Category Archives: Uncategorized

May Books never leave us

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In her work “Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age,” Jessica Pressman describes a fascinating paradox. We live in a time when we no longer need books, but love them more than ever. Although the traditional physical book is far outdated as a reading technology, we are surrounded by a new culture of book worship. Pressman calls this phenomenon bookishness: “creative acts that engage the physicality of the book within a digital culture.”

This phenomenon can be found everywhere: book sculptures, cell phone cases that look like old books, in so-called “shelfies” on social media, or in laptop bags with a leather book look. The aesthetic appearance, especially of old books, fascinates many people. It is more than just pure nostalgia. It is a cultural response to the loss of closeness, materiality, and identity in the digital world. While we find ourselves in an era of constant connectivity, we longingly seek the concentration, privacy, and tranquility that we find in books. Pressman writes: “The book has historically symbolized privacy, leisure, individualism, knowledge, and power. This means that the book has been the emblem for the very experiences that must be renegotiated in a digital era.” Books have become symbols, physical markers of identity. Pressman describes how people today use books (or images of them) to show belonging and taste, for example through bookshelves as Instagram stories or in the background as decoration in cafés or in their own homes. The possession, or even just the display, of books becomes a gesture. It is proof of cultural depth, education, perhaps even resistance to superficiality.

The work emphasizes that this love of books is not backward-looking, but productive. Bookishness transforms books into art, design, or performance. When artists cut, fold, or digitally recreate books, they make it clear that books live on, not as a medium for reading, but as a medium for thinking and feeling. We also saw this in the interview between Jessica Pressman and Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer, who use books as art to convey a certain criticism of a particular medium. In the end, bookishness is not a nostalgic retreat, but a new form of engagement with the digital. She writes: “Loving books in a digital age is personal and communal… claiming a bookish identity can constitute an act of rebellion.” We love books not because they are useful, but because they no longer have to be. 

Week 13: Books to Read or Collect

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When does a book reader become a book collector? Most who read, who pursue reading as a hobby, will borrow, or buy, and own books. They will have a bookshelf or bookshelf’s to display and keep their books, bit are they collectors of them or just owners? While reading Unpacking My Library, by Walter Benjamin, I became interested in the process by which someone becomes a collector of books rather than simply a reader of them. Through the reading I figure that the collection of books, not only the ownership of them, is intentionally, one has to state that they are a collector of books in order to be one.

If a reader has a large number if books in their library it is not a collection until they deem it one, until they do it is a group, library, or an assembly, not an intentional collection. To collect books is to appreciate them and see them beyond the material they hold, but as Benjamin describes, to love them as , “the scene, the stage, of their fate.” (Benjamin, 60). There is a difference between a person who says that they love reading and books and a person who says they love books and owning them, one is a reader, one is a collector. A person who reads may be a collector, but there is not always a certainty that a collector is a reader.

I have realized that I am teetering on the verge of becoming a collector of books, not just a reader of them. I used to only buy books if I intended to read them immediately, as a reader I have had rules for my shelves, just as he had ruled that “no book was allowed to enter [them] without the certification that [he] had not read it.” (62). But the rules I have for my book ownership are changing, I now have begun to buy multiple editions of the same book, or have bought books that I will read “one day,” even if a planned date for reading is non-existent. I want to have books not just to read, but because I like having books, I am becoming a collector, my library of books is now a collection of chosen books, not just an assemblage of literary devices.

Final Project Proposal

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Moby Dick by Herman Melville is a foundational work of the American canon that has been read, reread, and taught for decades now. It is a timeless narrative that explores transcendentalism, class, power, religion, and the natural world while also questioning what it means to be educated, American, and even human. Most importantly, it’s a text about the art of reading, how to read, and the process of reading the world around you. Ishmael models this form of reading throughout the novel, not only by observing people and animals, but also by treating the world itself as a text, reading the markings on Queequeg’s body and the engravings on the whale’s back. Thus insinuating that books are not the only way to read and learn, and that knowledge comes in many forms. 

This led me to question: Does form affect content? Or, in other words, does the medium through which information is delivered shape the way we comprehend and emotionally engage with it? In this scholarly analysis, I will be interrogating different textual media of the same novel, Moby Dick, to examine their scale, interface, design choices, and how these all work together to tell their own story. To do this, I will be investigating a limited edition Arion Press artist book, a classic codex, and a PDF online version, exploring how these adaptations affect my reading experience, emotional response, and absorption of the text.

