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Andrew M. Stauffer. Book Traces: Nineteenth Century Readers and the Future of the Library. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Hardcover/eBook, 207p. $49.95/$49.95 (ISBN: 9780812252682/9780812297492). Reviwed by Alison Reynolds.
What is the future of nineteenth-century books in academic libraries? This is the question that lingers throughout Andrew M. Stauffer’s Book Traces: Nineteenth Century Readers and the Future of the Library. In a book that is part sentimental reading of Romantic and Victorian poetry, part analysis of nineteenth-century white middle-class reading practices, and part plea for humanities scholars to urge librarians to save books printed between 1800 and 1923, Stauffer draws the reader into a world where books serve as social objects, media objects, and souvenirs from their owners. At the same time, he emphasizes the importance for these works to remain in browsable, circulating collections in academic libraries to serve as “humanities laboratories” for students and scholars. Stauffer estimates that “approximately 10% of books [in academic libraries] printed before 1923 contain inscriptions, annotations, and other marks made by their owners and readers,” more commonly in books of poetry and prominently written by women readers (19). Treating each copy of a book as a unique artifact contributes to the bibliodiversity needed for humanities scholars to conduct their research, allowing for the serendipitous discovery that fueled his Book Traces project.
Stauffer is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia whose Book Traces project (https://booktraces-public.lib.virginia.edu/) started in 2009 with an assignment in one of his graduate seminars. With support from grants, Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online (NINES), academic libraries, and scholars from around the world, it expanded into a crowd-sourced project where anyone can submit a book with marginalia from this period for inclusion in their database of more than 15,000 volumes.
This book evolved from his project and is organized into five chapters. The first four chapters provide close readings of poetry through an analysis of marginalia and annotations inscribed by previous readers and owners for the purpose of examining nineteenth-century reading practices. Each chapter focuses on a different kind of “book trace,” including sentimental notes in books of poetry by Felicia Hemans (chapter one), flowers pressed in books (chapter two), date markings (chapter three), and the transfiguration of books into artifacts through annotations and physical changes accumulated across long periods of time (chapter four). Each of these chapters includes poems, photographs, or plate illustrations from the books described so readers can see the unique handwriting, sketches, or annotations created by previous readers. The final chapter discusses the role academic libraries play as stewards of these books and includes a critique of library preservation and retention policies along with a plea for librarians to keep nineteenth-century books browsable in physical stacks as part of their circulating collections.
Stauffer’s passionate argument in defense of the bibliographic study of nineteenth-century books runs through the core of Book Traces, and takes the form of different recommendations for book scholars and for librarians. Most critical work on marginalia has focused on medieval and early modern readers and their books, and Stauffer strives to challenge the assumption that book annotation declined or is less important for academic study after 1830. He suggests that personal copies of books have not been well-examined in the scholarship of Victorian middle-class reading and book culture, and libraries have contributed to this lack of scholarship by placing them in a “medium-rare” status, “making them more available for casual reading but, in some ways, less suitable for scholarly study then earlier materials, well catalogued and preserved, in rare-book rooms” (8).
As a result, he calls for librarians to reconsider their copies of nineteenth-century books as valuable pieces of a large, distributed, networked archive and refers to the downsizing of print collections as “a threat to cultural memory” (139). He asks librarians to review their policies that result in deaccessioning books with low circulation rates, physical damage, or digital surrogates (131). His solution is a collaborative approach among scholars, students, and librarians wherein scholars demonstrate the need for easy access to these volumes by engaging in bibliographic studies and teaching with nineteenth-century publications rather than anthologies, recent editions, or digital scans (150). Librarians, he suggests, should include humanities scholars in conversations about deaccessioning to determine criteria about what makes a book significant (148).
To find these arguments convincing, both scholars and librarians must buy into his belief that books printed between 1800 and 1923 are the most vulnerable in the library and that digital surrogates like those found in Google Books or HathiTrust are insufficient for humanities scholarship. Stauffer’s arguments for the unique research value of physical books are particularly strong in chapter one, where he provides analyses of readers’ marginalia and annotated poetry in a practice he terms “microreading.” Combining readers’ personal annotations with contextual research conducted through related books and family records found in archives, special collections, or online genealogical databases culminates in a compelling suggestion that nineteenth-century books distributed across different parts of a library are part of the same institutional history and can be reunited to tell a story about the objects and lives of the past in ways impossible by a single copy (107).
He also makes strong points about how this work would not be possible using a digital surrogate of a different copy of the book, citing the inconsistent quality of scans in Google Books, lack of full-text availability, and the tendency to scan clean copies of books or skip digitizing marginalia in front or back matter. Stauffer’s prose is also a strength that contributes to an enjoyable read. Often poetic and sentimental, it mimics the subject of his book and builds a sense of urgency and significance in the reader.
While he succeeds in persuading readers of the importance of access to unique copies of these books, his arguments for their vulnerable status are logical and idealistic in theory but limited in the practicality of their implementation. He acknowledges that decisions to deaccession or move books offsite are largely because of library budget concerns and space constraints (143) but offers little in the way of countering this other than suggesting librarians, humanities faculty, and students unite to find common ground and “demand more resources for their preservation” (152). While well-intentioned, the implication is that librarians should be responsible for shifting their priorities and creating long-term plans to find space, money, and labor for the preservation of these books in circulating collections.
At the same time, however, Stauffer is also opposed to libraries moving these volumes into offsite storage facilities. He suggests that moving books offsite contributes to a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the books do not get used because they cannot be browsed (150). While his statements are plausible, his evidence for these claims is largely speculative and anecdotal. It seems offsite storage could be an area of compromise, providing access while conserving resources, however Stauffer maintains a hard stance that moving books offsite provides greater justification for their eventual removal.
Perhaps the largest gap in the book is the absence of academic archives and special collections in conversations about the future of nineteenth-century books. Special collections are mentioned briefly as repositories for books printed before 1800 and as resources for related books or family papers, but they are rarely discussed as potential homes for unique copies of nineteenth-century books. Since Stauffer is arguing for these books to be available in browsable stacks, one might assume he would also be against having them in the closed stacks of special collections, however this is never discussed as a possible solution.
Many nineteenth-century books in academic libraries were donated from wealthy families post-WWII prior to the development of academic special collections departments, and thus entered circulating collections. As we move further into the twenty-first century, Stauffer suggests that interest in bibliographic studies of nineteenth-century works will increase, and that therefore action needs to be taken immediately to preserve unique copies of these books for future study. This could prompt special collections librarians, archivists, or curators to initiate conversations with humanities faculty and subject liaison librarians to discuss the possibility of moving nineteenth-century volumes with unique markings from circulating collections into special collections where they would be accessible for book scholarship like their medieval and early modern counterparts. At the very least, this book may prompt librarians to rethink their processes and criteria for making retention and preservation decisions. Ultimately, Book Traces succeeds in expanding ideas about what qualifies as book history, in broadening expectations about which books are deemed important enough for scholarship, and in highlighting the ways in which library policies impact the trajectory of humanities scholarship in both circulating and special collections.
— Alison Reynolds, Georgia Institute of Technology