Update 9/11/2022: A pdf of this talk (with images and links) has been deposited in the Humanities Commons at https://doi.org/10.17613/sjs2-8z89.

I had thought I would start this talk with the usual story I tell about the origin of this FemBib project, the tale of why I got interested what feminist bibliography might be. But that was before the legal framework in which I exist as a United States citizen finally broke apart to reveal a new reality, one in which I, as someone with a uterus and ovaries, exist as a person only to the extent that I might have to give it away in order to become an incubator. My bodily autonomy—my personhood, my right to control what I do with my own body and my own life—isn’t mine after all, but only something that I hold in abeyance. And because I have almost always, by virtue of my reproductive system and my sexual activity, been in a state of maybe-or-maybe-not-pregnancy, I am now almost always in a state of maybe-or-maybe-not-personhood.

A quick aside about this maybe-maybe-not: the way fertilization and implantation and counting gestation works, most pregnancies aren’t registered as such, as a missed period or a chemical change, until at least four weeks of gestation. If you haven’t been pregnant, or haven’t been avoiding getting pregnant, you might not realize this. Gestational counting starts from the first day of your last period, not the date of ovulation. So the earliest you can know you’re pregnant—two weeks after you’ve ovulated and in theory the first day of your missed period—you are already 4 weeks on. I say this in part because it’s why the six-week limits that are now going into effect in some places are so insidious. Six weeks, a person might think. That’s plenty of time to miss a period and decide what to do! But no, six weeks is at most two weeks. Language and counting matters. For more than half the world population, every two weeks we rotate between definitely-not-pregnant and maybe-pregnant until the question is either resolved by pregnancy or multiple layers of birth control, and we deserve the right to take care of ourselves.

Anyway. Here I am, today, probably a person, because I am probably not pregnant, thanks to age and my IUD.

I’m also probably a woman because that’s pretty much how I feel about myself. But I also say “probably” because being a woman can be surprisingly complicated. There are behaviors you should or should not exhibit, personality traits that you should or should not have, and if you move from, say, one community to another, you might find that behaviors you had learned as being totally appropriate for women are, in this new group, completely inappropriate. Do you smile with your teeth showing or not? Do you make eye contact? Do you wear pants? Do you show your hair in public? Do you show the right amount of bare skin, or too much, or too little? None of that is straightforward and all of it is constantly monitored.

When I was in elementary school, I went to a friend’s birthday party, and we played one of those stupid games that you play at girls’ gatherings when they’re at the age of trying to figure out how to be. And at some point, the question asked to the group was, “How do you hold your hands when you’re looking at your nails?” The entire group flipped over their hands to look at the backs of their hands with their fingers extended. I curled my fingers in over my palms and looked at my nails that way. And that’s when I learned that I was not good at being a girl.

That’s origin story number 1 for this project.

Origin story number 2 is this: My PhD was on Shakespeare and feminist theater and it was called “Act Like a Feminist.” I had some throwaway line in my preface draft about how realizing I was a feminist made my life so much easier. One of my advisors—Barbara Hodgdon, a wonderful scholar and mentor and a fierce feminist—Barbara wrote in the margins of my draft something along the lines of, “What, are you sure? Being a feminist has made my life so much more difficult!” And it probably did, for her, and it definitely can for others—the activism and arguments and facing male sneers and anger. But for me, being able to take what I had always felt and to find a name and framework for it—what a relief! It wasn’t that I was bad at being a girl. I was good at being a girl the way I wanted to be, not the way they wanted me to be. Feminism gave me a way of understanding the world and my current and potential places in it, a way of arguing and resisting and making my own path.

I suspect, if you’re listening to this talk, that you, too, are someone who is aware of the longings people often have to make sense of things. If you’re a bibliographer, you might not also be a philosopher, but if you’re someone who is curious about how things work, you probably are also curious about why things work that way. Why is this book put together in this way? Why does this sheet exist in two different states? Why do we care about collational formulas for letterpress books but not for the intaglio plates in them? All of that is a longing for a methodology to go along with our methods, a wish not only to count the leaves in a book but to understand why it’s important to count some leaves and not others. A way of making sense that isn’t random but meaningful. A way of making sense that isn’t needlessly rigid but that allows for us—maybe even encourages us—to stop and wonder, But shouldn’t I also be counting these other leaves? What happens if I do?

My desire for a feminist bibliographical praxis is a desire to find a way to make sense of the work I do both as a scholar and as a person finding her way in the world, a desire to create a way of working that might help others also understand and expand our sense of the possibilities of what’s around us.

I’m going to pause here to state explicitly what my feminism is, since it’s become very apparent over the years that different people use this term in different ways. My feminism is inclusive of race, sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, ability, and class; is always political; and is striving to improve the world. I want to emphasize one point in particular, since it is a hot point and it’s infuriating: sex is not gender, transwomen are women, and the attacks on women’s right to control their lives are the same attacks on trans people to control their lives.

What this means for my life is that I live through a feminist framework that strives to free everyone from the constraints that gender places on us, and that the scholarly work I do should reflect the values that shape how I engage with the world. What this means for my bibliography is that I think all textual artifacts should be part of a feminist praxis and that all people can be part of this work.

This is a good time to consider another set of definitions: What is bibliography? The simplest answer is that it’s the study of books and their material incarnations. W. W. Greg’s answer in 1945:

The object of bibliographical study is to reconstruct for each particular book the history of its life, to make it reveal in its most intimate detail the story of its birth and adventures as the material vehicle of the living word.¹

And that’s often the way that I’ve taught book history, asking my students to culminate their research with a biography of their book’s life story. But it’s also a definition that is very focused on books. (And as a relevant aside, I don’t want to hear any more intimate details of birth stories; people who have given birth have shared enough intimate details of what happens to our bodies and no one should have to share those moments with anyone in order to be seen as valid.)

In 2020, for the Bibliographical Society of America, Thomas Tanselle wrote a lovely account of what bibliography does, complete with characteristics of different approaches, including analyzing physical clues, describing the material artifact, determining the relationships between books carrying the same works, and writing histories and technical studies of the materials and processes used in bookmaking, bookselling, and book collecting. His expansive definition ends with a more human-focused answer than earlier bibliographers might have provided:

What links all bibliographical pursuits is an understanding of the significance of books as tangible products of human endeavor.²

(And a quick aside here is that Tanselle uses “books” here in the way that I do: as the best handy term we have for textual objects, be they codices, scrolls, tablets, or digital.)

