archival collection of Cormac McCarthy’s papers. At the time, I had only a passing interest in McCarthy and had read one or two of his books. Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men. A professor in one of my English courses even offered to take anyone interested to the archive, and I thought at the time, “Wat would be the point in that?”

That was before I spent years poring over the vast majority of McCarthy’s bibliography and before I became obsessed with the ways in which he manufactures the sentence. I did not understand then the wealth of information I had at my disposal. As Bode and Osborne say in The History of the Book, the viewing of these archives of correspondence provide the opportunity to better understand authorial intention and “destabilize established arguments by directing attention to new information” (221). Right now, those very same archives are being scoured for any new information about McCarthy’s much younger muse and their very eyebrow-raising love affair. Destabilization is the key to the creation of greater understanding.

Research of this depth can give the researcher the opportunity to better understand the author and to also upend the status quo surrounding their work. Take, for example, the case of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which existed in its final form only after the dedicated work of archival researchers unearthed new material, with part 2 of the novel appearing seventeen years after Wright’s death and a complete edition finally being published fourteen years after that, in 1991 (Cloutier 1-2). The status quo around Wright’s work was to shun it, but to resist that through research has allowed us the opportunity to create a new narrative around the author and his work.

I do wonder at the future of archival research, and how it might change, in some ways for the better, as a digital archive of writers’ correspondence would be much easier to navigate, but this ease of navigation might lead to less discovery, as we may only find what we are looking for and lose the opportunity for surprise that would disrupt that status quo. When information must be combed through, that is the only time you really get the chance to uncover what many may have tried to keep hidden.

Why Digital Literature Scares Me

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I’ve been a writer for a very long time. In many ways I think I can tie this back to the murder of my father as a child, sifting through his things, what he collected, what he wore, for years trying to piece the clues together to make sense of who the man was who I hardly ever knew. It led to an obsession with permanence. What are we when we’re gone apart from the things we leave behind? So I write in a kind of vain attempt at immortality. At its very best it is a noble effort to endure, at its worse it is nothing but pure vanity, of thinking one might matter enough to be spoken of far into the future.

What frightens me the most about digital literature is the knowledge that these things are ephemeral. As Doctor Pressman says in her introduction to electronic literature, sometimes we have “only seven years of access to these works,” a far cry from the tens, hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years of access we have had to the works of literature we all have grown up with. My favorite novel is nearly ninety years old–the book I did a biography on for the midterm was first written in the thirteenth century. When writers write they write to stay. Writing has always, in some form, been a struggle against time. To record one’s thoughts and the mechanics of one’s mind takes those things from fleeting to enduring.

The three Ps of e-lit are poetics, critical practice, and preservation. “Facade” was created on a version of the web that no longer exists. Caitlin Fisher’s “Circle” plays with ephemerality in its core concept. I think it is admirable, and quite Zen, for artists to create without the impression of any permanence in their work, but what does that mean? I believe it goes against the very nature of being human, to me. It is to allow for death, to celebrate it, to accept it.

I have known very many men who have spoken of accepting the end, of being at peace with it, but when the end came I believe rather firmly that all of them realized they had been liars. And it is far different for a man with a rifle in his hands to wave away life with a flick of the wrist when they are willingly gambling with it than for someone who creates, whether to commune with the masses or in cathartic process, to accept that what they have done is of no meaning to anyone but the artist themselves. If it is true then it is admirable. But I cannot understand it. It is a complete and total submission to time and its forward progress, and to think of it makes me feel incredibly small and powerless, like standing in a field of ever-receding black, vanishing and vanishing in every direction all around you.

Seven years of access? I have blinked once and seven years passed. And to look back I often return to things I have written or things I have created. If they were not there how would I have any measure of who I ever was or how I became whoever I would be?

Maybe I am harping on some age-old fear. I know I am. But I know this because when those fears were expressed people wrote about them; people conveyed the fears in mediums that were enduring. We can look back at the historical record, and we can find them. We can trace where we once were, how we came through to the other side. What does it do to us, as a society, as mankind, if there is nothing to trace? We are floating, and maybe we always have been, but I do not know how to accept it.