The Shadow Archives

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I found the introduction of “Shadow Archives,” by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, to be extremely intriguing because it discusses the concept of ‘shadow books,’ which are works that are either forgotten, discarded, removed, or never published. Cloutier places special emphasis on the importance of these works and the preservation needed for them. On page 2, Cloutier writes, “the preservation of the removed is precisely the condition which genitor criticism depends: the alternative versions and abandoned drafts retroactively cast their shadow back upon the maimed books that survived. By disrupting textual stability, special collections further encourage “a willingness to recognize the unfinished” as a condition of the literary– not only what has been removed but also what the removed may one day inspire.” These shadow books are a crucial aspect of the literary world because they offer insight into unknown stories and allow people to gather more information and context surrounding the work. In this introduction, Cloutier discusses Richard Wright’s Black Boy, a book that had been heavily edited or had text removed. Years later, it was republished with notes from the author and a ‘restored text’. With this updated version, Black Boy has become a staple in African American literature. Imagine what lessons, ideas, and opinions could have been lost without that revised edition. Cloutier’s chapter provokes the question of what can be done about lost media and the importance of trying to preserve it. While it may not seem like much at the time of publishing, some works need to be processed with time. Richard Wright, along with countless other authors are recognized posthumously through their work and the resurfaced shadow books. The preservation of these shadow books bring more awareness to the author, publisher, and the ‘invisible labor’ that Cloutier mentions. in the article, Kevin Young states that he became a collector “to save what we didn’t even know needed saving.” This statement really stuck out to me since we live in a time where so many pieces of work are discarded or ignored. Sometimes there is just no time to view it. Despite that, it doesn’t lessen the work and becomes something worth saving. Often items are ignored when it comes to archives so it is important to be aware of what is saved and recorded while other material is lost or ignored. This circles back to the power of an archivist and collector. They are able to pick and choose what they want and exert power over what they deem worthy to be collected. Shadow books fight against this and prove that awareness is always shifting.

Shadow Archives

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After reading The Lifecycles of African American Literature, I was very much intrigued because I always wondered how much of people’s work were never stored away or kept. The chapter goes on to tell us that simply pushing away other people’s stories and not archiving them or let alone acknowledge them; creates this erasure of the person as well as their identity, culture and of course, their work. When you purposefully do not include people’s work in archives you are damaging and controlling the flow of information as well as the history. This thought stuck to me so much after reading this quote from the chapter, “We nevertheless journey to black authors’ special collections to “search amongst the fragments of life unlived,” hoping to map out the counterfactuals that history refused to accommodate.”

The quote really stuck out to me because I remember in my journalism class a few years ago we read stories of black authors that got purposefully shadowed by the city they lived in. We also read newspaper stories about how small towns were caught lying and changing the history about how they treated black authors. That class and now this have been the only times that we have ever discussed about black history and stories being shadowed by people. It honestly bothers me a lot about people would misuse the archive to purposefully erase people. I have been more and more interested in archives because I too also believe that when you archive something, you treat it with care because you still believe for it have some life even though we “discard” them because they are “dead”. (2)

Overall, I learned a lot more about shadow archives and what authors were blocked off from society who didn’t get the recognition they truly deserved. Archives are very much important, but it is more important to document the “correct” information and I quote correct because whoever is the one archiving the information; they are labeling it with their bias. All and all, a lot of things to see and bring up to light, so that stories, people and history are not taken away from society.

Making History

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Christophe Cloutier in Shadow Archives: the Lifecycles of African American Literature sees the archive as something active–a creation of a story. He states that “the archive becomes a site where an author’s hidden identities, affiliations, and political ambivalences and fantasies can be hammered out, notably when these things were deemed too difficult, messy shameful, or inchoate for public presentation” (10). In other words, the archive is a living thing which changes depending on the person archiving it. The subjectivity of the archive makes it such that it reflects systems of oppression, thus the importance of focusing on African-American (and other minority) archives.

The various forms or “multiplicity of lives” (12) which an archive can have demonstrate the impossibility for objective storytelling. If the same archive can have various different associations, then it is impossible for it to have an essential story. This is relevant when put in the context of academia when it is in pursuit of truth. As Cloutier states, “archivists guide–or perhaps one should say, manipulate–scholarly practice” (24). The archive denotes the understanding of what is being archived. In other words, in a sense, the archive speaks for itself.

Keeping stories alive

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When I read the introduction of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, one line really stopped me. It says: “In part because many African American authors lived with a constant threat of annihilation and in part because of a forced self-reliance, they deliberately developed an archival sensibility whose stakes were tied to both politics and aesthetics, to both group survival and individual legacy.” (p.9) 

From my point of view is this a very deep sentence. It’s not something you can just skim past. The idea that people had to build an archive not out of luxury or curiosity, but out of fear of being erased felt both heartbreaking and powerful. It made me think about how fragile memory can be when the world doesn’t want you to exist in it.

What I found most moving was how this “archival sensibility” wasn’t just political but also deeply creative. These writers weren’t only keeping records to survive, they were turning that survival into art. The act of saving letters, manuscripts, or photographs became something beautiful a way of saying we were here, and our stories matter.

The book also describes this process as more like a boomerang than an arrow. I love that image. Instead of moving in one direction, these stories keep coming back, circling through generations, reminding us that history isn’t gone it keeps returning to us, asking to be heard again.

Bookishness – A Responce to a Culture in Transition.