What I hope is clear from this is that bibliography provides the basis for all other kinds of textual work. You can’t really understand the connections between a work and its audience or the intentions of an author or even the words on the page if you don’t know which text an audience was reading or whether a published text derives from an author or whether those words on the page are always the same words in other copies and editions of that work. Not everyone has to be a bibliographer, but we need to draw on bibliographical work in order to do anything else.

My work as a bibliographer can be summed up as trying to inspire in others a desire to explore how textual artifacts can bring us closer to understanding how people and technologies and cultures work. That seems both overly broad and a tad ridiculous sometimes. Most bibliographers probably identify a specific field or research question as their framework. And I do have a field—the first centuries of the printing press. But my research question is more about pedagogy than identifying type or recreating the output of a printing house or naming early booksellers. All of those things are great questions to work on, but they are not mine. My burning question is,

How do I get you to want to do this? What can I do to make you see the possibilities and joys of this field? How can I help you want to make bibliography enticing and exciting to newcomers?

One output of that research question is my book. Studying Early Printed Books 1450–1800: A Practical Guide is for anyone who has to learn the basics of working with these objects, anyone who needs to understand how early printed books were made and why it matters that we know these things, anyone who needs to be able to find and access early printed books, anyone who needs to show up in a reading room feeling like they have the skills to be able to make sense of the books in front of them. I wrote the book I needed to teach with since that book didn’t exist and it was profoundly shaped by my experiences in the classroom. But it was also shaped by my own experiences of trying to learn basic bibliographical skills long after I’d left graduate school.

So here’s another origin story, back from when all things bibliographical were Greek to me: At some point after I’d become a regular reader at the Folger Shakespeare Library but before I started diving into book history, an out-of-town friend needed to fact check a quote, so she asked me if I could pull up the book, confirm the passage, and let her know where in the book it occurred. An easy enough request. But at that point I was not working with anything printed before 1910, and while I had some basic familiarity with old books from my graduate courses—well, one course, really, with Rebecca Bushnell—it had been a long time since I’d looked at any. Reading the text wasn’t a problem for me, but I could not remember what the deal was with signature marks. As in, I knew that I had to cite the page and that I could do that with those numbers printed at the bottom, but I did not know what to do with recto and verso. Was the page opposite B3 B3verso or B2verso? It’s such a basic skill!

But I did not have it at my fingertips and I was much too embarrassed to ask anyone for help—I didn’t yet know other readers, and I didn’t want to expose myself to the librarians as ignorant. There didn’t seem to be an obvious resource to figure this out, so I did what I always do: I figured out how to find other examples of what I needed to know and taught myself to apply that knowledge. I pulled out an article that referenced early printed books and then called up some of those books to look at the passages quoted, and then worked out a pattern that helped me understand how to use signature marks as a reference system. It was a roundabout way of figuring it out, but it worked, I didn’t embarrass myself, and when it came time to teach my students how to do this, I knew both what they needed to know and what mistakes you make when you’re trying to learn about signature marks and format. Now, hopefully, when someone else is in my shoes, they’ll be in a reading room that has my guide on its reference shelves and the title of the book and its orange spine will sing out to them—Me! I’m the guide you need to help you do this! I’m Practical!

So adding to the list of things I probably am, I am probably a bibliographer, depending on your definition, I suppose, and depending on how I’m feeling. Sometimes I’m a bibliographer, sometimes I’m a teacher whose field is bibliography. I definitely relatively recently wasn’t a bibliographer, and sometimes I still don’t think I am.

Another origin story: I started teaching myself book history and bibliography around 2005, when the Folger hired me as a consultant to explore the possibilities for the library to create an undergraduate program. By the time I taught my first course on early modern books and culture in 2007, I was already frustrated with Philip Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography. It was the only book I could find that offered the depth of detail I wanted about the hand-press period, but it was also really a nightmare to use as a beginning textbook: full of minutiae that are hard to understand unless you already know how to understand them. I spent a lot of time obsessively reading it, then taking students through the basics of printing, sending them off to read sections, and then taking them all through it again, all while assuring them that they will get it, they just have to trust me and themselves.

So when an acquisitions editor from Blackwell asked me what I thought the field of book history needed, I said an easier Gaskell, something that you could actually teach today’s undergraduates with. And Emma Bennett—whose faith in this project was a real gift—said, Oh yes, I’ve heard that from others as well, do you want to write that? And I immediately and repeatedly said, No, no way, I am not a bibliographer, I do not know enough, I cannot do the things that bibliographers do. And I kept saying that for years until I finally realized, hey, I can do this, I do know enough because I am an expert in what students new to the field need to know!

And then, after a lot of trials and tribulations, I wrote that book. I have, on other occasions, talked about how nerve-wracking that process was and how full of doubts I was and how anxious I have been about the inevitable errors that are in it. (Mistakes are part of living and part of printing, there’s just no way around it, for better or for worse.) But my point with this story is to pause over how closely linked trying to understand bibliography was with feeling like I couldn’t own my expertise. If bibliography was a house full of experts and excitement, I couldn’t find the door to let me in because it felt like I had to already know where the door was, hidden among the vines, in order to be able to open it. I never felt any hostility in my search for that door, but it also took me a long time to figure out how to get into that house.

And that is one of the foundational principles of my feminist praxis—to minimize the barriers to doing bibliographical work. Ours is a funny field, based on skills that were for a couple of generations not taught in postgraduate programs, and that even now you often have to go elsewhere to learn—places like London Rare Book School. This specialized knowledge had gone out of fashion, especially in the US, in part because it refused to consider itself as belonging to the world of theory and feminism and Black studies and queer politics that other parts of academia were exploring. It is only just now—over a century past the codification of the bibliographical field—that we are seeing studies that can be described as Black bibliography, and queer bibliography, and feminist bibliography. Only now, when the study of English literature and of history and even of print culture have long since been immersed in this work.

Bibliography strove, in its formative years, to distinguish itself from the work being done by collectors and librarians by insisting on its scientific objectivity, on creating a practice that was replicable and built on clear principles of truth-seeking and precision. Bibliographers were not dilettantes or catalogers; no, they were professional men of learning. That objectivity and boundary-setting might have helped gather the field into itself as it was being codified, but it also expressed itself as a resistance to change for a long time. And it leaves an uneasy legacy for those of us who are not professional men of learning.

I’m going to come back to that, but I want now to think about what types of objects the field has encouraged us to study, because these origins have also created problems for those of us who might wish to study texts other than the canonical ones, other than the world of incunables and Renaissance and Restoration drama that formed bibliography’s basis. Certainly in the decades since Fredson Bowers codified descriptive bibliographical practice, bibliographers have expanded its utility for 19th-century works, for instance, and American imprints. But any field’s roots shape how it grows, so let’s take a look at some of the assumptions of descriptive bibliography as it was collated into a field by Bowers and his successors.