Biography of a Book: The Golden Legend, Wynkyn de Worde, 1527

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Bibliography

This copy of the Golden Legend, first written in Latin by Jacobus de Voraigne in 1265, is the ninth edition of a William Caxton English translation, printed by Wynkyn de Worde on August 27, 1527, on Fleet Street at “the sygne of the sonne,” according to the book’s colophon in folio CCC.LXXXIIII. The volume is bound in brown leather with embossed gilding and decoration. “NOBILIS IRA” has been stamped on the front cover of the binding as well as the image of a lion—the family motto and crest of Clan Stuart of Bute, a wealthy family of Scottish nobility. It is a heavy and large book, printed at full folio size before trimming. The interiors of the front and rear covers show some water damage.

Binding of the Golden Legend showing crest and motto of Clan Stuart

The spine of the book bears six horizontal hubs. The spine is embossed in gilt with “THE GOLDEN LEGENDE” at its top and “W. DE WORDE. MCCCCCXXVII” in its center with a series of decorative gilt knots embossed in the other recesses between the hubs. The joint and hinge of this cover are in excellent shape, as are most of its pages. The book is accompanied by an undecorated solander case made of cardboard and faux leather, likely of much later origin than the binding and pages of the codex.

The pages of this edition are cloth rag, and they have gilding on all three exterior edges. There is some light dampstaining on the first few pages of the book and the last few. The center pages of the book are in excellent condition and some folios are pristine. Watermarks are visible at the center of most pages throughout the book, bearing the image of a star below an open palm. The blackletter text in which this work was printed has held up very well and the letters are clear and sharp throughout. Unlike earlier printings, this ninth edition does not have red drop cap lettering. Wynkyn de Worde was known for his illustrated copies, and there are many woodcut images stamped throughout this copy of the Golden Legend, some incorporated into the formatting of the text, others taking up full pages (Gillespie & Powell 30). Where the title page would typically be, there is a full-page illustration of many saints gathered around the throne of God. This page appears to have been repaired with newer paper, and one can see where the edges were once tattered by the years.

Artwork on first page, AIJ

There are several bookplates glued to the inside of the front cover and to the frontispiece. Inside the front cover a bookseller’s plate is glued to the top left corner reading:

1652 Legend Aurea; That is to say, in English, The Golden Legend; wherein be contained all the High and Great Feasts of Our Lord, the Feats of our Blessed Lady, the Lyves, Passions, and Miracles of many other Saintes, Histories and Acts, black letter, with woodcuts, folio, remarkably fine large copy, Morocco elegant, gilt leaves, EXTREMELY RARE, 52l. 10s. – London by Wynkyn de Worde, 1527. One of the most splendid specimens of this early printer’s productions.

Below this plate it can be seen that a bookplate has been removed at some point in this edition’s life. Below the adhesive residue where the old plate was, there is a bookplate with the image of a fine medieval building. In very small print the facade of the building bears the words ALDENHAM ABBEY. The bookplate glued below this gives a case, shelf, and room number. However, a plate from the Tempsford Hall Library has been glued over the top of it, denoting Case C, Shelf 4, and asking the reader to “Please return this Book to its place when done with.”

Underneath the Tempsford Hall plate is a more modern plate from the twentieth century reading “THE LIBRARY OF DAVID AND LULU BOROWITZ.”

Inside front cover: bookplates, water damage

The frontispiece has a fourth bookplate glued to it, this one larger than the rest, decorated with a coat of arms depicting a griffin-plumed helmet resting on the top edge of a shield. The crest’s motto reads “ET CUSTOS ET PUGNAX.” “Ex Libris” is written at the top edge of this plate, and the bottom edge reads: William Marchbank. This plate seems to be of an older paper than the Borowitz plate, but not as old as those of Tempsford Hall and Aldenham Abbey, so it is reasonable to estimate it is from the early twentieth to late nineteenth century. This plate also appears to be glued over the top of another of the same size and inscribed with the same message and crest. All that appears to have changed between the two is the font of William Marchbank’s name at the bottom and the material of the plate itself.

