Victorian Reliquary

Unravelling the Code(x): Dr. Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia

uvicspeccoll:

On 14 January 2016, the University of Victoria’s Libraries kicked off the new year with a visit from Dr. Andrew Stauffer from the University of Virginia as part of the Unravelling the Code(x)speakers series. Dr. Stauffer is the director of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) and the founder of the Book Traces project.

Stauffer kicked off the day’s events with a workshop entitled “Traces in the Stacks” that centred on his Book Traces project. He revealed that the Book Traces initative came out of a realization that nineteenth-century readers are reflected in library stack collections, not just in university special archives. Traces – autographs, dates, place names, souvenirs, sketches, and other ephemeral inserts – are preserved in individual copies of common book objects. In fact, Stauffer has founded that nearly 20% of library titles include a trace – with some exceptional authors exhibiting a “hit rate” of over 80%. One of Book Traces’ main objectives is to reach out to the global library community in order to assemble a collective picture and understanding of nineteenth-century readership through book traces. Our workshop helped to facilitate this collaborative project by sending participants out into McPherson Library to browse the stacks for unique traces in our own collection.

Before the search began, Stauffer was optimistic about finding a couple of examples to contribute to the project. However, much to everyone’s surprise and after a mere forty minutes of hunting, the room was buzzing with energy as workshop participants filed in …arms full of books!

The findings were astonishing. Many students found original autographs and prize book certifications. One student found intricate pencil sketches in a copy of Hawley Smart’s Bells and Ringers and another found a tiny fragment of a yellow ribbon – possibly used as a bookmark. Overall, the workshop participants contributed nearly 80 unique entries to the Book Traces project! It was clear that in many cases the participants developed a keen fondness for or curiousity in the book traces they discovered. Several participants checked their items out of the library to carry out further investigation and a group of English graduate students have begun planning monthly “book hunts” to continue contributing to Stauffer’s initiative.

Later in the afternoon, Stauffer returned to give a lecture on the theoretical underpinnings of the Book Traces project. He began by using the nineteenth-century children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit to reimagine books as sites of intense nostalgia, memory, and loss. Stauffer argued that as the global library goes digital and institutions begin questioning what they should do with old books, these “shabby skin horses,” housed in open stacks, are increasingly at risk because they are not monetarily valuable and are often in rough condition. What the Book Traces project strives to demonstrate is that important everyday sentiments and markers of human experience are preserved in these common books. Therefore, Stauffer calls scholars to approach the nineteenth-century book with “rigorous nostalgia” as they reconsider the value of these print records. To demonstrate his point, Stauffer shared a number of compelling examples uncovered through the Book Traces project. At one point, he had the audience in stitches as he showcased a lover’s affair and quarrel captured in a book’s marginalia; at another moment, a trace brought on silent contemplation as Stauffer unpacked a woman’s responsive writing to her younger self.

The question period following Stauffer’s lecture facilitated a lively conversation between librarians, archivists, faculty, and students. It was keenly remarked that the Book Traces project points to two histories: the history of book use as social object and the history of engaged reading. This observation deepened the audience’s already captivated interest in Stauffer’s initiative.  

A special thank you to Dr. Andrew Stauffer for travelling to Victoria and including us in his spectacular Book Traces project. The energy generated by the day’s events evidences the immense impact and importance of this work. We encourage all of our readers to check out and contribute to the project!

Unravelling the Code(x): History of the Book Speakers Series and Symposium is an interdisciplinary cluster of interrelated events that explore book history scholarship and the creation, circulation, and reception of knowledge. The proposed speakers series and symposium features scholars from across disciplinary periods who will discuss their scholarship in book history, broadly defined to include bibliography, manuscript studies, material culture studies, media studies, and the history of printing, publishing, and libraries. The University of Victoria hosts this SSHRC-funded initiative.

The next Unravelling the Code(x) speaker, Dr. Leslie Howsam, from the University of Windsor, will be visiting on 18 February 2016. If you are unable to attend the events, please follow along through our Twitter stream @UVicSC or through the hashtags #unravellingcodex and #bookhistory.

For more information about this series, please click here.

This posted was written by the Graduate Fellow for the Unravelling the Code(x): History of the Book Speakers Series and Symposium, Lindsey Seatter.