First up, a definition:

Descriptive bibliography is a set of practices and principles guiding how we describe printed textual objects, using bibliographical features to determine how a book was printed and what the ideal copy is (that is, how states and issues of an edition are related to each other).

There are a few key things to note: it focuses on print and on text, it finds evidence in the object itself and not archival records, and it expresses those relationships in part by trying to reconstruct a copy as intended to be at the moment it left the printer’s or publisher’s hands for distribution. It’s easy, when you’ve been immersed in this work, to be so accustomed to these practices that you miss what is omitted from it, so let’s flip this to point out what is not included in standard bibliographical practice: it’s not interested in manuscripts; it doesn’t care about images, especially when they were produced separately from the text; and it doesn’t care about what happens to books after they leave the print shop.

A few examples of the sorts of things that have been excluded from traditional bibliographical inquiry [Ed. note: I adlibbed this section, so what’s written as text here varies from what I spoke; all images are linked to their sources]:

This 1705 volume of violin solos doesn’t appear in the ESTC because it’s entirely intaglio, not letter press—that is, it was printed on a rolling press with plates, and as such, doesn’t fall within traditional bibliographical inquiry. [Please note that although I said in the talk that this was in the ESTC because of a letterpress imprimatur, it in fact does not. There are other examples of that sort of book, however; just search “violin solo” in ESTC and you’ll see what I mean.]

John Christopher Pepusch, Solos for a violin with a thorough bass for the harpsichord or bass violin. London: J. Walsh, 1705.

University of Pennsylvania, Oblong M219 .P425 (public domain)

Even in works that include letterpress text with intaglio prints, the images fall by the wayside in cataloging and description. In this copy of Soldini’s De anima brutorum commentaria, the intaglio image on the left is of a collection of animals printed in blue; the initial letter on the right is printed in a lighter blue.

Francesco Maria Soldini, De anima brutorum commentaria. Florence: Gaetano Cambiagi, 1776. (sigs. a7v–a8r); Getty Research Institute, QL785 .S7255 1776 (public domain)

But in this copy of the same work, the image on the left is different and the initial letter is printed in sepia ink. If there were textual features that differed so distinctly from copy to copy, they would surely be recorded and carefully studied. Even though plates are printed separately from letterpress text, and therefore often separate from the book’s structure and attached to bound books in different orders, the use and distribution of plates could be a fruitful object of study.

Francesco Maria Soldini, De anima brutorum commentaria. Florence: Gaetano Cambiagi, 1776. (sigs. a7v–a8r); Smithsonian Libraries, QL785 .S7255 1776X (public domain)

What about woodblocks printed simultaneously with the text on a common press? Here is a woodblock printing of a corn-cockle from a 1568 printing of Dodoens’s herbal, printed from a block that is still held by the Plantin Moretus Museum. Despite the fact that woodblock printing is done on the same common press as type, and despite the long history of block reuse, bibliographers have generally been uninterested in woodblocks aside from when they can help with printer identification.

Rembert Dodoens, Florvm, et coronariarvm odoratarvmqve nonnvllarvm herbarvm historia. Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1568. (sig. C8v); Getty Research Institute, QK41 .D64 (public domain)

Woodblock, Agrostemma githago [common corn-cockle], ca. 1568 (recto); Museum Plantin-Moretus, MPM.HB.04094 (public domain)

To the left, a 1618 Dodoens printed with the same block; below, a 1633 Gerard herbal.

Rembert Dodoens, Cruydt-boeck. Leiden: Franciscus Raphelengius for Christopher Plantin, 1618. (sig. Y4v); Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, G 51476 [C2-516 a] (public domain)

John Gerard, The herball, or, Generall historie of plantes. London: Adam Islip, Joyce Norton, Richard Whitakers, 1633. (sig. 4Y2r); Getty Research Institute, QK41 .G3 1633 (public domain)

Margaret Cavendish frequently emended her printed works before distributing them. Here we see a pasted-in slip reading “Written by my Lord Duke.” on the left, and a hand-written correction of “civil” to “cruell” below. Because these interventions happen in between the end of printing and the start of distribution, they fall outside of traditional bibliographical inquiry, despite the rich opportunities they provide for studying the creation and circulation of Cavendish’s work.

Margaret Cavendish, Plays, never before printed. Written by the thrice noble, illustrious, and excellent princesse, the Duchess of Newcastle (London, [1668]); Folger Shakespeare Library N867; both photos taken by Heather Wolfe (CC BY-NC)

These bibliographical parameters that I’ve just outlined come from the field’s interest in answering questions that were often driven by a fascination with Shakespeare and establishing which of the printed versions of his plays were the closest to what he intended; hence the focus on text not image and on the workings of letterpress print shops.

There are very good reasons why descriptive bibliography forms the basis of so much bibliographical and textual study and why it studies the selection of objects it does. You can’t compile lists of texts to study if you don’t know what you’re putting on that list (Is it a work’s first printing? Second printing? Maybe it should be the second edition?). You can’t understand how the copy you’re looking at relates to other copies of that book until you understand where it fits into that work’s genealogy. And you can’t edit (or analyze) a text if you aren’t sure whose words are on the page, the writer’s, the compositor’s, the result of pied type. Without this level of close observation that descriptive bibliography supplies, we wouldn’t have answers to many of the questions that bibliographers have wondered about, like were Shakespeare’s plays pirated and how can we get back to Shakespeare’s words without this darn veil of print?

I’m kind of laughing but I’m also serious in pointing out that this focus on Shakespeare has shaped much of how bibliography was developed and in wondering whether that serves us well. At the same time, I want to make sure we remember that much of what we know about the practices of early modern printing come from the long hard work of past bibliographers. We are all standing on their shoulders, and their work forms the basis of much of what we know about the history of western printing and the book trade.

So how did our founding bibliographers answer these questions about past printing practices? In part by looking at lots and lots of books. One of the most important principles of descriptive bibliography is that you want to look at as many copies of an edition as possible so that you can have a full picture of what the variations between them might be and then you can figure out what those variations might be telling us. And that makes sense—if you only look at 3 of 5 extant copies, you might miss the cancel that appears in copy 4 and the variant imprint on copy 5. (It’s also a mammoth logistical problem, then and now; more on that in a moment.)

