The Life and Times of an Artifact and Thing: The Gazeta de Lima

Abstract

What can a hole in an eighteenth-century periodical tell us? This essay takes a hole in a 1759 copy of the Gazeta de Lima as a prompt to explore the life and uses of this object, working from its moment of printing through its absorption into José Durand’s bound collection of the Gazeta and finally to its current home at the University of Notre Dame. Combining thing theory with detailed conservation work, the authors argue for the advantages of thinking in terms of both things and artifacts in order to hear the stories that textual objects can tell us and to see the ways in which they act on us.