Critical Context
Near the close of Walter Benjamin's 1931 talk, "Unpacking my Library," he muses, "I put my hands on two volumes bound in faded boards which, strictly speaking, do not belong in a book case at all: two albums with stick-in pictures which my mother pasted in as a child and which I inherited. [...] There is no living library that does not harbor a number of booklike creations from fringe areas" (66). After recounting years spent hunting down rare volumes, Benjamin's point on "booklike creations from fringe areas" exists in contrast not only to his anecdotes, but the history of book collecting. In consideration of rare book collecting up to our contemporary moment, this project, "A Library of One's Own" makes possible a "living library" that treats "booklike creations" as central, rather than not belonging, to a collection.
The practice of rare book collecting has been restricted to individuals of certain financial means, classes, and genders. First, book collectors are most readily considered male. Walter Benjamin writes, “What I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection” (59). Not only just "his," but a singular and authoritative him. This gendered assumption did not begin with Benjamin. Phillip Connell identifies the 1812 Roxburghe library sale "as the central, defining moment in what was known as the 'bibliomania,' a passion for the acquisition and display of books, and in particular old books, that captivated some of the very wealthiest men in Romantic Britain" (25). These captivated men—whose self-proclaimed "mania" seemingly did not present any challenge to the discernment necessary to collect well—were "book dealers, wealthy private collectors, and curious but impecunious men of letters" (24). Book collecting was not only just for "men," but only for "some of the very wealthiest" among them. While Benjamin shared, "The acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money or expert knowledge alone," they are still rhetorically positioned together (63). Furthermore, Jennifer Ciro writes how the extensive library of a noble estate like the Roxburghe's was capable of "projecting the owner's image" of heightened power and cultural access to others, even if the books' titles were fake and pages uncut (89). Like in Jay Gatsby's fictional library nearly a century later, collections of books are curated for the messaging of personal position.
The small assortment of individuals capable of collecting historically is compounded by the constraints of what the 'rare' of 'rare books' signifies. David Nathanson shares, "The traditional definition of a rare book is any book which has an enhanced value because the demand for the book exceeds the supply, usually because of its importance, scarcity, age, condition, physical and aesthetic properties, association, or subject matter." The value of a rare book relies not simply on its uniqueness, but relative supply. To Connell, book collectors are responsible for accounting for and then disseminating textual and material knowledge along with the capital, labor, and communicative and transportive networks that went into their production and sale.
Rather than strictly focusing on collections as a matter of knowledge, social capital, or aesthetics, Susan Stewart remarks that, "Significantly, the collection marks the space of nexus for all narratives, the place where history is transformed into space, into property" (xii). Like the messaging created even through the partially falsified rare book collections of grand estates, narratives are not limited to the text printed on pages in book collections. Contexts drive collections, yet in these spaces where "history is transformed into space," the histories of those who interacted with or owned books before the collector in question is often muted. Susan Stewart points to an "impulse to remove objects from their contexts of origin and production and to replace those contexts with the context of the collection" that is to the detriment of both the material and the unique story of the object, which are ostensibly major reasons a collector begins collecting in the first place (156).
Indicating a shift toward a greater appreciation of original contexts, in her 2019 talk "Beyond Brontë: The Essential Act of Collecting Books by Women," writer and proprietor of The Second Shelf rare book shop AN Devers noted, "women tend not to like the car collector, pristine editions. We actually like inscriptions." This preference, one previously not privileged in the rare book trade, is more than an opportunity to enjoy and learn from dedications of marginalia. This shift extends the idea of physical notations to noted accounts that live outside of the material book even while they are closely sourced in it. These stories can be collected and valued alongside the traditional "points" of value sought after by rare book collectors.
Still, entrenched associations of power and identity are not easily separated from the practice of book collecting. Jennifer Kim profiled the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in 2006. The article began with the premise that "the collection of books for pleasure or for patronage has always been within a small group of people -- historically, the elite who valued, collected and then donated books to libraries and institutions, says fair committee chairman Gordon Hollis." Kim observed that young female collectors are still "a rarity in the rare-book community and AN Devers said that "whole [rare book] scene was a very male environment," yet Diane Mehta's 2018 “The Rare Women in the Rare-Book Trade" article points to this disruption. The fact that I even first read the piece online affirms Gordon Hollis's optimistic projection of rare books, where "It's going to end up in a very new, exciting phase where younger people start to reshape our thinking of culture by collecting books that reflect new demographics and new geographies. The Internet has made the world so small. It seems rather silly for young people to collect in traditional ways." In step with Hollis's broadly inclusive hope for "young people," while I have found accounts of the gendered mode of collecting invaluable to this project, this capstone is not constrained to women’s collecting practices. Rather than presenting this new mode of collecting in essentialist terms as 'feminine,' I build on the feminist labor of individuals, primarily women in academia and the book trade to realize rare book collecting as broadly relevant and accessible.