Looking at lots of books is not only part of describing an edition. It also has been how we’ve come to understand what early printed books are. Early bibliographers examined books, came to conclusions about how they were made, and then used those conclusions to interpret and assess other books, and then people like Philip Gaskell and me use those conclusions to write books to train people to study books. I find it easiest to think about this process along these lines: look at specific instances of books to create general principles that you can apply to other books. It’s one of the things that makes bibliography a useful tool: you don’t need to examine all instances of printed texts in order to understand the general workings of printed texts. And it’s a pretty standard way of thinking about the scientific method: Look at some number of things, derive a principle of how they work from that observation, and then use that principle to understand the things you haven’t looked at yet.

But there are also some tricky bits to this process. For starters, it’s no accident that I chose icons that look similar for that top row, but that the items all on the bottom, the ones that are being analyzed by the principles derived from the books at the top—those icons all look different, from each other and from the books at the top. One of the dangers of working from a small set to derive practices and theories for working with a larger set is that the smaller set often does not represent the full variety of the larger. Here we have bibliographers focused primarily on English early modern playbooks working with those and related texts from the period up at the top. And here we are at the bottom, using those principles to understand all sorts of textual objects, including broadsides, almanacs, jobbing work, books with moving parts, books that are composed of plates, hybrid books that are both manuscript and print, books that have been altered by their creators in that moment between production and circulation—and maybe even newspapers, stereotypes, offset flyers, and e-books.

Put another way, descriptive bibliography depends on books being repeatable objects, things that exist in enough copies that that variations are noticeable. But what if textual objects aren’t repeatable? It also focuses entirely the acts of production. But what if the importance of some objects is in how they are modified in the hands of users?

In other words, are the concerns that drove those early principles useful to us today? The texts that formed the basis of descriptive bibliography are primarily canonical, male-authored, bound codices. What are the biases of those texts that might shaping how we understand, say, Melesina Trench or Phillis Wheatley Peters? What should we do with texts that only ever circulated in manuscript? Texts printed on woodblocks over a period of years and years? Texts that are not ink on surface, but knots in thread? Sure, we can say that those aren’t the concern of bibliography, but what does it do to our field that the basic terms of our analysis don’t speak with the basic terms of analysis of other textual studies? And when those other categories of text are categories where we find a lot of work by people other than white men living in the west?

My point isn’t that bibliography cannot or should not address these other categories and concerns. My point is that it was not built to do that, and that maybe instead of devoting energies to expanding the terms of descriptive bibliography, we should ask ourselves if there are other methods suited to our work. Do we want to wrest the work of anonymous authors circulating in manuscript into this framework? Do we really want to make Chinese woodblock books squeeze themselves into fitting into these principles? Are we just going keep ignoring textual artifacts that don’t belong to the categories of texts that we were studying 150 years ago?

Let’s return to my earlier comment that the aims of bibliography have been the aims of professional men of learning and what this means for those of us who are not in that category.

Anglo-American bibliography has of course included women among its practitioners since its earliest years and some of the resources we rely on today were created by women and scholars working on different categories of texts. Henrietta Bartlett, Dorothy Porter, Katharine Pantzer—these are some of the biggest twentieth-century names in the field. And there is increasing research being done on their work and histories, as well as those of other women involved in bibliography and the book trades. I have no doubt—and you shouldn’t either—that women were involved in the making and circulation and study of textual artifacts since they first began to be made and circulated and studied. So my point is not that women have not done and cannot do any of this work.

But bibliography as we have been practicing it requires a huge amount of time and money and travel in order to do it. The premise that you must look at as many copies as possible and that you must look at them in person means, for instance, that anyone with any sort of caretaking responsibilities has a hard time doing that work. If you have young children, or teens, or a partner, or elderly parents, or anyone who needs you to help feed or drive or generally make sure they stay healthy and alive—if that’s your life, you can’t do this work easily, or sometimes not even with difficulty.³ And women are overwhelmingly the ones who are primary caretakers.

Let’s talk about the ways in which basic bibliographical work does not tend to be rewarded in academia—at many places, doing an edition will not count for a thesis, compiling a descriptive bibliography will not count for promotion and tenure, even publishing a bibliography of understudied works—something that future researchers can build off of and create new studies from—those bibliographies have a miserable time finding publication venues. How do you do this work if it doesn’t get you a degree or a job or the funds to do the necessary research?

And should we talk about the state of academia and research in general? Jobs that offer stability and a living wage are few and far between. You can function as an independent scholar, but if you want to get money from a funding agency for it, you almost always have to give up all your other paid work while you’re on the grant. That’s a system that can work great for standing faculty, who have a salary and benefits and a multi-year contract. But for the rest of us, completely giving up the hustle that makes up your income—whether it’s freelance work or a day job doing graphic design—isn’t really an option. For those of us in the United States, where access to health care is often predicated on having a job that provides medical insurance, anything that disrupts your benefits can have lifelong consequences. And again, women are overwhelmingly the ones who are working in precarious jobs, which makes access to research funds absolutely a feminist issue.

Oh, and let’s note that rare books spaces are often designed in ways that model gentlemen’s libraries,⁴ that are guarded by people who are too often the only people of color in the library, and that have security practices that require monitoring people’s appearances and behavior. Now imagine you are someone who is a first-generation student, or who is Black, or who is genderqueer. Imagine your comfort levels in constantly entering these spaces and being stared at.

I’ll wrap up on two final notes:

The first is that it is important—necessary, even—to have more people doing this research from a broader range of perspectives. Part of this is because different experiences allow people to see different things in our collections. Jenn Shapland’s memoir My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House Books, 2020) is an incredible account of her research into Carson McCullers and her reflections on her own queer life is a powerful example of what this means: Without Shapland’s own experience of being queer and closeted, she would not have recognized the signs in McCullers’s writings and archives that led her to see McCullers as queer and to find the love letters she and her partner sent.⁵ And without seeing McCullers in the archives, she makes clear in her memoir, Shapland would not have been able to understand herself, to reshape her own life, to create the creative and scholarly and fulfilling life she’s living now.

Especially now, we need to point to our past and show its full variety—that women, and queers, and trans people, and people of color—-we have always existed, we’ve always been part of life and part of books and part of history. And when we find that words from the seventeenth-century are being selectively read to defend some sort of fake ”originalist” sense of what they would have meant in that time period, we have obligations to do a better job of expanding that past to show it in its full variety that is there, to do a better job of bringing the public into that work and bringing that work out into the public.⁶

And finally, I want to come back to counting and to categorizing. We categorize things as bibliographers as a basic function of our work. But categorizations are not neutral, and they are not locked into place. Just because we used to see books as existing in one way doesn’t mean that they have always existed in that way. Just because we are insistent that these definitions meant something in the nineteenth century doesn’t mean that they have to mean that same thing today. Just because white property-owning men controlled most of the official records of and decisions around books and laws in the past doesn’t mean that those are the values we need to replicate today. We cannot do the work that we need to do for the future of bibliography if we cannot expand how we support that work and who is included in that work. Thank you.

notes

And then came the plague. So I’m writing a note now about how things will look in the workshop in light of travel not feeling safe and universities and libraries not being open for in-person teaching as we’ve been used to it. If you’ve been considering this workshop but are unsure how it fits into the Covid world, please read on.

tl;dr Remote participation is ok; we will talk about remote/digital-first teaching; sign up for workshops/seminars by September 15th.

