Book History最新文献

Abstract:

This article unveils the personal dedication of author Basil H. Johnston, together with the professional commitment of his publisher Anna Porter and agent Beverley Slopen, that led to the production and dissemination of Indian School Days. Published in 1988 by Toronto's Key Porter Books, Indian School Days was the first memoir to focus entirely on the Indian residential school experience in Canada and the first written by an Anishinaabemowin speaker. Drawing on primary material—archival documents held in the Basil H. Johnston fonds at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, as well as my 2022 interview with his daughter, Tibby Johnston—the article argues for the distinctive allyship of Porter and Slopen with Johnston, three figures united in sensibility and purpose. Individually, each valued mutual understanding alongside career success and sought to challenge the prevailing bias against Indigenous writing within mainstream publishing. Collectively, they grasped the corrective significance of Indian School Days—as a work of remembrance, history, and art—and fostered awareness for a book that was central to the rise of Indigenous writing in Canada.

Abstract:

This article provides the first account and analysis of the publication of Hannah Wolley (c.1622-c.in or after 1674), the prolific but understudied author of five different domestic manuals between 1661 and 1674. The publication of The Ladies Directory in 1661 and its reprinting in 1662 provide the context for an exploration of the opportunities and challenges facing a first-time female 'Authress' (as Wolley was described on the title page) being published. As a non-elite but educated working woman, Wolley did not fit the mould of her female published precursors, and nor did the format and contents of her texts. This study shows how Wolley and other stakeholders in the production of The Ladies Directory navigated a challenging period in English book production, through conceiving the book as the first instalment in a series of domestic texts that could be printed separately but bound together; and argues that she used print as but one strand of her commercial 'offer', alongside private tuition and selling readymade medications.

Abstract:

In this article, I consider the surge of pocket-sized books produced for use by Union soldiers during the US Civil War, investigating how publisher choices about print format intersected with military and civilian attempts to manage the health, conduct, and efficiency of soldiers at scale. As objects believed to exert intimate influence over readers' mental and physical habits, books designed for the pocket promised both to aid and to undermine the production of orderly military bodies in nineteenth-century America. Even as reformers and military officials feared the influence of pornography and fiction published in small, concealable formats, religious organizations including the American Tract Society proposed that pocket-sized books could enhance efforts to discipline soldiers' minds and bodies for military success, including by habituating soldiers to hold books instead of playing cards. Meanwhile, the 1863 entry of Black soldiers into the Union Army, which I consider later in this article, prompted variations on these practices that highlight the racialized nature of Civil War-era approaches to soldier discipline. If wartime responses to pocket-sized books show that print formats may accumulate cultural meaning, such responses also demonstrate how works for the soldier's pocket activated nineteenth-century fantasies of individual optimization and population-level control.

Abstract:

In 1929 Edmund Blunden, outraged by (what he perceived to be) the crudeness and historical inaccuracy of Robert Graves's World War 1 memoir Goodbye to All That, set out to correct the record. For Blunden, the most historically consequential and personally devastating form of retaliation was to make manuscript notes, drawn from multiple sources, in the margins of Good-bye to All That, and to deposit this in the British Museum. With Siegfried Sassoon's help, Blunden harnessed the book's physical properties to offer a comprehensive and lasting indictment of Graves's memoir. Blunden's marginalia materially instantiate the processes through which war writers, and their readers, undertook the work of personal and collective remembrance.

• Contributors

Micah Bateman is an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa, where he is working on a book, Lyric Publics: The Uses of Poetry in American Social-Media Campaigns. His other essays on the intersection of poetry, politics, and online platforms are forthcoming in Expressive Networks: Poetry & Platform Cultures and The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman.

Joshua Ehrlich is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau. He received his PhD and MA from Harvard University. Ehrlich's first book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cam-bridge, 2023) examines knowledge and political thought in South and Southeast Asia.

Ruth Panofsky, FRSC, is Professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the author of Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing (University of Toronto Press, 2019) and The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2012). Her current project is a SSHRC-funded study of publisher Anna Porter and Key Porter Books.

Sara Pennell is currently Associate Professor of Early Modern British History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Greenwich (UK). She has published extensively on food and recipes, kitchens, and domestic material culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and she is now working on a book-length study of Hannah Wolley.

Nicole Reynolds is Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio University. She is the author of Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Michigan, 2010). Her research has been published in such journals as Studies in Romanticism, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. She is currently developing a critical edition of Phebe Gibbes's Friendship in a Nunnery; or, The American Fugitive (1778) as well as a project on Edmund Blunden, twentieth-century antiquarian book collecting, and the development of Romanticism as an academic field.

Marie Stango is Assistant Professor of History at Idaho State University. She is working on her first book, Second Black Republic: Freedom and Family in the Making of Liberia.

