Are YOU a Bibliography+ person?
The panel’s name is officially “Bibliography, Publishing Studies, and Textual Criticism,” all of which is wrapped up with Book History, related work in Digital Humanities, even History of Rhetoric, and probably sub-disciplines I’m overlooking at the moment.
We’re people who care about texts and transmission—how people have created, edited, preserved, and used texts for as long as texts have existed.
If this sounds like you, please come! We want to hear about your work and ideas!
Who We Are and What We’re Doing
Our panel has been going since 1976, and in that time, participating scholars have produced energetic, thought-provoking, and valuable documentary work. In recent years, we’ve seen the urgent need for new conversations about what bibliography and related studies look like in the 21st century.
We began looking toward revitalized directions in 2020—and then Covid hit, and the conference was canceled. In 2021, as people continue to face a variety of challenges, we’ll be keeping our focus manageable. Still, we’re very glad to be able to support meaningful work taking place, and we know the time together will be encouraging.
We’ll be rallying for an online conference session and a virtual reception that’s open to anyone interested in discussing bibliography related things. We’d love to have you join us for either or both events.
—Heidi Nobles, panel chair
Panel Basics:
Thursday, October 7,
10:15-11:45 am
Virtual Panel
Click here for Zoom Link
*password provided via email to registered attendees
Reception Basics:
Thursday, October 7, 1-2 pm
Virtual Reception, Open to the Public
Zoom Link: https://virginia.zoom.us/j/4629103081
*An opportunity to discuss our panelists’ work in more detail, and to discuss the present and future of Bibliography+ studies with colleagues. Please bring your lunch along for what we hope will be a lively conversation.
2021 Panelists
(Thursday, October 7, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM)
Opening Comments by Heidi Nobles: “Bibliography+: Toward Revitalizing Textual Studies for the 21st Century”
*This section is a work in progress; photos/abstracts/bios will be posted as they are finalized.
“Search and Browse Interfaces and Shakespearean Bibliography”
Heidi Craig, Texas A&M
Search and browse interfaces are the conventional portals to digital bibliographies. Like many terms borrowed from the physical realm and repurposed for digital spaces, “browsing” and “searching” simultaneously carry and transcend their earlier resonances. For example, “to browse” originally referred to the leisurely or preparatory consumption of food; “browse” and its cognates appears throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre, each time associated with consumption. In the nineteenth century, browsing came to refer to the casual examination of books, shelves and stacks. In online contexts, browsing retains its leisurely resonances, but has largely shed its associations with consumption. The term’s historical ties to print culture makes “browsing” simultaneously useful and frustratingly ineffective for describing research activities in digital spaces. In most cases, “to browse” implies a directionless, anticipatory activity, often contrasted with a more directed or rigorous one, namely “searching,” in bibliographical contexts. And although the image of the “browsing scholar” risks caricaturing the daily habits of a seemingly idle academic, the serendipity of the stacks has produced monumental discoveries. In Shakespeare studies, arguably the most capacious field in English literary studies with some of the largest and longest-standing bibliographical resources, browsing and searching have a special significance. In this paper, which derives from a larger project on which I am working with Prof. Laura Estill (Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University and co-editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography), I consider how research interfaces in print and online have historically shaped and continue to transform bibliographical approaches to Shakespeare.
“Longman and the Microeconomics of Fiction Publishing, 1794–1836”
Michael VanHoose, University of Virginia
On average, the retail prices of British novels tripled from 1790–1836. By narrowing the socio-economic spectrum of potential novel-buyers, rising prices deepened the genre’s reliance on commercial and associational subscription libraries. Yet the market forces motivating this trend have received scant attention, even as bibliographers such as Peter Garside and Jan Fergus have deepened the stock of primary evidence available on the genre’s publishing and reception history. To help rectify the widening historiographical gap, I analyze accounting data kept by leading London publisher T.N. Longman III. Detailed records of production costs survive for 170 of Longman’s novels published 1794–1836; for at least 90 of these, records also survive of sales revenues and profits (or losses). By analyzing the ledgers statistically, I argue against the prevailing view among book historians that Longman and his contemporaries raised prices principally to offset rising production costs. Indeed, Longman’s costs remained remarkably steady across the period. Rather, Longman raised prices (1) to fatten profits and (2) to mitigate risk, ensuring that even relatively unsuccessful novels recouped on his investment. Because Longman’s strategy relied on the assurance that many buyers would put up with exorbitant price hikes, the ledgers testify that demand for fiction was rising meteorically during the Romantic period. Longman—and with him most other fiction publishers—responded to the genre’s thickening distribution networks not by printing novels in larger editions, but by bidding up prices and keeping supply artificially low. Perversely, I argue, the Romantic novel’s popularity thus begat its exclusivity.
