This is the fourth and last of a series of short reports on SHARP 2024: Global Book Cultures, provided by select SHARPists who were supported by SHARP travel awards. They are presented below in interview format. Please feel free to reach out to these scholars for collaboration and networking! Their contact info is hyperlinked to each of their names, below.

Read parts I, II, and III.

Tell us a little about yourself and your research.

My name is Holly Day (she/her). I graduated from a History PhD at the University of York earlier this year, where I’m currently based as a grant officer for the humanities. My PhD research was on the development of “memorandum books” in Georgian Britain; what we would now refer to as pocket diaries. These annual publications brought together a range of useful and entertaining printed material – such as tables to help calculate expenses, lists of holidays kept at public offices, fashion plates and poetry – with pre-formatted diary and accounts pages left blank for their owners to fill in. Drawing on over 200 extant copies and situating them alongside newspaper advertisements, periodicals, prints and more, I interrogated their production and the ways they shaped manuscript practices in the eighteenth century. I am currently revising my thesis for publication as a monograph entitled Mem. to Self: Rise of the Pocket Diary in the Transatlantic Print Trade, 1695-1880. To this end, this summer I am a visiting fellow at the Manchester Wesley Research Centre and University of Manchester, where I am looking at diaries in the Methodist collections at the Rylands Library. Later this year I will be undertaking a fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia to study the transatlantic links in the diary trade. I am also developing a project on the visual culture of eighteenth-century ladies’ pocket diaries. In my spare time, I am a research volunteer for the National Trust, working on a project on eighteenth-century Catholic women in the domestic sphere.

I’m Nyssa Komorowski. I’m a PhD candidate in Art History with a specialisation in Book History and Print Culture, at the University of Toronto. The topic of my research is focused on intersections between Indigenous crafts, texts, and performances, and how materials and images have historically been used to make and maintain human connections to land and territory. Methodologically, I experiment with craftwork and poiesis that engage with Indigenous objects using hands-on approaches like beadwork and wampum weaving, and I am interested in textual theories that consider paratexts and objects that contextualize or contribute to the production of texts. For instance, I recreated a loom-beaded panel (today housed in a museum in a delicate state of decay) that used to be worn by Mohawk-Canadian performer and poet E. Pauline Johnson during her stage performances. Then, I used the same beading design to create another beaded panel that serves as a hypertext visually describing the process and timeline of recreating the antique panel. Other projects for my dissertation include the upcoming creation of an artist’s book version of Pauline’s first published book, analysis of her poetry, tracing and analyzing her use and exchange of wampum belts in her performances, and consideration of her costume as a kind of text that describes her relationships with people whom she counted as friends and family. My goal is to approach my topics creatively and to bring colour and life to objects used by Pauline, which had previously only been widely seen in old black and white photographs.

I’m Fallon Murphy (she/her or they/them), I am a PhD Student at Boston University and study 20th and 21st century African American literature, critical bibliography, and the digital humanities. Before graduate school, I worked for several years in the profession of conservation, with a focus in the preservation of archival materials. The experience taught me so much about how we treat archives, both materially and conceptually, and how interpretation is shaped by the material remains of the archive. I was so excited to attend SHARP in part because of the emphasis on the materials of the book. I am not yet in the dissertation stage, but my work explores the rise of the Black American curator-creative writer. I am interested in the contemporary writers Robin Coste Lewis, Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Trethewey, Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole, Kevin Young, and Hilton Als and how they engage in curatorial practices, or cite institutional records of Black life found in museums and other archival spaces as starting places for their creative writing. I argue the utilization of archival records and documents is a poetic practice that is an act of restoration, that is neither an act of restitution or counterhistory. I suggest in my research that these acts of poetic-curation serve as a method to reimagine gaps in the archive addressed by Black feminists such as Cristina Sharpe, Tina Campt, and Saidiya Hartman. Although my research centers on a contemporary question, I argue in that the utilization of institutional records as a creative practice has a long history in African American poetry and its canonization, in particular, Toni Morrison’s Black Book (1974) and Richard Wright’s collaborative project with the photographer Edwin Rosskan in 12 Million Black Voices (1941).

My name is Linjie Zhang, I am a PhD student at the Department of Sociology, Edinburgh. My Chrystal Macmillan Scholar-funded project is “The Dawn and Decline of Bookstores in China”. I also have interests in forensic labs, sociology of literature and museums. Besides, I am a member of the History of Science Library, a public Zotero library for the history of science (https://www.histscilib.com/map).

