On 17 March 2012, we celebrate twenty years of SHARP-L, our discussion group.  Patrick Leary, who has managed SHARP-L since its beginning, reports:

Twenty years of SHARP-L.  It’s a little hard to believe.  But there they are, in the archives, all 23,000 messages (just about) that have been posted since the very first announcement went out on St Patrick’s Day, 1992.  Today I’ve been browsing through those archives at random, remembering this and that.  The occasional absurdities, for instance, like the thread about prison libraries whose Subject line a typo transformed into the memorable, “BOOKS BEHIND BRAS.” Or the eminent historian who complained in a private email that another eminent historian (and listmember) was “anal retentive” – and then promptly sent the email by mistake to everyone on the list.

But of course the meat-and-potatoes of the list, percolating beneath the weekly flurry of announcements, are the constant queries, responses, and discussions, and to browse through these is to be reminded how deep and wide our field can be, spanning all places and periods.  Whether arguing about Eisenstein or trading examples of paratexts or explaining the arcana of bibliographic description or sharing ideas about literacy rates or book prizes or digitization schemes or Oprah’s Book Club, SHARP-L members have engaged one another week after week with courtesy and passion and deep erudition.

I couldn’t have envisioned such a long-running tangle of conversational threads twenty years ago, when the idea for SHARP-L first occurred to me.  The previous summer, at a wonderful conference in Santa Cruz on a theme in which I was passionately interested – the 19th-century publishing world – I’d attended a meeting about a proposal to start a new scholarly group to be called “SHARP.”  The organizers, Jonathan Rose and Simon Eliot, were eloquent, and I left Santa Cruz determined to help them get this idea off the ground.

The problem that SHARP was meant to solve was isolation. Too many of us who were exploring “the history of the book” were utterly out of touch with one another, stranded in departments with colleagues out of sympathy with what we were trying to do, or struggling to work outside of the academic world altogether. I had just come back to school to work on a PhD after years of pursuing my scholarly interests alone, so I knew a thing or two about isolation and how discouraging it could be.

We needed to build a new community, a place to share ideas across the traditional disciplinary divisions.  For a couple of years I’d been keeping in touch, by this new thing called “email,” with my former college roommate, Jeremy Butler, who was now teaching at the University of Alabama.  We had both played around with Usenet and other “bulletin board” kinds of sites, but that fall of 1991, Jeremy told me about his experiments with some software called “Listserv” that used email distribution itself to exchange messages within a pre-defined group.  He had started a “list” for scholars of television and film, and it seemed to be filling a real need.  With some trepidation, I decided to try to set up the same kind of thing for SHARP.  Luckily, it turned out that my campus at Indiana University was one of the most thoroughly “wired” campuses in the world, with all the tech support a neophyte would need – and, boy, did I need it.  The work was absurdly time-consuming and labor-intensive at first, but after a few years, as the software improved and I got a little more adept at managing things, the list became such a familiar part of every working day that I rarely begrudged the time it took.

I often think of the wonderful experiences and the abiding friendships that SHARP and SHARP-L have brought me. Looking back to the archive of messages for that first month, I’m most struck by the names of contributors who would go on to become familiar and welcome presences on SHARP-L for the next two decades, people like Germaine Warkentin and Terry Belanger and Charles Robinson, and of course the indefatigable Simon and Jonathan, too.  We’ve seen and heard from hundreds upon hundreds of our colleagues on the list over the years, and the list is old enough now that some SHARPists who started on SHARP-L as first-year grad students are now tenured professors, and still participating.  We’ve said goodbye on SHARP-L to a number of our book-history colleagues, as well, a distinguished roster that includes such familiar names as Philip Gaskell, Don McKenzie, William Fredeman, Michael Treadwell, Norman Feltes, Graham Rees, Peter Graham, Madeleine Stern, Kevin Sharpe, Harold Love, Matt Bruccoli, Katherine Pantzer, Robin Alston, and Trevor Howard-Hill. For a list like SHARP-L is not like a newsletter, or a bulletin board, or a blog.  It is, at its best, an active community of kindred spirits, and the rituals that have governed the give-and-take on the list, from announcements to pleas for help to advice on teaching to vigorous expressions of opinion, are part of what binds us all together.  I’m very proud and grateful to have been a part of that community.