A letter has been glued to the frontispiece of this edition, presumably by a later bookseller. The letter is written in cursive on letterhead from the Bodleian Library at Oxford, dated May 11, 1850. It is accompanied by a loose envelope addressed to Henrietta Street in Covent Garden, London, sent to Thomas Thorpe, a bookseller in the capital. The envelope reads: “Relating the Golden Legende. May 1850” and bears several postal stamps from 1850 while the letter was in transit. The letter reads:

11/5/50

Dear Sir, I have carefully examined our copy (in the Douse Collection) of the Golden Legend, by Wykkyn de Worde 1527. There is no leaf between the Frontispiece and AIJ. Douse considered it perfect, only remarking that the impression from frontis plate was the worse for frequent use. As far as I could keep into the back of the sheet without injuring the Book, it seemed to me that the plate was struck off on the half of the last folding – so as to prove that it was an Ai- I shall be glad at all times to make any search of this nature for you. I am glad to find that your country air has restored you. I wish I could get away from Oxford for a little while, but I am afraid to go too far from my [unknown] Medical friends until the weather has become really genial—besides which I have a great deal on my hands at Bodley at this moment. Believe me. Yours faithfully, M Banchmil.  

Some of the words are difficult to decipher in the cursive text of the letter, but it is apparent that these two booksellers were well acquainted with one another, as Thomas Thorpe is listed in many letters held by the Bodleian Library’s archives in correspondence with the booksellers at Oxford.

Frontispiece: letter, envelope, bookplate

There is writing in pencil on the top of the inside cover that may read “Miss lj,” though I cannot make it out too clearly, and this appears to be a part of an inventory code Thomas Thorpe kept with many of the books he sold. The pencil inscription on the top of the frontispiece reads “3500 ww373,” and a final pencil inscription at the top left of the next page bears the call number of the book: BX 4654 J33 1527 to Special Collections, likely placed there when the book joined our archives along with the small stamp at the back of the frontispiece that says, “San Diego State University Library Special Collections.”

Analysis

The pedigree associated with this book is extraordinarily compelling. For much of its near-five-hundred-year existence, we can trace the movements of this edition of the Golden Legend down to the address of its residence and the shelf it has been stored on. The meticulous documentation that accompanies this book suggests to me that it has been an object of great importance since the day it was printed. The letter of sale attached to the frontispiece gives us an insight into how this book was viewed in 1850, and likely through the centuries before and since: as an object of immense value, whether socially or monetarily: a status symbol since the first days following its printing on Fleet Street in 1527 to its ultimate resting place in our Special Collections Library.

Wynkyn de Worde was a student of William Caxton. Born in Germany, he immigrated to England in 1476 in order to work under Caxton, ultimately taking control of Caxton’s business following his death in 1491. Wynkyn de Worde is credited as one of the instrumental early players in London’s printing scene. According to Fleet Street Heritage, he established the first print shop on the now famous Fleet Street in circa 1500 and set out on a prolific career in the industry, “in all, it is estimated that from 1501 to the close of his career [in 1535], Wynkyn printed over six hundred titles, several of which survive today.” He “seems to have sought to develop markets, particularly for smaller, hence cheaper books, that required less capital investment and could be produced more quickly,” though it is clear that this edition of the Golden Legend is not one of those books (Gillespie & Powell 30).

While de Worde made an effort to establish markets for the less affluent, he also had established connections within the hierarchy of the English nobility. He was a close associate of Lady Margaret Beaufort, King Henry VII’s mother, and was even named her printer shortly before her death in 1509. The Companion to the early Printed Book in Britain claims, though it is unclear, that Lady Margaret may have provided some assistance to Wynkyn de Worde, whether through monetary backing, or guaranteed purchases of a set number of copies, or it could be that association with her name provided a boost to sales (Gillespie & Powell 31). In any case, the colophon’s reference to the reign of Henry VIII suggests either that Henry’s reign held a strong grip on British society in 1527 or that de Worde was close with the crown, likely both.

Knowing that Wynkyn was making concerted efforts to lower production costs of his printing, it is easy to understand his movement away from using red ink drop caps in the text, and although it is printed entirely in plain black blackletter, the book is still rendered beautiful by the integrated woodcuts throughout and the masterfully decorated leaf that would have come before the now missing title page. This was very much created as a work of art. Many of Wynkyn de Worde’s printings were smaller, and so the page sizes of this copy of the Golden Legend alone speaks to the importance of this particular edition. A person could not and would likely not have wanted to purchase this book in its day unless they were extremely wealthy.

First page of text showing blackletter, woodcut, black ink drop caps

 And although we do not know who the first owners of the pages of this codex were, we can assume that they would have been deeply religious Catholics, as England was still a decade away from the reformation. This would have been a book of great importance in the owners’ homes, and following the reformation, the stories within telling of the lives of the saints may have been a way for its readers to maintain their catholic heritage.