Here’s the official blurb that’s in the SAA Bulletin:

Do you want to teach with rare materials but feel unsure if your library has suitable texts? Are you scared of bibliography but want to be able to encourage students to think about the materiality of texts? By doing advance readings and exercises and then sharing assignments with the workshop, participants will develop approaches to teaching with special collections and tools to do so confidently, whether or not they are based at institutions with loads of early books.

I kept hearing from Shakespeareans (and librarians) that they wished they could teach with their institution’s special collections, but that they didn’t have the right collections—no early printed Shakespeare, no early printed books, no Shakespeare, no whatever it was that they thought was necessary. But none of that is needed! There are lots of great ways we can teach about Shakespeare with rare materials that are not Shakespeare or are not old. You can use 19th- or 20th-century Shakespeare to explore concepts of how a text’s appearance shapes readership and indicates cultural values; you can extrapolate back to how 17th- and 18th-century readers experienced Shakespeare in print. You could look at a bunch of different genres of older or newer texts to think about the ways in which different categories of text appear in different modes of print and manuscript and then think about putting early Shakespeare in that context or imagine creating the plays or poems in different material circumstances. I am not exaggerating when I say that I believe that there are endless ways to successfully teach Shakespeare or early modern courses with rare materials at any institution. And it is worth it to do so!

Anyway.

My goal in the workshop remains the same as it has always been: to create excitement around using libraries and rare materials in literature courses and to empower teachers and librarians to experiment and collaborate. Students who work with old stuff, however you want to define that, tend to come out of the experience feeling genuinely excited about themselves as researchers and investigators. That’s good for them, for teachers, and for libraries. It might feel scary to those of us who weren’t trained that way, but I promise we can all learn the techniques needed to succeed.

Now, with this new and shifting landscape we’re in, how are we going to create that sense of excitement and empowerment if we can no longer gather in groups in poorly ventilated rooms to look at texts together? This is the continuing and urgent question that many of us are wrestling with. And it will be part of the workshop, too. Digital collections are not the same as analog ones, but we can still make them effective and interesting. (As part of the online #SHARPinFocus week that substituted for the planned SHARP conference, I ran a session on “Teaching Material Texts without the Material” that had lots of discussion around this topic and some great ideas for those of you invested in materiality-heavy courses; the video was recorded and there were notes with links to resources and brainstorming in a google doc as well, all available now through the SHARP in Focus web page.)

Our workshop will do some brief readings about teaching with special collections, participants will do an exercise or two designed to build familiarity with their collections, and it will culminate in sharing syllabi or assignments that have been created for the workshop. There won’t be a paper, and there will be feedback and an opportunity to add to your pedagogical repertoire. It’s really a win-win situation. (Plus, as you can tell, I’m really enthusiastic about this and am looking forward to cheerleading for you and learning from you.)

A few other coronavirus logistics that are important: SAA has waived its usual requirement of in-person participation. I am anticipating that many of us will not feel safe or be able to travel to Austin for the meeting, and I building into the workshop structure the ability for it to work for remote participation. SAA has also created a “zero dollar” membership level for those experiencing financial hardship during this. (The details of this are on the front page of the June Bulletin; the full issue has information about the program and other logistics.)

If you’ve never done SAA before, make sure you read through the site to see how it works (you sign up for 4 ranked choices and get assigned to them as they are open; there’s no application or proposal; you do need to be a member to sign up, but, again, there’s a no-fee option this year). And feel free to ask me questions about this workshop or about SAA in general.

Thanks for reading my boosterish post and I hope I’ll see some of you there!

Over the past couple of years I’ve given a few lectures and led a few workshops on the topic, and I wanted to collect some of that work in a single place to help others join in this work.

In December 2018 I gave the Lieberman Lecture for the American Printing History Association. You can watch “Working toward a Feminist Printing History” on YouTube (with or without captions); there’s also a transcript linked in the video description. I am grateful to Jesse Erickson and the APHA for extending the invitation to deliver that lecture.

That talk has been adapted into an article that will be coming out in Printing History sometime this summer, I believe. I’ve deposited the pre-print of “Working toward a Feminist Printing History” in the Humanities Commons’ CORE Repository. I’m really excited to have the talk appear in print (and Printing History is actually a print-only journal, gorgeously produced, which is fun), and PH Editor Brooke Palmieri was immeasurably helpful in shaping the talk into an article.

As an outgrowth of this feminist printing history work, I’ve been actively exploring what a feminist bibliography practice would look like. This past fall I did a sort of flipped plenary for the Behn-Burney conference, starting off with my walking through some of the background for and ideas behind a feminist bibliography, and then doing a group “drive” of a book through a document camera where we could as a community examine an artifact and then explore what feminist questions could come out of it.

The Bibliographical Society of America sponsored a workshop that I led at the Folger Shakespeare Library in the fall of 2019, which was a great group experience, albeit something that I can’t easily replicate into a readable piece for folks who weren’t there. But it was a chance to combine hands-on work exploring textual objects with a group discussion about feminist theory and pedagogy.

And I just remotely gave a talk as part of UCLA’s Feminist Bibliographies event, a panel that brought together my work with that of Kate Ozment and Tia Blassingame. It was livestreamed and the recordings of the talks will be shared as well. All three of us are wrestling with similar desires from different angles. I was very sorry not to be there in person, but grateful to Devin Fitzgerald for creating the event and to the library and special collections staff that made it possible, including the tech that let me Zoom in. (I’ll drop in the link to those talks once they’re up.)

The common thread through all of this is explicating a method that frees feminist inquiry from a sole focus on text and authors and printers. Instead, we can create an approach to bibliography that asks feminist questions about what we choose to study and the systems that get books from their origins to our hands today. We can shift from modeling expertise as bibliographers to modeling questioning, and in so doing, we can bring in newcomers to our work and expand the types of work that bibliography does. For me, one of the key elements of being a feminist is ensuring everyone has access and the tools needed to succeed. I try to model that in my way of teaching and leading workshops and giving talks.