Patrick Leary, one of SHARP's founders, has managed SHARP-L since 1992, maintained SHARP Web from 1994 to 2009, and has served the Society in various other capacities over the years. His The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London was published in 2010 by the British Library, and he is at work on a study of authorship in 19th-century London.

Edmund G C King writes the the latest in our series of blogs from the 'Landmarks in Book History' seminar series held by the Open University with the Insitute of English Studies:

Prof. David Finkelstein gave us a fascinating glimpse into some of the possible futures of the discipline of the history of the book.  In a talk entitled “Assessing Don McKenzie’s Legacy in the Digital Age: A Case Study,” Finkelstein speculated about what a “sociology of texts” might look like in the twenty-first century, an age in which the definition of “text” seems to be ever-expanding, due to the rise of online media. In the years since McKenzie’s untimely death in 1999, broadband internet - and the profusion of mobile devices that allow users to access it wherever and whenever they please - are making textuality ubiquitous across a range of physical and social spaces. What might a study of textual culture look like in a world where technology makes so many objects and surfaces into potential platforms for the projection or embodiment of texts?

As Finkelstein noted, bibliographers and book historians have been cautious in their approach to new media. Indeed, for some, new media have seemed positively menacing: agents that threaten the very existence of traditional print culture by undermining the physical medium that has traditionally contained it. Yet, this merely reproduces an older “threat narrative,” in which the book (and the act of reading itself) is imperilled by technological change. In this version of the narrative, computers, the internet, and ebooks occupy the roles that film, radio, and television played in previous iterations of it. Finkelstein mentioned one further reason why academic book historians in general might be overly invested in books. Due to current funding regimes such as the UK's Research Assessment Exercise and now Research Excellence Framework, the measurement of academic value is very much tied up with the monograph itself. There are extrinsic - and not always edifying - reasons for our failure to “let go” of the codex.

However, perhaps the main reason why new media still seem more ephemeral and transient than the book is because of the apparent immateriality of the web and the virtual spaces it inhabits. One can’t pick up and “touch” the internet in the same way one can a book, and the forensics of webpages seem more arcane than the forensics of book production practised by physical bibliographers. Despite the interventions of scholars such as Matt G Kirschenbaum, this kind of work still seems ancillary to the discipline of book history—something that “other people” (the young; media studies theorists; computing historians) might want to do. Yet, D. F. McKenzie knew full well that we needed to expand our definition of “textuality” to encompass image and sound as well as print. These were prescient ideas, and ones that are very useful to us as practitioners of book history in an increasingly digital world. Perhaps, in keeping with McKenzie’s vision, Finkelstein suggested that we could expand the idea of textuality to embrace the materiality of the idea, or “meme” (to borrow a term from Dawkins), as exemplified in this case by the idea of the “film concept.”

Helen Chambers, postgraduate student in the Book History Research Group at the Open University, UK provides our latest blog from the Landmarks in the History of the Book series:

As part of the Open University/Institute of English Studies Book History seminar series ‘Landmarks in the History of the Book: the Future of the Discipline’ at Senate House, London, Dr Susan Pickford, Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Paris 13 gave, on 8 February 2012, a thought-provoking and wide-ranging paper exploring the relationship between international book history and translation studies.

By selecting as her starting point Pascale Casanova’s provocative book, La république mondiale des lettres (Seuil, 1999), trans. M.B.DeBevoise as The World Republic of Letters (Harvard, 2002), Dr Pickford not only inserted a ‘French accent’ into the seminar series, but provided the opportunity to consider a work which, while receiving high critical acclaim in translation, is rarely cited by book historians. Pickford pointed out that the mere existence in translation of this undeniably gallocentric work indicated interest in the further internationalization of book history. She gave us a succinct overview, focusing initially on Casanova’s world literary system, an interconnected hegemonic structure of central dominant and peripheral dominated cultural/language regions, where literary capital was, and still is, unevenly distributed; clearly echoing Fernand Braudel’s interconnected global economic systems.