“Biblio-Making and the Future of the Book”
Kevin M. O’Sullivan, Texas A&M
In the last decade, widespread access to technologies and processes such as 3D scanning, computer-aided design, rapid fabrication, and microcircuitry, have opened new avenues to the study of the physical book. The increased activity of book historians in digital spaces has greatly enhanced our knowledge in this area through engagement with holistic 3D digitization and the recovery of historical tools and processes used in book production. In a similar way, these so-called maker technologies have found productive applications in the formation of arguments toward possible futures for the book -- what a book can do; what it could mean. This paper will analyze recent activities of speculative book production as part of the broader bibliographical maker movement, an outgrowth of practice-based research and instruction related to the history of the book in conjunction with the proliferation of artists’ books in the late twentieth century. As I will demonstrate, in the same moment when cultural critics and techno-evangelists were forecasting the “death of the book,” numerous scholars and artists were inspired to explore the possibilities of the book’s physical form as a venue for meaning-making and argumentation. Such biblio-maker activities made possible through the widespread adoption of personal computing and analogous technological advancements do not signal the book’s death-knell, but rather forecast new opportunities for practice-based critical inquiry related to both the history and possible futures of the book.
History of the Panel
The South Central conference is the only regional conference that maintains a Bibliography+ panel
There are 6 regional conferences in the Modern Language Association. But although the national conference hosts Bibliography-related sessions each year (in 2021’s Toronto conference, there are 2 panels that promise to be engaging; see here and here), the South Central conference is the only regional conference that maintains a Bibliography+ panel.
This panel launched in 1976 as a special interest group for “Bibliography and Textual Criticism.” Ernest W. Sullivan II of Texas Tech University proposed the group for the 1976 convention of the South Central Modern Language Association; ten additional scholars signed Sullivan’s petition. The SCMLA’s governing body granted unanimous approval, and the panel has stood ever since. For the 2020 convention, we expanded the panel’s name to be “Bibliography, Publishing Studies, and Textual Criticism,” in an attempt to better reflect the breadth of our work.
In the early years of the SCMLA, a subsequent issue of the South Central Bulletin would publish an annual conference program summary. The very first issue of the South Central Bulletin, published in December 1940, declares “First Meeting Successful,” documents the numbers involved (212 registrations, 47 papers, etc.), and expresses the “interest and keen satisfaction so widely evident among the membership of the new organization.” The author concludes by reporting “the oft-repeated comment on the large number of young people who had come to the meeting.”
The South Central Bulletin published its last issue in 1983, and in 1984, the South Central Review became the official journal of the SCMLA, publishing “a stimulating mix of interdisciplinary scholarly articles, essays, interviews, and opinion pieces.” As a traditional journal, the Review did not publish the conference programs. For our purposes, the transition means we have paper titles for the sessions of our panel from 1976-1983; records from more recent years reside with the panelists and those holding print conference programs.
From reviewing those materials, I can tell you that for more than 40 years, bibliography and textual scholars have been presenting us with both theoretical and practical arguments about curating texts and with lively case studies in works including Fahrenheit 451 (1980 conference), Jack London’s letters and poems by John Donne (1984 conference), all the way to 2018’s presentations on Erma Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat, selected Bengali Dalit autobiographies, and the New Orleans-based literary magazine, The Double Dealer, and 2019’s papers on John Faulkner’s corresponding with his publishers, Walt Whitman’s forms and formats in Leaves of Grass, and the custodial history of selected Somerville and Ross manuscripts. In other words, we’ve seen a lot of vital range since this panel first launched in 1976.
But if I may be frank, at recent conferences, we have been missing the turnout of young people reported at the 1940 event, and we are in need of emerging scholars, whose minds will carry this work forward.
Excerpted from “First Meeting Successful,” South Central Bulletin 1.1 (1940).
We are in need of emerging scholars, whose minds will carry this work forward.
Contact us
Please send your email address, and if you feel like it, a brief note about why you’re interested in connecting with this group, and we’ll send you updates about this panel before and after the SCMLA 2021 conference, including invitations for at least one dedicated social event (dinner or coffee or whatever else we decide to do—may be physical or virtual, as needed by those who sign up) during the conference time.