Books before looks: An exercise in bibliographing (course content)
BLOG: Books before looks
Did you know there are people on this planet who grow up to be bibliographers? Imagine having to say, “bibliographies” instead of “art” when some woman sitting next to you on the bus asks you what you’re studying in college.
Now, given that in Ancient Greek biblío means “small book” and graphos means “something drawn or written about,” bibliographer can mean a person who studies books — or some part of books. See, for example, Charles Dexter Allen’s totally fascinating as a piece of our past 1894 guide to book-plates which comes with Allen’s confident assertion that some day book plate studies will be a well-established academic discipline. (Never happened.)
The word bibliographer might also refer to someone who makes books, and in fact, ancient Greek writers first used the word “bibliographia” to mean the practice of copying books by hand. However, since the 18th century, the word bibliographer has, with growing frequency, denoted a person dedicated, not just to books but specifically, to compiling and publishing lists of books.
Bibliographers today are, I am fairly certain, people who, when they hear the word bibliography, do not think immediately: “the most annoying part of writing a paper in college.” Instead, they associate bibliographies with other things: VERBS like excavate, detect, explore, and discover; and/or PROCESSES like a) digging through centuries old volumes of stuff written by thinkers and creators who ceased to exist long ago, or b) chronicling the existence of a genre and its evolution and/or extinction, or c) examining books as if they are pieces of amber, trappers of prehistoric knowledge rather than bugs…
Why am I writing you all this?
At the end of this week, I am going to ask you to produce your own, early in your project, annotated bibliography using 6 sources from JSTOR. This is true. But just before this, I want you to play around with a bibliographer’s bibliography. I want you to think of this bibliography as a data set, and related: I want you to try-on the practice of excavating a list. Because just maybe, this will be a practice useful to you in your own research project this semester.
FN: Lists are data sets and thus sources of information, be they grocery lists, to-do lists, hit lists, book lists, or something else entirely.
ASSIGNMENT: Excavating a bibliography
A bibliographer might be hanging out in some archive somewhere (or constructing an archive) in order to produce a bibliography =
They/she/he usually starts with texts then produces a list.
In contrast, I want you to start with an already compiled bibliography and arrive at your own conclusions based on that bibliography =
You will start with the list then produce new knowledge from that list.
Does that make sense?
The bibliography with which I am asking you to work this week is one published in 1922. It documents fourteen hundred “dime novels” dating from 1859 to 1905.
- Required text: Anon. 1922. The Beadle Collection of Dime Novels. Bulletin of the New York Public Library, New York City: New York Public Library, form: p166 (vii-20–22 5c).
[Open the HTML, please, then click next for a description of the assignment.]
The unnamed author of The Beadle Collection of Dime Novels (the bibliography now open on your desktop) wrote, in an introduction to that bibliography in 1922:
The collection, as shown in the Main Exhibition Room, constitutes an absorbingly interesting assemblage of a pioneer literature which has now wholly vanished, but which, for a generation, exercised a profound influence on the country’s thought, character, and habits of mind…
The collection is literally saturated with the pioneer spirit of America. It portrays the struggles, exploits, trials, dangers, feats, hardships, and daily lives of the American pioneers from the days of the Puritans to the death of Custer, and breathes the spirit which, for two and a half centuries, shaped the conquest and development of the Continent north of the Rio Grande. It is a literature intensely nationalistic and patriotic in character; obviously designed to stimulate adventure, self-reliance and achievement; to exalt the feats of the pioneer men and women who settled the country; and to recite the conditions under which those early figures lived and did their work…
…No serious student who seeks to understand the history of this country and many of its present tendencies, can fail to obtain a better understanding of such matters by a study of the collection now on view. It is a clinic in the subject of mass psychology; as valuable to the university professor for its significant historical revelations as it is to the gray-haired man to whom it recalls memories of boyhood.
Assuming, as the author says, that these books reflect the “thought, character, and habits of mind” of their readers, I would like you, using only the list of books (skip to page 18), to suggest some conclusions about those readers.
Please answer below:
Conclusion 1. Using titles, show me something interesting about gender relations in the time period covered by these books (1864–1905).
Conclusion 2. Again thinking with the book titles, what seem to be especially important social values in the U.S. from 1964 to 1905? In contrast, do you see evidence of any common fears, seemingly shared by readers?
Conclusion 3. This bibliography lists dime novels in chronological order. How are later titles different from and/or similar to earlier titles? What new themes begin to pop up? Do you think these shifts in titles suggest shifts in society and/or readers’ “thought, character, and habits of mind”?
Conclusion 4. What else can you say about dime novel readers and/or writers using only this book list?
