I was out sick and missed Tuesday’s practice in descriptive bibliography, as described by Terry Belanger (1977 qtd. in “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” 2025). (Thanks to Vide for keeping me in the loop.) Now I’m typing this week’s post informally because my mind is slow-simmering with sick. I note this because it’s offering me insight into how sickness influences energy and modes of functioning in a way that, like the language and probable typos in this post, can be read in comparison with other posts to signify my material circumstances as a creator. Considering the scope of bibliographic methods described in the Bibliographical Society of America’s “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” (2025), I’m thinking about how a disabled or sick bibliography would operate.

Following Lisa Maruca and Kate Ozment’s “critical bibliography”, I want to approach bibliography as culturally situated and potentially radical work. I’m thinking of a disabled or crip bibliography, which is a familiar practice in disability studies. There’s a quandary of identification in disability studies: How can we determine that a creator is disabled when there’s no hard evidence of this? Using bibliography, I think that we can elide this unnecessary (and at times medicalist) question and instead center how the materiality of a created object holds traces of disabled ways of being and production.

While it’s common to encounter a work and “just know” that you’re encountering crip kin, what you’re really experiencing is the recognition of familiar material behaviors in their media. The manically-typed scroll of Jack Kerouac, the multiple hands of blind Jorge Luis Borges and his assisting mother, the smudged and slanting correspondences of Frank’s Kafka during his late institutionalization, and the frenetic journal infodumps of Ada Lovelace can all be read for traces of disabled production practices. We might not know the affective experiences with which actors approached a book object, but we can read what G. Thomas Tanselle calls “physical clues [that] reveal details of the underlying production process” (2020 qtd. in “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” 2025). There is some uphill work, I think, in defining and asserting ways of reading disabled production to a broader audience, but understanding the book as a technology means that we can understand how actors adapt it for disabled use.

This approach to bibliography is not limited to the processes of writing or printing a book object. The ways that people use books, as we’ve seen, are shaped by material circumstances; reading is, and has always been, transformed through disabled adaptations. Physical production processes are shaped by bodily limits on energy, time, and access. Charting these processes through crip bibliography can recenter the prevalence and importance of disabled life across history, resisting the dehistoricization and erasure of disabled life in dominant histories. This is critical when the erasure of our histories is used to justify the eradication of our futures.

I follow the bodily attunement of disability and affect theories in centering this way of experiencing the world as I practice bibliography from home. I’m looking over my journals and (in comparative readings with the aforementioned letters) observing how (re-)inking, formatting, and medium reflect how I was evidently using sketchbooks, notebooks, Post-It’s, and other ephemera both as existing books (mostly store-bought) and as creative adaptions. I will not be doing this project before a more foundations-based attempt at bibliography, but I do want to give it a try: I’ll write a bibliography of my written journals across my changes in health. Here I am trying out a disabled bibliography that can only be done in a disabled way. I’m thinking on this as my fever has exacerbated my memory issues, and approaching my journals does not come with memories of their creation. I would here undertake bibliography of objects that I know the context of (I modified them at some point) but not the actual processes of creating (those memories are gone). This would invite critical insight into doing disabled (auto?)bibliography, using immemory to investigate the fractured but continuous relationship between bibliographer, book object, and trace actors.