Tag Archives: archives

Week 11: Bode and Osborne

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In Chapter 13 of The Cambridge Companion to The History of the Book, Katherine Bode and Roger Osborne remind us that “no book was ever bound by its covers” (Bode and Osborne, 220). While we’ve been re-learning the importance of the materiality of the physical book, Bode and Osborne, in section “Reading the qualitative archives: sources”, remind us that archiving extends beyond the physicality of the book itself. Archives preserve not just the book, but the traces of the people, relationships, and decisions that shaped it during its creation, and over time. Bode and Osborne highlight the three main and most used categories of archival records used in book history as “correspondence, publishers’ records and booksellers and library records”, each providing insight into the book’s life. Authors’ letters may reveal how a manuscript evolved through editing and negotiation, while the correspondence between booksellers or librarians may show how works reached, or failed to reach, specific readers. This correspondence may even “provide specific reasons why a book was or was not purchased for a particular group of readers” (Bode and Osborne, 220). As they write, correspondence “provides some of the most direct evidence of relationships between individuals in print culture” (Bode and Osborne, 220). With these records, scholars are able to reconstruct the “communications circuit” of print, tracing how various works moved from private creation to public consumption. In fact, archival research reshapes our understanding of authorship and authority. Scholarly editions, such as the digital Mark Twain Project, reveal that previously undiscovered correspondence can “destabilize established arguments” about a text’s purpose or meaning. Archives keep literary history alive, and are continually reshaping the boundaries of what we know, or think we know. Bode and Osborne push us to see that studying the history of the book means studying a network of human activity and correspondence, that is the archive is a living and continually growing space. 

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.