Tag Archives: Week 12

Take a Shelfie!

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

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

Week 12: Fetishization of the Book and Self-Image

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Dr. Pressman starts off the first chapter with the statement, “we no longer need books” (pg. 1) in the original sense. A lot don’t use them solely for their original purpose anymore; to explore or have time with one’s thoughts thinking about the book in context. And if we intended that use, I guarantee that we would have still bought books off the shelves because of the cover, thinking that it looked pretty. The clothbound or highly illustrated ones at the Barnes and Noble personally draw me in because I like the sophisticated or elegant look of the book. That is me prioritizing aesthetic and materialistic value over the purpose of the pages I’m buying. 

The fetishization of books has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon. Everywhere I look, books are being used as content for material objects, titles being printed on everything like a constant ad. They target this need for a reputation of being knowledgeable rather than offering knowledge itself.  On page 8. Dr. Pressman brings up how books are being reshaped and questioned through art, “In bookwork, the book is presented as a physical thing of beauty, complexity, and fascination, not just as a storage container for text. We can’t read the words contained in Pamela Paulsrud’s Touchstones or in Brian Dettmer’s New Funk Standards because pieces of the pages have been cut away, shellacked, and otherwise altered Garrett Stewart identifies bookwork as a distinct genre of contemporary art in which the codex is “demedi-ated,” its medial function stripped away to become sculptural and aesthetic.” Touchstones made me think about how in the modern age, we strip away the knowledge and common form of the book and turn it into a form of paperweight, using the book as a knickknack to showcase what knowledge we want to be seen as having. It reminds me of those fake storage containers that pose as books that people decorate their houses with; I’ll insert a photo. We fetishize books to the point where we don’t care to even physically have the pages of knowledge to go with it anymore if it has an appearance like it. We now view books and anything with their likeness as an accessory to a collection about us, centralizing this focus about ourselves and self-image.