Nicola Wilson is Associate Professor in Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading, UK, and co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (CBCP). She is author of Home in British Working-Class Fiction (2015), co-author

• Ni Kinidi/Making Book:Textual Mobility in 1830s Cape Palmas, West Africa
• Marie Stango (bio)

In December 1835, John Leighton Wilson carried a stack of writing paper some 800 kilometers up the coast of West Africa, from his Cape Palmas mission station called "Fair Hope" to Cape Mesurado, where the largest settlement in Liberia, called Monrovia, was located. Wilson, a white missionary from South Carolina sent to West Africa on behalf of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), arrived at the Monrovia offices of the Liberia Herald, the first newspaper established in the American settlements comprised of freeborn and formerly enslaved Black Americans that came to be known as "Liberia." There, Wilson commissioned the Herald's printer, James C. Minor, to produce a primer in the Grebo language, a West African language spoken in the vicinity of Cape Palmas. Encouraged by news that a few Black American children in Liberia had been able to learn multiple West African languages, Wilson had been at work creating a written form of Grebo, using Roman letters, since his early days in Cape Palmas.¹ Wilson, like many Anglo-American Protestant missionaries of his generation, was intrigued by the languages spoken by the individuals around him. After initially hoping to teach Grebo-speakers English, Wilson eventually concluded that it would work better to teach his pupils to read religious texts in their own language—a language Wilson had to codify first.²

Like many Protestant missionaries of the early nineteenth century, the ABCFM missionaries in Cape Palmas hoped to offer the Word to would-be converts in the vernacular.³ Embedded in the ABCFM's mission was the fervent wish that their work could bring the trappings of Western-style civilization—including education, literacy, and printed texts—to peoples they viewed as less civilized. Both the Fair Hope missionaries and the Black American settlers in Cape Palmas viewed the Grebos as unsophisticated and illiterate people. In his attempts to create a written Grebo language and [End Page 51] print books in it, Wilson assumed that they had no knowledge of written languages nor of print. While indeed the ABCFM did eventually finance the transportation of the first printing press to Cape Palmas, the Grebos that Wilson met in Cape Palmas were not newcomers to the concepts of written texts.

This article explores how the meanings of print were complicated in Cape Palmas. While Wilson and the Fair Hope missionaries believed that they were bringing a new technology to the Grebo, Wilson's own observations reveal a more tangled story. As coastal people with centuries of trading relations with Europeans before the arrival of the Americans in Cape

Abstract:

This article explores the previously overlooked transatlantic dimensions to the operations and cultures of reading of the American Book-of-the-month club (BOMC) and the British Book Society between 1929–49. These two book sales clubs were major distributors of new books to wide audiences through the mid-twentieth century, disrupting previous patterns of consumption, with a significant impact on book sales and global distribution. Drawing on extensive new archival research, this essay shows how the clubs were part of a broader transatlantic print culture of distribution and reading. Using little-known archival evidence of exchanges among authors, judges, publishers, and texts—as well as new quantitative data parsing book choices and recommendations—it demonstrates how the BOMC and the Book Society were part of a transatlantic publishing ecosystem that shaped interwar and mid-twentieth century reading patterns across the Atlantic and wider Anglophone world. As such, it is the first research to offer a comparative, transatlantic examination of two major Anglophone book distributors that revolutionised how we read and think about books.

• "Distributed 'Blackishness'":The Uses of Black American Poets among Candidates of the 2020 US Democratic Primaries
• Micah Bateman (bio)

After a long season in which several of Joe Biden's competitors for the Democratic nomination to the US presidency in 2020 styled their campaigns with poetry, it was largely not until the end of his successful bid against Donald Trump that Biden chose verse to be a larger part of his own. In October 2020, two weeks before his election, his staff released a YouTube video of his recitation of "The Cure at Troy," an adaptation from Sophocles by Seamus Heaney that Biden has long recited at various events, sometimes with the same opening joke about his Irish heritage and affinity. From an address to the World Affairs Council in 2007: "I'm always quoting Irish poets, and my friends in the Senate kid me. They think it's because I'm Jean Finnegan's son. I'm Irish. That's not the reason I quote them. I quote them because they're the best poets."¹ And from a plenary address to the EU-US Summit in 2021: "You think I quoted Irish poets because I'm Irish. That's not the reason. I quote them because they're the best poets in the world. That's why."² After fourteen years, Biden's identification with Irish verse—particularly Heaney's—has become a chestnut for opening remarks to international audiences. Biden's laying bear of his ethnically oriented selection bias is a charming gambit to many, but his sharing of Heaney in 2020 became a major news item for the Irish press, with RTÉ News, for instance, describing Biden as a "proud Irish-American" and ending their broadcast with his YouTube video on the night of his election.³

Lin Manuel-Miranda also recited from "The Cure at Troy" at Biden's inauguration, for which Biden's choice of an inaugural poet, Amanda Gorman, was not of Irish descent but one of now three Black women poets out of six total inaugural poets to have recited original verse at the presidential inaugurations of elected American Democrats (the other two: Maya Angelou for Bill Clinton in 1992 and then Elizabeth Alexander for Barack Obama in 2008). Juxtaposing Biden's poets—Heaney and Gorman—orients [End Page 192] a self-to-other coordinate scale by which Biden can personally and ethnically identify with Heaney while positioning the much younger and Black Gorman to stand in for the everyone else whom the Democratic tent purportedly includes. The Biden campaign video featuring his recitation actually mediates these poles, as Biden's voiceover of Heaney is overlaid onto images of struggle and protest of many people of color from, for instance, Black Lives Matter demonstrations to protests at the Trump Tower. The crucial last line from the following quatrain is imprinte