Can you share a bit about the work you presented at the conference?

Holly: The paper I presented was titled “Selling Memorandum Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” and was part of the panel “Eighteenth-century Book Cultures” along with Julie Park, Simon Burrows and Tom Mole. Simon’s paper showed a big data approach to uncovering women in the French book trades, while Tom’s explored the way Samuel Taylor Coleridge helped to shape a new media imagination in the Romantic era. My paper particularly complemented Julie’s paper, which examined the kinds of life-writing you could find inside memorandum books and the way they functioned as personal archives.

“Memorandum books” are what we would better understand today as pocket diaries, pre-printed publications with blank spaces for people to record their daily lives. First published by Robert Dodsley in 1748, these books were some of the most popular print publications of eighteenth-century Britain, and instrumental in the spread of life-writing practices.

My paper at SHARP shared some of my key findings about the scale and mechanics of the memorandum book trade. As part of my PhD research, I conducted the first ever large-scale bibliographic study of these books: I constructed a dataset identifying titles published in Britain between 1748-1799, their publishers, place of publication, and their earliest and latest known dates of publication. From this I provided estimates of the number of titles published and their print spans and explored trends over time. Moreover, I drew on evidence of the value of copyright shares and the print runs of memorandum to demonstrate that memorandum books were major business ventures, seriously invested in by leading members of the eighteenth-century London and provincial book trade. I argued that the vast popularity of these products likely outstripped some of the best-known publications of this period such as novels, periodicals and satirical prints. Study of memorandum books should therefore prompt us to reconsider what kind of media forms were most commonly encountered and consumed in this period.

The highlight for me was that the University of Reading Special Collections team kindly provided some book rests and snakes so I could show some surviving examples of eighteenth-century pocket diaries – which led to a lively discussion after the panel!

Nyssa: I presented on the panel “Communities of Publishing” chaired by Elisa Bolchi. My co-panelists included Kirsti Salmi-Niklander, Henning Hansen, and Gearóidín Uí Laighléis. My paper was entitled “Landscape Literacy and Haudenosaunee Wampum,” and looked at wampum as a case study to investigate Haudenosaunee perspectives on relationships between cultural objects, images, texts, and between humans and land. Wampum are carved shell beads, and to make wampum belts they are woven by the thousands or tens of thousands to document treaties and important political fixtures (such as the rights of women in the confederacy). Wampum has been used for hundreds of years amongst the Haudenosaunee and other Northeastern Woodlands cultures to facilitate diplomatic exchanges. Wampum belts are documents, comparable to a written treaty or contract, and they are visual-tactile performances of orality. They comprise both oral tradition and ‘literature’ in an expanded sense of the term. I introduced E. Pauline Johnson and explained how Pauline, in the dedication of her first book of poetry, compared wampum beads to words of a poem, and the weaving of wampum belts with the making of books. She clearly positioned the materiality and spirit of book publishing to wampum, which is a very interesting perspective when the mainstream view of wampum today is often cast through a museological lens of material culture. With phrases like “the breathing of tradition” and appeals to her family members, Pauline seems to put forward a view of wampum that is closely aligned with the Haudenosaunee perspective today. In my presentation, I dug into this perspective on wampum. When considering established theories on textuality and orality there seems to be little place for Indigenous practices like wampum weaving. For instance, in Walter Ong’s influential theory on orality and literacy, he proposes that what counts as a true or “sharply focused sense” of text is defined by a higher, human evolution of writing in contrast to an unevolved, animalistic condition of nature found in orality (2002, 83). More recently, scholars who have attempted to reconceive this divide between human and nature still work hard to avoid disrupting dominant ontological positions about nature. In contrast, I put forward the view that Indigenous objects are living emissaries that help people make deeper connections with places and each other, using textual theories and Indigenous histories and philosophies, focussing on the story of Hiawatha’s discovery and use of wampum to make peace treaties and establish the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Wampum emerges from and models a literacy and orality rooted in Haudenosaunee landscape. Visual symbols and material connections to land put order to social relations by referencing the vitality of land. As shell beads, wampum beads and belts have vitality from the land. By reintegrating concepts around human technology and culture back together with nature, while also experimentally expanding beyond common understandings of what counts as a text, I have attempted to begin development of a nuanced, land-based understanding of communication technologies, textual belongings, and literary texts made by Indigenous Haudenosaunee people.