While the first few pages have been frayed and repaired, a hint as to their usage, the excellent condition the rest of the pages are in and the gilded edges all suggest that this book was moving between the shelves of the rich and powerful before winding up in the Bodleian Library sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Bodleian is one of the foremost institutions of knowledge-keeping in the world. Very little arrives there by accident.

M Banchmil, bookseller at the Bodleian, then sold this copy to Thomas Thorpe, whose bookshop was located at 13 Henrietta Street in Covent Garden, London. Thorpe then, judging by the date of the bookplates and the binding, sold this to a member of Clan Stuart, the book going from Covent Gardens to Aldenham Abbey, near Watford, sometime after May of 1850. The book then traveled further north to Tempsford Hall, a building owned at the time by a Major Dugald Stuart (possibly the original purchaser from Thorpe of this copy of the Golden Legend) just west of Cambridge. Tempsford Hall burned to the ground in 1898, so we know that this copy of the Golden Legend must have been relocated to its new owner’s shelves before then.

It is most likely that this new owner was William Marchbank. Based on the heraldry on Marchbanks’ bookplate, we can see that his family was a part of the Clan Marjoribanks. The Marjoribanks clan is of some relation to Clan Stuart, tracing their joint lineage back to a fourteenth-century marriage between Robert the Bruce’s daughter Marjorie with Walter Stewart, whose son would go on to be the king of Scotland in 1371.

So, we have evidence that this book has been passed along the descendants of Scottish royalty, coming from a birth in the lap of the British royalty. It is likely that the Scots, remaining catholic following Henry VIII’s reformation and the creation of the Anglican church, would have continued to value the Golden Legend spiritually, possibly adding another layer to the clearly cherished nature of this edition.

Whether William Marchbank inherited this book, purchased it from some distant cousin, valued it religiously, or even opened it at all is unknown, but he must have owned the book for long enough to install two bookplates bearing his name and crest on the frontispiece before it went to its new home. Not much can be uncovered about Marchbanks, but this same bookplate appears inside a book at the Penn University archives (call number: EC F6253 650ec), so it can be assumed that he placed much value on his collection. Archival references in letters found at Trinity College in Cambridge suggest that William Marchbank was a knight and solicitor who managed the Drapers’ Fund during the second world war, but this cannot be wholly confirmed by the evidence.

In order for this edition of the Golden Legend to cross the Atlantic and make its way to us, it needed a very wealthy buyer. Enter David and Lulu Borowitz. According to obituaries found in the Chicago Tribune, the husband and wife lived lives of philanthropy and rare book collecting. Lulu spent WWII fundraising for the Red Cross, while David spent the early part of the century investing and founding the Bradley Manufacturing Company, which made lamps and lamp shades. The Borowitzes became a power couple in the book collecting world, donating large collections to Brandeis University and the University of Louisville, where David would be awarded an honorary degree for his contributions. Lulu Borowitz passed in 1987, and with David’s death the following year, this copy of Wynkyn de Worde’s Golden Legend left their shelves. Where it went next is unclear, but eventually the book was acquired by Special Collections, although due to record keeping at the time (or lack thereof), the date of the acquisition and who it was acquired from is not certain.

In a world where there are many old things passed along without record through family members or friends or antique shops, to find an object whose history can be traced at all is a rare feat, let alone one that has had hundreds of years of ownership recorded for posterity’s sake attached to it. When a numismatist picks up a very old coin, they often imagine who might have held it, what it might have been used to purchase. Old books are similar. But in this instance, we can know who turned the Golden Legend’s pages, we can know where they stored it and where they lived, and from that, we can know, in some small way, and with only the tiniest dusting of certainty, a bit about their lives. This tiniest dusting, however, will leave more of history’s traces on our fingers than so many of the things we will ever touch that arrive to us nameless.

