In the 19th century, books were especially popular gifts — cheap enough to be owned by the middle class, but enough of an investment that people kept them for decades, then passed them down to the next generation or donated them to libraries. Increasingly, libraries must decide which of these books to clear out and digitize to make room for more. In the process, they risk losing the record of individual reader’s annotations and inscriptions. In Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (Bookshop|Amazon), University of Virginia associate professor of English Andrew Stauffer chronicles a project to uncover and catalogue the “shadow archive” of history hidden in such volumes. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A Shadow Library Found Added to Books”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. As long as there have been books, people have been writing in the margins.
You probably made notes yourself in a book agreeing with what the author said or maybe disputing it. Or maybe you personalized a book for someone with a gift inscription.
In the 19th century, books were even a kind of social media. They were especially popular as gifts because they were cheap enough now to be owned by the middle class, but they were enough of an investment that people hung on to them for their whole lives, and families tended to pass them down from one generation to the next. In fact, books were considered so precious that eventually many of them ended up being donated to libraries. But this means that increasingly libraries face the challenge of deciding which books to clear out and digitize to make room for more.
And there’s a really cool project that began at the University of Virginia using a cadre of researchers and volunteers to seek out what they call this shadow archive of history. This effort has now spread to other colleges and universities, and it’s described in the new book called Book Traces, 19th Century Readers and the Future of the Library. It’s by Andrew Stauffer, who’s an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia.
And I love this example. He describes a volume of poetry that they found, and it has a penciled inscription above one of the poems saying that it was read to a woman who died in childbirth. A short time before she died, the woman had asked her mother to read that poem to her, and a family member later noted that in pencil on the page above the poem. They even pasted the woman’s newspaper obit in the front of that anthology and attached a flower.
And Grant, it’s a touching window into both the role of poetry and the role of books in the lives of 19th century Americans. And there are lots of examples like that in the book. And it just, it makes you wonder what’s out there on the shelves just waiting to be discovered and what we’re losing in the process of what they call deaccessioning volumes.
Oh, I have so much to say about this.
Oh, good.
Well, the first thing is I spend a lot of time on archive.org researching the history of words because they have many scanned books, which are often deaccession books from libraries.
And you will often find that these books at one point were gifts from person A to person B. So there’ll be an inscription in the front, you know, something like to Bill on your birthday, many happy returns or something like that.
It’s usually fairly innocuous, but Bill owned this book and he had this and it was for his birthday and somebody thought it was for him.
And it’s just nice to see that this book had a history. Someone cared enough to buy it and to give it as a gift.
And that’s a history. That’s a story, right?
But in my own collection of books and my own used books that I’ve bought, I have found many things, including a receipt from the 1970s for a casino in Lebanon.
Wow.
Yeah, an adorable photo of a mother nursing a child. A letter. I bought a book of part of an estate sale for a lexicographer, well known in my industry.
And I found a letter that she’d written to another lexicographer about a third lexicographer in which she described him in unkind terms.
And apparently he was something of a rascal. Somebody’s story and somebody’s life is opened up to me when I find stuff in books.
Right.
This reminds me of when I was a little kid and I checked out of our church library a copy of Little Women.
And I got about halfway through and I hadn’t realized that someone had pressed four leaf clovers into the pages after the halfway point.
When I saw the first one, it just took my breath away. You know, I mean, imagine some little girl, she’s reading Little Women, and maybe she’s outdoors reading Little Women, and she’s also looking for four-leaf clovers.
It gave you a picture of a time and a place and a person, yeah.
Yeah, and a connection.
Yeah, it was the connection that took my breath away.
What’s the most curious thing that you found in a book? Share what you found with us so we can share it with the world.
And share your used book discoveries with us and email to words@waywordradio.org.
And if you’ve got pictures, we’d love to see them. Put them on Twitter @wayword.