In this world literary space, French originally predominated, supplanting Latin as a national literary language in the 16^th century, to be challenged later by the rise from folk culture roots of German as a literary language.  Pickford questioned the validity of the ‘single event’ model of French literary dominance, which Casanova attributes to the appearance, in 1594, of a specific text, Joachim du Bellay’s La deffence et Illustration de la langue françoyse. Pickford then moved to the more interesting second part of the book, to consider Casanova’s three-way division of writers from the margins: as rebels (‘révoltés’) such as  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, accepted at the centre but later moving away; as ‘assimilés’ such as Naipaul and Henri Michaux, fully embracing their respective dominant cultures; and as ‘révolutionnaires’, such as Ibsen, Joyce, Faulkner, Borges, who ‘overturned the barricades’ and changed the centre.

SHARP President Professor Leslie Howsam recently encouraged SHARPists to comment on her blog on Book History's Best Books. Now, the Open University, UK's regular Book History and Bibliography seminar, held at the Institute of English Studies, is hosting a seminar entitled 'Landmarks in Book History: The Future of the Discipline'.

The organiser of the series, Dr Shafquat Towheed of the Open University, reports on the first in the series, asking what book history and media history might learn from one another:

In a fascinating and wide-ranging talk given on 11 January 2012, Dr Karin Littau from the University of Essex suggested some of the ways in which book history could draw upon media history and vice versa. A comparative literature scholar with an interest in book history, critical theory, translation and film studies, Littau engaged Robert Darnton’s landmark essay, ‘First Steps towards the History of Reading’ (1986), in particular noting that over the last 25 years, Darnton’s championing of the material text had forced both reception studies and reader response criticism to engage with the history of reading. But how, Littau asked, might book history be studied in relation to the histories of other cultural modes and forms, with their own partially excavated material traces? How might book history and film history, for example, be studied comparatively?

Uncovering the parallel technological developments in production and the cultural shifts in consumption in other media (such as film and radio), Littau argued, can flesh out changes in the use and impact of books in a cross-media world. For example, did the rise of new media such as film and radio increase or decrease the speed of reading, or have an effect on what people read, and how often? Littau’s talk encouraged us to consider once again whether in the face of recorded sound and vision, reading accelerated in the first decades of the twentieth century. Glancing at the automatic reading experiments of Gertrude Stein and Leon Mendez Solomons, and the technologically enabled fantasy of Octave Uzanne and Albert Robida’s ‘La Fin des Livres’ (‘The End of Books’, 1894), Littau’s approach asked us to examine again the hidden byways in media history to freshly interrogate the history of the book and of reading practices. How might Robert Carlton Brown’s futurist manifesto of automated labour saving reading machines, The Readies (1930), for example, be used to examine anxieties about reading practices at the time of the rise of talking cinema?

Leslie Howsam, President of SHARP and University Professor, University of Windsor, Canada, writes:

What have been the most innovative monographs in the field of book history published in the past 20 years, since the foundation of SHARP in 1991?  The question arose a couple of months ago when I read, on Twitter, the feedback and controversy generated by History Today. Their editors celebrated the popular history magazine’s 30th anniversary by surveying readers and interviewing prominent historians about ‘the most important historian’ and ‘favourite works of history’ over the past 60 years.

SHARP had an anniversary of its own in 2011, and our society has even generated a list of potential ‘best books’, the record of winners of the SHARP De Long Book History Book Prize. But recent SHARP blog posts by Amadio Arboleda and Claire Squires show us that those awards were arrived at with difficulty, and some deserving works are bound to have been overlooked. Others will have emerged into prominence too late for the cycle of prize giving.

To start what I hope will be a vigorous discussion in the comments section below, I’ll put forward a book we discussed last semester in my own graduate class on the history of the book. I am a huge admirer of Isabel Hofmeyr’s The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (published in 2004 by Princeton University Press). It tells the story of the transnational circulation of John Bunyan’s 17th-century work, regarded by many as quintessentially English, but redefined in Hofmeyr’s hands as ineluctably African. She stresses translation, translatability and circulation, and her approach to some 80 translations is ‘guided by a method of keeping one’s eye on the book as a material object’.

That’s my vote for one of the most innovative monographs of the past two decades. What’s yours?