To hold an object of this nature changes it from simple antique. The provenance of the piece urges us to view it as artifact; we are holding something that has communed with the past directly in a discoverable way. The book should speak to us of more ancient times, but rather than speaking in a hollow shout, it whispers to us as if confiding a very old secret: “This is what the world was before you came into being.” While it may be a very different world, one bearing the hallmarks of wealth and privilege, whether we are rich or poor now we are interacting with the same interface, turning the same pages, finding the same ink stamped in the same places telling us the same old legends, some of them golden. It is up to us to decide whether this gold bears the same value, or whether it has been tarnished by the hands that held it, be they made rich through blood and scheming—as was the case with Clan Stuart and the Marjoribanks, through a fascination with the word—in all its forms—by those that stewarded the Bodleian and by Thomas Thorpe, or through innovation—as we saw through the rise of Wynkyn de Worde, or through lamps—in the case of the Borowitz family.

While it is hard to ignore the value placed upon these pages that superseded many of the other things that must be valued in this life, for me, this book is still worth its weight in gold.

The Future of Books as a Return to the Origins of Story

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Borsuk’s final chapter on the book as interface had me thinking a great deal about remediation and the process of it. All the history of humanity has really been the history of storytelling, and a book is nothing but a method of transmitting a story. Borsuk writes, “historian Matthew Rubery contends that the medium [of audio books] emerged to both reproduce the printed book and repair its shortcomings” (205). No matter how much we all may love books and the idea of them, there are some things the traditional codex volume simply cannot do. “Literature,” Borsuk writes on page 208, “emerged from an oral tradition that included bards, troubadours, filid, meddahs, and griots, among other literary performers.” If we continue to think about literature in this way, then we can trace the origins of mankind’s and bibliophiles’ obsession with the story and, as a result, the book, to a point some tens of thousands of years ago around a fire where the first fragments of language were being used to weave together tales of imagination. The oral tradition is the absolute baseline of story. It is what we are always striving to replicate. The book is only one point in the long and complex history of human storytelling.

Storytelling has been in a glacial process of change for all of our history, slow and nearly imperceptible, but once the process is complete, or has moved on to a new phase, the landscape is radically changed in ways that we may not have foreseen. I think that what we are living through, when it comes to books and the perceived threat they are said to be under, is perhaps better understood as a shift in the way story is told. If a book is only a nexus for that, then it is of no higher or lower order than a podcast, an audiobook, a video game, or any other current or uninvented method of storytelling. The book has been romanticized so much by those of us who love them that to envision a world without them is terribly frightening, but this romanticization is only a result of the times in which we live. As we discussed earlier in the semester, there was backlash and fear ascribed to reading and what it would do to the minds of the people from the great thinkers of the Hellenic period of our history. So it should come as no surprise the backlash new forms of storytelling receive when they first emerge in our contemporary conversations.

The knowledge of storytelling’s remedial nature should give us some hope that all is not actually lost when it comes to human knowledge and creation and culture. We are merely watching it turn into the next form of itself. An era may be drawing to an end, though the book will likely never go away, the main methods of knowledge dissemination and storytelling may shift dramatically. As Borsuk says in the final paragraph of The Book, “Some scholars consider this period of textual fixity and enclosure the Gutenberg parenthesis, rather than the Gutenberg era, suggesting that we are returning to a culture that values orality and ephemerality, no longer needing ideas bound between covers or owned in quite the same way” (258).

How the Construction of the Page May Obscure Fascism

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The aesthetics of the page are important. This is something innately understood by most readers, even if they do not have the understanding of why. When we open a book and see long blocks of text, readers are subconsciously aware of a kind of gatekeeping taking place within its passages. Those who do not read often will think “this must not be for me,” or “this information is too complex for my understanding.” When we see smaller paragraphs, more white space, a simpler lexicon, the reader approaches it as if by warm invitation from the author. The page itself says, “come with me.” As Bonnie Mak says on page 5 of her introduction to How the Page Matters, the page “influences meaning by its distinctive embodiment of those ideas [on the page].” The page exists as “an ongoing conversation between designers and readers. As writers, artists, translators, scribes, printers, booksellers, librarians, and readers configure and revise the page, in each case they leave redolent clues about how the page matters to them and how they wish it to matter to others.”