There will be other workshops, and when normal travel and campus life resumes, I hope you’ll think about whether this is something you’d like to bring to your institution, either as a small workshop or a larger group event. In the meantime, read the pre-print and think about how a feminist bibliography can shape your own bookish practices!

[update: One of the subsequent talks I gave, “Feminist Bibliographical Praxis” at LRBS in June 2022, is online as a video and as a transcript.]

I’m going to try doing that again, only this time in newsletter form. The tl;dr version is that you can head over to sarahwerner.substack.com and sign up for Early Printed Fun to get periodic (twice a month?) emails from me about some bit of early printed nerdery. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’ll replicate some of what I used to do here and at The Collation.

The longer version is that I decided to do a Substack newsletter because I’m hoping, if I can build up enough momentum, to introduce paid subscriptions. There will always be free posts, I promise, because I can’t bear the thought of not providing some free excitement about books. But I also am shelling out money to run EarlyPrintedBooks.com and I would like, at a minimum, to recoup those costs. Substack makes it easy to have both free and paid subscriptions, and that’s really appealing.

I’m going to putter along with all free posts for a while and see how it goes. There will be posts about printing puzzles, about cool books, about images on EarlyPrintedBooks.com, about teaching strategies—the one I’m working on right now is about the variety of ways in which images are digitized and why they show up the way they do on my site. I’m hoping all the posts will give you food for thought, maybe food for teaching, and definitely quick, fun reads!

So please sign up and tell your friends! I’ll try not to make you regret it!

About a year and a half ago I started thinking more seriously about the relationship between libraries and archives and climate change, due largely in part to the ongoing work and activism from archivists Eira Tansey and Ben Goldman. So when I was invited to give a talk about whether digitization is a form of preservation at the Society of American Archivists meeting in August 2019, I jumped at the change to consider our complicity with the coal industry. I’m reviving that brief call to arms today to mark the climate strike. The talk itself is short. Take five minutes to watch (or listen) to the video below. And then browse through some of the resources about the environmental impacts of digital preservation.

Your ark is causing the flood: Digitization is not preservation

a small selection of further readings:

Goldman, Benjamin Matthew. 2018. “It’s Not Easy Being Green(e): Digital Preservation in the Age of Climate Change.” In Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark Greene. Society for American Archivists. https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/concern/generic_works/bvq27zn11p.

Goldman, Ben, Eira Tansey, and Whitney Ray. 2018. “Gathering and Documenting Archival Repository Location Data.” RBMS, New Orleans, LA. https://repositorydata.wordpress.com/2018/06/29/rbms-2018-presentation/.

Lischer-Katz, Zack. 2017. “Studying the Materiality of Media Archives in the Age of Digitization: Forensics, Infrastructures and Ecologies.” First Monday 22 (1). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i1.7263.

Maughan, Tim. 2015. “The Dystopian Lake Filled by The World’s Tech Lust.” BBC Future. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth.

Pendergrass, Keith, Walker Sampson, Tim Walsh, and Laura Alagna. 2019. “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation.” The American Archivist. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165.

Staniunus, David. 2019. “Our Carbon Footprint in the Archives.” Presbyterian Historical Society. https://www.history.pcusa.org/blog/2019/09/our-carbon-footprint-archives.

Tadic, Linda. 2016. “The Environmental Impact of Digital Preservation.” AMIA Conference. Pittsburgh, PA. http://www.amiaconference.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Advocacy-3-1-Environmental-Impact-Tadic.pdf.

Tansey, Eira. 2015. “Archival adaptation to climate change.” Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. 11, no. 2.

Winn, Samantha R. 2019. “Dying Well In the Anthropocene: On the End of Archivists.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/90177.

Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly curious about how we might imagine and create feminist book history. And so I was thrilled when I saw that Valerie Wayne was leading a seminar at this year’s Shakespeare Association of America conference on “Women, Gender, and Book History,” and I’ve been delighted to be part of such a smart and engaging crew of scholars. We’ll be meeting at the tail end of the month and I’m looking forward to our conversation and to feedback on my contribution.

But I’m not done with wrestling with this yet, and so I’d love any feedback any of you might have to offer. I’ve plans for this little 3,000-word piece and I’m hoping I can make it stronger before I’m ready to let it go. If you do read it, and you do have thoughts to share, please leave a comment below (remember when we used to comment on blogs and have actual conversations there???) or drop me an email.

[updated: I’ve removed the embedded pdf file because it’s no longer the current version of this piece, but it is still available to download here.]

The more time I spent looking, the more frustrated I grew about what wasn’t available. How could it be that there were no open facsimiles of Sidney’s ridiculously important sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella? Or Tottel’s miscellany? Or one of the most popular English plays, Mucedorus? These are foundational works in the development of their genres. In some cases, they survive in only a very small number of understandably restricted copies. Shouldn’t imaging them be an obvious choice? And what about works that could form an integral part of a canon of women’s work, or black studies, or any of the texts that exist at the margins or outside of dominant literary and cultural history?

I mentioned to a former colleague once, in a response to a question about imaging yet more First Folios, that I didn’t see the value of that project when so many important works like Sidney’s poems hadn’t been digitized even once. “Oh!” she said, “just let me know and I’ll see if I can do that.”

Institutions work in silos. There is rarely cooperation between libraries in discussing what their digitization strategies are. (There is often no digitization strategy, frankly, but according to the latest ENUMERATE survey from Europeana, that’s starting to improve.) And the more I think about this, the stranger it seems to me. Libraries and other cultural heritage organizations tout access as one of the benefits of digital collections and outreach. But you can’t access something if it isn’t there.

So what would happen if we started to keep track of what we wanted and couldn’t find? What if we pooled our requests so that we could see all that is missing from our digital cultural heritage? And what if we published these needs so that maybe librarians could look at them and say, Hey, we own that, we could image that.

I don’t know what we’d learn. I do know that some librarians have expressed a willingness to respond to such requests. And so here we are.

Do you have an early modern text that you wished you could access as a digital facsimile? Submit it through this request form (http://bit.ly/DigitizationSubmission), and I’ll add it to the wishlist (http://bit.ly/DigitizationWishlist).

Some guidelines:

1. Please only submit things that you have actually searched for.
2. Please be as thorough as possible when submitting: the more detailed the citation you give for the item, the better chance of the correct text being located; the more thought-out your description of why this text matters, the better the odds that you’ll convince someone of its value.
3. Please be patient! I vet items before adding them to the wishlist (I like things to be tidy and I don’t want sloppy research to slip through, since that will just muddle us all).

Need some help?