Fallon: I was lucky to present on the panel, chaired by Nicola Abram, “Acts of poetic restoration and testimony,” that dovetailed so well with some of the broader questions that I was seeking to address in my paper, and am still hoping to understand and theorize, which includes: how can creative practices be an act of reclamation that responds to histories of violence, such as racism, or, how have artists used the gaps in the archive or the racist violences in the archive as a part of their creative process?

My paper explored Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), which I argue is a critical bibliographic text that utilizes poetry and documentary archives to restore Black lives captured in institutional spaces. I traced how Trethewey’s book uses poetry to rewrite an exhibition of documentary photographs shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 of white-skinned Black women sex workers taken in New Orleans in the 20th century and rendered as objects of fascination and discovery. Instead of only documenting what the camera voyeuristically captures, Trethewey uses an experimental citational practice of the couplet, haiku, and the epistolary form to narratologically restore what the archive misses.

To define poetic restoration, I use the museological term in contrast to preservation, a Romantic heuristic applied to archival objects. The method of preservation reveres the archival document as an index of a past, and the person who preserves aims to keep an archival document within the same material state it was acquired. Although considered an ethical method for conserving museum objects, to preserve often means that the colonial recordation of the object is maintained materially. Restoration, in contrast, alters archival records into another temporality, which I see as a one of the liberatory possibilities of remembrance outside of the empirical. Ultimately, I argued Trethewey’s poems provide a heuristic for the ethics of bibliographic research and its epistemological limits, a creative way to maintain awareness of the archive’s gaps, and the interpretative possibility of what cannot be empirically proven.

Kristin L. Matthews had a paper called “A Poetics of Witnessing.” The presentation was a part of Matthews’ book project that explored contemporary Black American women’s poetry, who cite and creatively alter historical documents of White supremacist histories. Matthews argued that the moment the archive interrupts the poem is when we must reckon with how Whiteness has authored Blackness. She had us to see how poetic works are a vehicle for reckoning with, or witnessing, the terrors of racial slavery and its aftermaths in the present.

The panel was initially supposed to be just Matthews and I, but we were joined by DeNel Rehberg Sedo. Her paper, titled “Normalizing Alternatives with Frequently Asked White Questions,” interrogated reading as a space for White people to speak about, contextualize, and process the historical and cultural implications of Whiteness in the case study Frequently Asked White Questions. Sedo’s paper highlighted the importance of reading, as not only an isolated enterprise, but as a space for shared solidarity and reckoning.

Linjie: Panel: Japan/Korea; Speakers: Kevin Mulholland, Aron van de Pol, Linjie Zhang; Topic: Imagination on China: Japanese Author, Travel Writing and Book Translation (1980-2022);
Abstract: In the mid-19th century, the development of printing and transportation technology further promoted book circulation. At the same time, the representation of exotic scenery in travel writing was deeply rooted in the relationship between power and knowledge, given that the travels were government-funded. Some studies found that in the history of travel writing, the written object changes from article and science to culture and sentiment, and the perspective of writing turns from the author’s empire to the written country. However, the question of how readers of the written country understand those travel writings remains little explored. This study focuses on the six Japanese authors’ travel writing about China from 1899 to 1942. Through text analysis and in-depth interviews with Chinese publishers, this paper explores the background of Japanese authors’ travel writing about China and the publication as well as circulation of Chinese versions of those travel writings, to illustrate how Chinese readers and publishers understand Japanese literati’s travel writing about China. This paper argues that in the process of cultural exchanges and book circulation, state-led travel writing has more complicated meanings because of the interactions between the author and the state, between the books and the readers. This paper argues that the publication and translation of travel writings not only reflect the complex entanglements between China and Japan but also illustrate the imaginations of Japan and Japanese writers from Chinese readers, which promotes cultural dialogue. It’s a bit pity I was the only speaker on my panel but audiences were very passionate and we discussed many interesting questions.

Beside your own panel, what was your favorite session at the 2024 SHARP Conference? 

Holly: I particularly enjoyed the panel ‘Civic Fictions: Modelling Book-Reader interactions in the Age of Revolution, c. 1760-1830’. This panel was formed of a team at Radbound University all working on the “Civic Fictions” project which began in 2023, with each paper giving a sense of the different subprojects that the team members were tackling, and showing how big data can be meaningfully coupled with a case study approach. Alicia Montoya showcased the impressive digital infrastructure created by the project, which enables us to think about the wider bookscape by looking at both book buying and reader reception. Rindert Jagersma examined the Leiden Booksellers firm Luchtmans to make the case that bookseller accounts should not be seen solely as singular narratives about a particular family, but as social records of the wider community, meriting consideration as a collective archive. Helwi Blom looked at evidence of the restitution of books which had been confiscated in revolutionary France, exploring the emotional significance of restitution for their owners. I am really excited to see what the team discovers as the project continues.