When we open a book, look at a flyer, without reading a single word we can likely know who the work was created for and who it was created by. The modernist movements of literature, art, and design were integral to this. Among the most prominent writers of modernist literature is Ernest Hemingway, whose style was inspired by the work of impressionist painter Claude Monet. Monet’s later works, such as “The Water Lillies” would evolve to set the foundation for what would become expressionism. Both of these art forms have been very enduring in their wider appeal, much as Hemingway is often credited with doing “more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century” and whose works were published in clear, easy to understand, accessible formats. The Old Man and the Sea was published in Life magazine, so as to be accessible to more readers, and one anecdote in Lesley Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly recalls a late-night reading of the book at a truck stop, of all places, to a room full of greasy drivers and people from the sticks and hollers of West Virginia: A waitress reads from the copy of Life. People are trying to order coffee from her, a jukebox is playing and is unplugged from the wall to better hear. “She says, ‘Shut up and listen’ And in the middle of the night, in this truck stop, she starts reading The Old Man and the Sea” (236). This work was for everybody. It has been enduring. Just like Monet. Just like the expressionists.

Other forms of modernism did not last, and their fates mirror those of the political parties they ascribed to. The Dadaists fractured into many smaller groups in a way that calls to mind the Communists’ sectarian splintering during the Spanish Civil War. Dada work was staunchly anti-bourgeoise, but it was created in a way that did not allow the proletariat to understand.

Equally incomprehensible are the futurist works of Filippo Marinetti, and a look at any of his works should hopefully let us know who they were created for and who Marinetti was. Let us begin our analysis of Marinetti by making something very clear, Filippo Marinetti was a literal co-author of The Fascist Manifesto, a fact that was startlingly omitted from Phillip Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. Filippo Marinetti and Futurism helped give the world fascism, helped give the world Mussolini, helped give the world Hitler, helped facilitate the violent deaths of over fifty million people. He volunteered multiple times to serve in the military of fascist Italy, fighting on the front at over sixty years old.

He is one of the worst people who ever existed.

A viewing of his poem “After The Marne, Joffre Visited The Front By Car” immediately greets the reader with his psychosis. It is nearly impossible to read and was designed as such, much the same as fascism is designed to be hidden within a society before takeover. Marinetti once stated, as quoted by Meggs on page 4 of chapter 13, “a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samoth-race.” The past was shunned by Marinetti so much that all its beauty was lost, and the world became nothing but a forward machination. (A copy of that statue, quite fittingly, was once given as a gift to Texas Woman’s University to celebrate the “defeat of autocracy.”)

When we look at the design of Meggs’ work through the lens of How the Page Matters, what is it saying to us? Text is presented plainly in large blocks, which can be an overwhelming intake of information for the layperson. The referenced images in the text are located at the very end of the book, and this says, quite apparently, that you must conduct an extra level of research to even comprehend or be aware of Meggs’ points or what he is talking about. This information is not supposed to be easy to process, nor is it meant to be easy to find.

But this clearly well-researched section on the history of Futurism somehow omits a very important aspect of the movement entirely. An omission this large is not an accident. The death of Antonio Sant’Elia is lamented. “Tragically,” Meggs’ writes of the futurist architect’s death in World War One. If Saint’Elia was a compatriot of Marinetti and Mussolini the only thing tragic about his death is that he did not meet the bludgeoning fate of the latter. The design of the pages of History of Graphic Design is constructed to not clearly give us the information in it. We have to work for it. This knowledge is not intended for the everyman. This section of Chapter 13 reads as an apologia for fascism, but this apologia is hidden behind a series of smokescreens and baffling omissions. Much as the meaning of Marinetti’s work was hidden in its layout, and how we are often unable to comprehend works of Dada or Futurism.

The fixity of text, as we discussed in class, enables it to be difficult to challenge, this lack of challenge allows for stability and a common basis of knowledge. Some of the most fixed texts are textbooks. A central hallmark of fascism is erasure of the past. It is extremely disappointing to find this kind of omission, let alone the lauding of these architects of destruction, in a textbook, somewhere it is unlikely to be challenged, and almost certain to be made canon.

You have to dig to uncover fascism. Even through the very layout of the page. Complexity often hides an untruth.

Perhaps at the end of this very long and, admittedly, a little heated, blog post, maybe it is time to turn back to a style of modernism that valued the construction of the page and wanted its content to be easily discernible for the reader, and I will close with a quote from page 66 of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, something important to remember in these trying times, a very simple exchange of dialogue between Robert Jordan, the protagonist, and Pilar, the leader of a band of Spanish guerrillas during the country’s civil war, surrounded by white space on the page, easy to pick out, clear to understand, and unfortunately, still timely:

“Are you a communist?”

“No I am an anti-fascist.”

“For a long time?”

“Since I have understood fascism.”