Our readings this week prime us to approach Special Collections materials within a “media ecology” (Jessica Pressman, “Old Media/New Media”). Operating themselves in this ecology, these readings cite diverse scholarly approaches to book studies. While this is my third time reading Michelle Levy and Tom Mole’s The Broadview Introduction to Book History (2017) with Dr. Pressman, I’m struck by the immensity of information and approaches to information cataloged in the History. As we prepare to enter Special Collections, I’m struck by a deep thought: There’s a lot to read. How do we read a lot?

If we understand each book as a networked media object, we must read this object’s contexts across time and place. To use Dr. Pressman’s term from “Old Media/New Media”, how do we read an “ecology of interrelated feedback loops” if all are entangled? How does one read an ecology? How do we focus or curate our readings of an object when we understand its paratext to spiral in directions and scopes beyond our comprehension? If the book object is assembled and networked so pervasively, how do we decide the scope of our reading? As Dr. Pressman said of digital hypertext in last week’s class, how does the reading end, and how do we decide where it ends?

What Dr. Pressman calls the “linear historical narrative that describes the shift from old to new media” (2), thoroughly unwound by book archaeology, is tempting because it makes reading media easier. Questions of immense scope are detangled; the singular reader retakes authority to create a sequential history and to construct singular meanings from this easier narrative. This reduced “flowchart” history is popularly bent to political ends. We don’t need to fall into this practice just because it’s easier – rather, it is important that we commit to following the confusions and uncertainties of research if we really want to meet and draw more nuanced interpretations of our book objects.

Without needing to construe reading history through the transitional “intensive to extensive reading” model, we can recognize that the way we approach reading is influenced by our perception of how many things are available to read (Levy and Mole xviii). I realized during our discussion of Mark C. Marino’s Marginalia in the Library of Babel that many hypertexts take me longer to process than static texts because they offer no readout showing how much content remains to be read. As a mortal thing, having some concept of when – or at least if – I’ll end a reading informs how I apportion my time and attention. My attention transitions out of the text and through others. Instead of expecting a fixed termination point, then, I think I’ll enter Special Collections with the framework that my reading of a book object will be transitional: our feedback loops will pass through each other. Maybe the ending that will guide my reading is not the limit at which a reading or history terminates, but the transitional process that happens when the book object takes on new meaning. It’s not a cessation, but a transition into more and radiating loops. I need to pay attention to my reading processes in order to notice when this transition is taking place.

Last week, Borges’ narrator in The Library of Babel conjured “[an] unspeakably melancholy memory: I have sometimes traveled for nights on end, down corridors and polished staircases, without coming across a single librarian” (114). Borges philosophically dramatizes conflicts surrounding the ways in which people approach books and reading as cultural practices; here the conflict is not between opposing readers but in the echo chamber of an intellectual journey undertaken alone. I am grateful that we populate our own Library within the massive ecology of scholarship, expertise, and curiosities of people across time and place.