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Wow, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first chapter of Jessica Pressman’s book Bookishness. I loved the words and all the wonderful pictures added for our viewing pleasure. It really helped to paint the picture of what bookishness truly is, a phenomenon of people fetishizing the look, feel, and idea of a book in the digital age, where we don’t need them anymore. Although the need might be gone, the want is still apparent. I loved how Pressman italicized these two words: Need and want. We dont need books anymore in our day-to-day lives, and this drastic change is what led to our even stronger want, desire, and fetishization for them.

It reminds me of why I love collecting CDs. I absolutely do not need my collection of CDs; I don’t even have a CD player in my car, and I can listen to all the same things on my iPhone, but it’s the physicality and the fetish of it. It feels more human to put in a CD or read a physical book.

These acts of going out of our way to use physical items such as books and CDs instead of relying on the digital feels nostalgic, and almost like a coping mechanism for how quickly our world became so digital. Pressman words it the best by saying, “Bookishness signals a culture in transition but also provides a solution to a dilemma of the contemporary literary age: how to maintain a commitment to the nearness, attachment, and affiliation that the book traditionally represented now that the use value of the book has so radically altered.” This quote is so verdant and robust with great language, such as the words; transition and radically altered. It honestly blew my mind reading this. That bookishness, in a way, acts as a response to a culture in transition, and this is so because the changes to the book have been so radically altered. Less than twenty years ago, books were the only means to read stories and novels. The first Amazon Kindle didn’t come out until 2007. Computers didn’t become necessary for school and home life until the 90’s and early 2000s. This all proves how shocking and quick our transition from physical to digital truly was, and we’re all still in shock and attempting to adjust. Bookishness is also, in a way, a fight and push back against the digital, our response to the attempted deletion of our beloved physical items. In all, I resonate with the term bookishness, and I will continue to be bookish as a way to push back against a fully digital age.

Institutions and Archives

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Cloutier discusses the function of archives: “what capture really means is that a record’s information must be inscribed or seized in some kind of storage medium…this piece of paper then needs to be pulled into a records management system—which still requires a physical infrastructure—in order to be used and controlled” (8).

The organization of archives is political, influenced by the culture and systems of power that surround it. The organization of archives emphasizes the human touch and consideration involved in this ‘medium,” similar to the way the human touch is involved in all technological processes we might assume run themselves (book publishing, AI).

I’m currently in Dr. Y Howard’s trans and queer cultural studies class, and we’re having similar discussions about the limitations of archives. Last week, we read Andy Campbell’s Bound Together, specifically the chapter, “Yellow, or reading archives diagonally” in which Campbell observes that something like the Leather Archives and Museum is effected by social influences like stigma surrounding kink and BDSM. Due to this, people are less likely to donate possible archival material from deceased people who used to be in the leather community. With the limitations of the archive’s organization in mind, Campbell reads through the archives diagonally, creating his own methods of categorization (organizing by the color yellow in reference to the hanky code) in order to come to a different result than would have been available had he followed the normative or offered organization of the archive: “What emerges to return to Foucault’s comment, is not just a collection of objects, but a way of life, yielding… ‘intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized'” (Campbell, 103).

Reading the Archive in Two Ways

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When I read Katherine Bode and Roger Osborne, one thing stayed with me, the difference between the archive you can touch and the one you can search. On one side, there is the quiet room, the box, the folder, the paper. On the other, a glowing screen and a cursor. At first, they seem like two versions of the same thing. But the more I thought about it, the more they felt like two different languages.

Bode and Osborne write that archives hold “the material evidence of print culture” (p. 219). That line made me pause. Material evidence makes the archive sound like a witness, not just a container. The paper, its edges, its marks, even its weight are all part of the story. You don’t just read the text, you also read the object.The digital archive changes how we enter that story. It makes research faster and broader. You can map a question across thousands of records and find patterns you would never see by turning pages. It has a different rhythm with less waiting and more moving, less surprise by accident and more discovery through search.

Still, something feels different when reading on a screen. The page becomes an image surrounded by tools such as a zoom bar, a search box, or a download button. These tools help, but they also create a small distance. You can zoom in and see the ink in perfect detail, closer than you might in person, but you cannot feel the give of old paper or the tightness of a stitched spine. Bode and Osborne describe how the “weight, smell and feel” (p. 233) resist translation. That line captures exactly what gets lost. You can see everything, and yet something is missing.

It is not about choosing one side. The best work happens when both worlds meet. Digital archives open up scale and connections, while physical ones remind us of size and texture. One teaches us to ask and the other teaches us to look.

Even the idea of chance changes between them. In a reading room, coincidence happens in the margins, like a note on the back of a letter or a slip of paper left behind. Online, it happens in the search results, when a word you did not expect brings up something new. Both moments matter, they just belong to different kinds of touch, one physical and one digital.

Bode and Osborne end by saying that different archives serve different purposes and that neither is naturally better. That feels right. It reminds me that reading today means being bilingual, fluent in both dust and data. The slow turn of a page and the fast scroll of a screen. Dust reminds us that knowledge has a body. Data reminds us that it has a pattern. Reading the archive in both languages lets us hear both.