The Sixteenth International Conference on Books, Publishing & Libraries

Abstract

The history of the archive is a history of desire: the collector’s desire to possess, the archivist’s to preserve, and the reader’s desire to study. It is also a history of contact, of turning pages and encountering ideas by means of those “devices,” once exclusively analog, now sometimes digital, through which reading takes place (in several senses). For those engaged in archival work, such points of contact have traditionally meant being there, where the books and manuscripts are. There, a storied provenance or striking inscription materializes a long-lost presence, sustaining reading not only of the book’s original content but of others’ readings of it. Yet within the archive, the physical act of reading may limit its own sustainability. Such limits reveal a tension between the researcher’s need for access and the vulnerability of the material artifacts upon which archival work depends. This paper explores these issues as they emerged in my work with an 1832 copy of “The Dramatic works of William Shakespeare” mutually annotated by George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. Taking place over two summers at The Folger Shakespeare Library, that work is marked by two very different experiences of the book once digitization was completed and the copy made restricted due to the vulnerability of Eliot’s penciled annotations. The consequences of “re-placing” the physical book with its digital image are the focus of this paper’s analysis of those issues of sustainability and effacement through which archival research is being redefined in the twenty-first century.