1. Some suggestions on how to search for open-access digitized facsimiles
2. A list of open-access early modern digital collections

Many thanks to the folks on twitter who responded to my call for beta-testing and an especially big thanks to those who left requests to start populating the wishlist. (I haven’t gotten to everything yet; just hang tight!)

And it gave me a chance to think again about digital facsimiles of early printed books. As I said in my talk, book historians think about digital facsimiles mostly in terms of what they show (“hey, cool book! why is it using that funky typeface?”). But what if book historians were to ask BH questions of digital facsimiles—what if we were to treat them as objects to be studies instead of (transparent) objects of objects to be studied?

Because I was part of a very fun roundtable, I could mostly ask questions and not insist on answers (best format ever). So here, without answers, is the digital facsimile I chose (only partially at random) to ask questions of:

It’s hard to resist diving right into that awesome book, I know. But resist we must, so that we can see the object for what it is. And what is it? (I’m sorry for the images of slides; I’m trying to be fast so I don’t have blogger’s panic.)

Well, it’s a picture of a printed page. Do we know anything else? We can probably go so far as to say it’s a jpeg. But another way of asking “what is it?” is to ask, “what is shown and not shown?” And that’s easier to answer. It doesn’t show anything that doesn’t interfere with the text. It’s a flat single page that leaves out any signals about where it might be in a book (is it recto or verso? towards the front or back of the volume?).

In the context of its platform, you can tell a lot more about what it is:

This is an image of the verso of the 8th leaf in the H gathering of a 1583 Antwerp edition of Noel de Berlaimont’s Colloquies. Seeing it in this context lets us make another assertion about this digital object: it’s an image that is meant to be seen in this viewer; this is the platform that provides information about what the picture depicts and how to navigate to related images. (Here’s the link to this view so you can play with it yourselves.)

Another question I think a book historian would ask is who made this image (we’re super focused on printers and publishers, right?). And although the image itself provides no clues about this, the platform does tell us that the image is provided by Les Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes, a project at Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance at the Université François-Rabelais Tours, of the copy held at the Bibliothèque Universitaire.

But who imaged this? To use book history equivalents, BVH is the publisher, but who are the printers? For that we can follow the platform link to the catalog record . . .

. . . where we get a lot more information about the object imaged, and if we scroll down . . .

. . . we can find some basic points about what equipment was used, when it was digitized, and when it was put online. It’s not much (there are no names and no information about software or post-processing), but it’s way more than is usually provided on digital platforms.

BUT!

Did you notice that image of the title page at the top of the catalog record? Did it strike you at all?

Yep. The image in the catalog is grey-scale and the image in the platform is color. So, what’s that thing in the record?

I suspect it’s a grey-scale version of the color image. I did a super quick tweak and with a bit more effort, it wouldn’t be hard to get that color image to look like the grey-scale one.

But that doesn’t really answer the question of what’s going on here. Why? Why is the image in the catalog grey instead of color? I always tell my bibliography students that if you see something funky happening in your book, it’s a sign something happened in the manufacturing process that should be investigated. The same holds true here: what’s going on?

Well, I don’t know. Without writing to the folks responsible for building the catalog, I can’t tell (and who knows if they’re even still on staff there or if they left notes about their working and decision-making processes). I could guess that maybe it seemed like using grey-scale images would lessen the drain on the resources supporting the catalog (smaller image files, faster loading time).

But we’re not done with the weirdness yet!

On the right is what you get when you download the full set of images (this is from the option “format pdf binaire haute définition pour l’impression”). It’s not color, or grey-scale. To my EEBO-trained eyes, it looks an awful lot like digitized microfilm.

Initially, that’s what I thought it was, but then I saw that even the objects imaged in 2016 were also available to download in this weird black-and-white option. It’s possible that their entire library was microfilmed and they’re only now getting around to doing color imaging. But that doesn’t quite explain why they’ve left these horrible-to-read images as high-resolution options. (Check out the 2016 digitization of this manuscript letter and the pdf download option; that’s no fun to read.)

So now I think we’re back to asking what is this thing and how many editions or impressions are there of it? What’s the relationship between these different iterations? How are they used, why were they produced, what does their production and usage say about the values or intentions or economics of the folks that produced them and of the systems in which they circulate?

These are book history questions, even if these aren’t books.

ps: Hi, folks! It’s been a while. I’ve been busy writing writing writing, and the good news is that my book is finished and in the hands of the publisher and should be available to be in your hands this coming spring. Oh, right: it’s called Studying Early Printed Books 1450-1800: A Practical Guide. It does exactly what the title says—it will teach you how such books were made, how to understand the signs of their making, what interpretations we can draw from all of that, and how to work with books in person or online. I suppose it could’ve been called Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Early Printed Books But Were Afraid To Ask, but it’s not. In any case, I’ve been busy and all my writing energies have been directed elsewhere. And now I’m focused on building a website, Early Printed Books, as a companion to the book, and so even though I like to think I’ll be writing more here, I might not be. Fingers crossed, but don’t forget you can always find me on twitter (@wynkenhimself but you probably know that).

Last August, Emma Smith’s The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio was published and I was and am delighted to have a piece in this one-stop-shopping introduction to F1. My contribution, to the surprise of no one, is on digitized copies of the First Folio. It’s a bibliographical and cultural-materialist inflected examination of what is available, how they present themselves, and what we might learn from them. “Digital First Folios” is a piece that I’m proud of and that I think is a useful contribution to conversations about digitization projects. And so I’m really happy that not only can you read it as part of the Companion, but that I can share it with you here on my site.

You’ll have to read the piece for the details of my argument, but as a lure, here are some of my key points.

Digitized F1s are presented nearly completely without any information about what they are and why they matter, something that might seem astonishing given libraries’ missions of educating users. But maybe that expectation misunderstands why institutions digitize their F1s:

Perhaps digital First Folios have not been provided with context primarily because they have not been understood to need any context: the act of displaying the First Folio, to its caretakers, has too often been seen as an act sufficient unto itself.

There is also no information provided about how they came to be digitized:

If the First Folio was treated the same way its digital incarnations are, we would believe that it sprung forth fully formed from Shakespeare’s imagination without the intervention of paper, ink, stationers, or collectors. But nothing springs forth fully formed, not even digital facsimiles, which have material and ideological characteristics that afford some usages and prevent others.

The treatment of digitized F1s as magically transparent windows onto Shakespeare’s text makes it hard to recognize their cultural and material lessons:

Treating digital First Folios as replicas of text rather than as objects in their own right also makes it difficult for us to understand them through the bibliographic and cultural material lenses that studies of the First Folio have been so important for in illuminating the histories of early modern printing and book collecting.