The collection sessions were also a highlight, as they showcased excellent research while prompting me to think about different methodological approaches to book history – I attended ‘Stories of adaptation and divergence’ and ‘How to study printed images.’

Beyond the sessions themselves, I would like to add that my favourite thing about SHARP was how wonderfully warm and welcoming all the delegates were – I hope to return for another SHARP conference in the future!

Nyssa: My favorite panel was “Acts of poetic restoration and testimony,” chaired by Nicola Abram, with panelists Kristin L. Matthews, Falon Murphy, and Hailie Tattrie and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. I particularly enjoyed panelist Matthews’s discussion of Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in Water (2018), a type of erasure poetry. Matthews described this as “inherently readerly,” because the artist/writer “reads it, then determines what to remove to reveal a late truth” (quotes may be paraphrased). For instance, Smith works with historical documents, erasing parts of them to reveal some insight to the past, such as in the poem “Declaration,” revealing limitations of official reports that describe horrors committed against Black people who were enslaved. Murphy’s paper discussed ekphrastic engagement with photographs made of women who possessed the “Jim Crow drop” to be legally classified as Black, but who appear white. The ‘speaker’ of the poem looks closely at the photographs and reimagines the model’s subjectivity through an ethos of care, giving the photographed women a literary, impressionistic space to speak. The story of the photographs has previously been focussed on their discovery and the “heroic attempts” to locate and print them. Murphy contrasted the treatment of these images with writers like Claudia Rankine, who had a famous photograph of a lynch mob altered to edit out the Black men who were the subject of the violence, leaving the white crowd. Overall, the panel explored how contemporary book culture can go beyond the book itself and influence the institutions that make and distribute books.

Fallon: There were so many incredible sessions. As someone who studies the United States and is in a non-creative field, I greatly relished the variety of talks—from hearing about incunabula in Greenland, to bibliotherapy in the United States, to the distribution of African radical books in inner-city Birmingham, and finally to the complexities of zine-making practices.

However, if I chose a favorite session, I would say it was Geoff Wyeth’s demonstration of the stone lithographic process and press, held in the new printmaking facilities at the University of Reading.

At the session, Wyeth, with his artist’s smock on, guided us through each step of how to make a lithographic print. What I learned in the studio demonstration, in part, is that making a lithograph, in comparison to a woodcut for example, is complex. Unlike a woodcut, which involves carving the surface of a block of wood with gouges, when the lithographic stone is etched, it is initially not visible. The process relies on the idea that water and oil do not mix.

After telling us how lithography was likely discovered — it was apparently when the playwright Alois Senefelder wrote a list for his mother — Wyeth first showed us how to prepare the slab of limestone, grinding it with water and a levigator to remove any greasy residues. Next, he had to keep his body off the porous stone (otherwise he might get an impression of his elbow) as he drew with greasy material a joyful composition of squiggly lines.

Although at this point Wyeth had applied the drawing materials, we learned that this is really only the beginning of the process—he had to apply rosin and talc, etch the stone with careful brushstrokes of a mixture of nitric acid and gum arabic, and wash it out with turpentine and asphaltum. The process is repeated, starting with the rosin.

After all the work Wyeth did, though, we could not see his drawing! It was not until Wyeth applied ink to the stone that we could begin to see the faint outline of his drawing. Once he decided that the quantity of ink he rolled onto the stone was sufficient, he brought the stone to the press to print. It was one of the earliest print presses.

Watching the process was such a lovely experience and illuminating—as a writer, it is often difficult to understand the labor that goes into making a print.

Linjie: Epistemologies of reading. My favorite one is Stephen Dan Mills’ ressearch: ‘“Circling the Square”: The Hobbes-Willis Debate avec the Foucault-Habermas Debate’

Give us a reading recommendation!

Holly: Adam Smyth. Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Nyssa: Indigenuity: Native Craftwork & the Art of American Literatures by Caroline Wigginton

Fallon: Tina Campt’s Listening to Images – it is a fabulous book that creates a methodology of sound and the haptic as an approach for quotidian documentary records of the Black Diaspora.

Linjie: The works of Naito Torajiro, Junichiro Tanizaki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and Kaii Higashiyama.