Of course, there are benefits to being able to access a collection of F1s:

But in looking at our collection of thirteen digital First Folios – an opportunity we would almost never have in person – we can see the cultural priorities that drive the organization of the preliminaries even when bibliographic clues were not recognized or followed.

The bibliographic standards that allow us to look across and compare different copies of the First Folio, however, don’t have an equivalent in digital copies:

But it is difficult to work with the digital First Folios in a similar way because digital facsimiles have not yet been standardized. There are image metadata standards: EXIF, for instance, is one of the defaults used to record such things as camera settings, time and location the image was taken, compression, make of the camera, and color information; IPTC and XMP are other standard formats for image metadata. What there is not, however, is a standard of whether such metadata needs to be included in the images of facsimiles that are made available to the public.

My kicker?

We are at a moment when digital facsimiles of the First Folio have been created primarily to act as surrogates for the physical books and to be encountered as discrete copies. But we are moving toward a time when digital facsimiles are going to be seen as digital objects in their own right: not as surrogates for a printed book or manuscript, but as different ways to experience that object. For some uses, the material text might be better suited; for others, a digital image might be a better choice. In order for that to happen, digital facsimiles are going to need to enable a range of different uses and they are going to have to provide metadata and interoperability that will allow users to shift from being passive consumers to active agents of their uses.

I hope you’ll read the whole essay and the whole volume. Even if you’re not a Shakespearean, I think it will offer you food for thought about how we digitize library collections.

One more thing: I am able to share this piece with you because I negotiated a contributor’s contract with Cambridge that allowed for it. The original contract didn’t make any provision for the author being able to place her work in a repository. I wrote to them requesting that change, they wrote back saying they could do that, and here we are!

For those of you looking for a model to follow in your negotiations, here’s my succinct email:

Dear [xxx],

Thank you for sending this. I have a couple of questions before I can sign it.

First, I’m not seeing any provisions for self-archiving my article on a personal or institutional repository. I know that some presses do make that allowance standard; other presses I have worked with have inserted a clause or used a different contract to allow for self-archiving. What is possible here?

Second, it is my strong preference to retain copyright, rather than assigning to a press. I’m happy, of course, to work out an arrangement for an exclusive license allowing CUP to publish the piece. Again, some presses I have worked with have had an alternate contract to allow for this. Is that a possibility here?

with thanks for your assistance with this,
Sarah.

The response was a quick and easy note saying that archiving was no problem but the copyright was. I decided that in this case I was okay with proceeding. You will have your own thoughts on what is and is not acceptable to you. But please please please know that you can ask your publisher for these things. It might seem scary but the worst is they’ll say no. I promise they’re not going to yank your contract just for asking. (You can read more about doing this in my other posts on the subject.)

Because I have a project coming up that will need lots of pictures of early printed books, I’ve been trying to compile a list of openly accessible digital collections of early printed books. Sound like a straightforward project?

You might think it’d be pretty easy to identify whether a digital collection has terms that are useful for your purpose. You’d be wrong. Some collections have clearly stated terms and link to those policies in obvious ways. My favorites are those providing that information with the items themselves—both because of their ease of use and because they allow for item-specific information, which is handy given confusing copyright regulations and diffuse collections. But there are also places that use a cover-their-butts note instead of providing user friendly information. Statements along the lines of “we obey all relevant copyright laws” might protect a library from the risks of wrongly stating whether an item is not or is under copyright, but they do nothing for the person wanting to use the image.

You might also think that a library that has digitized images of their collections online would allow people to use them. You’d be wrong. Most places at a minimum allow their images to be used for personal and/or research needs, and sometimes for non-commercial and/or educational purposes. But there are institutions that do not allow for any use of their images at all. I guess you’re just supposed to be happy that you can sit in front of a screen and stare at them.

What I need for my work are images able to be freely used, whether because they are public domain or licensed CC BY or CC BY-SA. Alas, these open collections are harder to find, as the bulk of institutions out there seem to think that a non-commercial license is plenty generous, thankyouverymuch. I understand why non-commercial licenses might be appealing for libraries who are often struggling for income—the feeling of “why should someone else make money off our collections?” is awfully strong. But there are many reasons why this is a problematic license. I don’t mean for this post to be a rant, so I’ll give you a quick list of points:

1. Non-commercial is a pretty narrow category. My intended project, for example, is a free website that will work in conjunction with a commercial publication; it is designed both to supplement my book and to advertise it. So is that a non-commercial use? I’m in a bit of a grey area—probably fine but maybe not.((The Creative Commons definition offers some guidance: “NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.”)) Do I want to risk it or to spend tons of time corresponding with libraries asking for permission? Not really.
2. Non-commercial licensing in these cases asserts copyright over images that are public domain. According to the 1999 US case Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. and the 2015 UK Intellectual Property Office copyright notice, faithful reproductions of public domain works cannot be copyrighted because they do not involve an element of originality. Being the possessor of the physical object doesn’t grant you its copyright; sweating over imaging an object doesn’t give you copyright either.
3. Finally, and this is the biggest hurdle for me, the one that really makes me want to stand up on my soapbox, is this: Do libraries exist to hoard knowledge or to spread it? The mission of libraries is to preserve and disseminate knowledge—locking up resources does neither of these things. No wonder we suffer from a dearth of funding when we aren’t making the case to the public why what we do is important. <deep breath>

So, library friends. I know most of you agree with me on these points—the librarians I know overwhelmingly want their collections to be more freely available, but they are not always able to convince those who administer and set policies that openness is the way forward. Perhaps as more studies continue to point out the benefits of open access, this argument will get easier to make. (If you haven’t already, read Effie Kapsalis’s The Impact of Open Access on Galleries, Libraries, Museums, and Archives and Michelle Light’s “Controlling Goods or Promoting the Public Good: Choices for Special Collections in the Marketplace” —both provide plenty of hard evidence that charging for reproductions doesn’t add to the bottom line and does harm their mission.) (Update: if you want the rant version of the problems of finding and using digital collections, my RBMS talk, “Looking for a radically open digital landscape,” will give you that.)

At the moment, my list of open access early modern digital collections has 16 institutions on it. Some of them are a joy to use, some of them are frustrating as all get-out. But I hope that I will be able to continue adding to it both as I learn about more collections and as more libraries change their access policies. Do let me know if I’m missing any, do continue working on hosting your collections on better platforms, and above all, do continue fighting for open access!

The photo at the top of this post is one of many lovely ones from @pleasant_peasants’s Instagram. My thanks to Pleasant for permission to use this photo, and my recommendation to you to follow the stream!