The Internet's affordance of broad ease of access over that of a physical rare book collection made a website an ideal platform for this new sort of rare book library. In 2013, Matthew James Vechinksi presented Benjamin's theory of book collecting as not only compatible with a digital library collection, but "a useful starting point for comparing the virtual library to the physical collection" (18). This translates to the digital, where information about experiences are collected, and manifested, through representative coding. There are also opportunities to lean on ways digital systems of grouping and ordering take cues from material collections. For instance, online blog tags function like analog library card catalogs. Just as this material form of data keeping is converted to digital data while maintaining its role in organizing other information for users, a born-digital rare book collection—as with the new implications of "rare" redefines materiality while still honoring physical materiality. Books in a "Library of One's Own" are often described and prized for particular material elements contributors share about via photos and written descriptions, but they are not subject to the typical constraints facing a physical collection. No admission charges, exhibition schedules, or mass physical storage concerns here. A website facilitates the necessary reconfiguration that creates a more expansive and useable digital, yet still material, rare book collection.
One way rare books might better meet the contemporary moment—let alone the future—is through a shift of "the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition" away from the individual collector, alone in their library, to one of collaboration that celebrates individual books and collections by positioning them alongside those of others (Benjamin 60). Benjamin fears the devaluation of the individual figure of the collector because he desires a space where personal history can become history. Yet there are ways personal histories of books can be collected without the alienation from means and "origins and contexts of production" that Stewart pointed out (156). In "Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom," Anna Tsing recounts the story of a mushroom enthusiast, Andy Moore. Moore became "a caretaker for a large private forest"—a curator in the truest sense—and undertook a close study of matsutake mushrooms. Rather than limiting his collected discoveries to books and coauthored papers, he created a website of his findings that "was not, however, designed to be Moore's personal blog; instead, he facilitated the making and exchange of knowledge" (197). Contexts of production were not only returned to but expanded beyond the individual figure of the collector through expansive recollection. Digital collection positioned Moore, as curator, to influence the scope of the collection in terms of individual posts from mushroom enthusiasts while valuing dynamic community exchange in the way that a published book would not. Just as I hope this library, which I can update and users can share from or submit to with the click of a button, will facilitate connection and learning to (and from) books in a way that traditional private collections and even public libraries do not. A collector can also be a curator, a caretaker.
This practice offers up a means of opening up the private, material access to book collections. This project's reconceived ideation of a rare book collection follows in the spirit of the work of those women in rare books profiled by Mehta. Online, the meaning-making of private book collections intermingles with the access and input of the public in a way Benjamin could not have imagined in 1931. While Benjamin believed his family inheritance of "two volumes bound in faded boards which, strictly speaking, do not belong in a bookcase at all," the potential to privilege these unbelonging books by featuring them on a new sort of shelf is delightful.
These personal book stories gathered in a collection are the rare books. If anything, they are more rare—more scare and special—than even a limited print run of an edition of a print book. After all, Benjamin tended to emphasize scarcity as the whole story of a collected book (63). This collection showcases the scarcity of the experience of individual collectors. Benjamin posited that the "most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition passes over them" (60). In contrast, the "magic" of this collection's circle is in its accessibility, not in the fact it is locked away. In how "the final thrill" is not the "thrill of acquisition," because another encountering your book may be the one who "the thrill of acquisition passes over." It also does not shy away from preceding productive elements in the same way Benjamin's "magic" does.
In "A Library of One's Own," materialities of the book continue to matter in physical, traditional rare book collections, yet are currently excluded, indeed erased, in the digital, accessible forms that a bookseller like Gordon Hollis hoped will enable young people to change the field of rare books. While on the collection platform of Goodreads, one's reading of the text matters, yet the material form it was encountered on does not. When users write reviews or create shelves or flag books, they are writing about or concerned with reading the words on the page of said book. This project makes the opposite true. "A Library of One's Own" follows Leah Price's discursive "contortions attempting to distinguish 'text'—a string of words—from 'book' or 'book-object' : a physical thing" in featuring what is a personally valuable "book-object" to you (4). In this context, the privileged "text" is not the text of the book, but the text an individual might write to share about their book. In this rare book collection, the worth of your book is not determined by its financial value. Instead, it matters deeply if you read a book as the original manuscript, in a cheap paperback copy, in the tattered first edition owned and cherished by your great aunt, or if you checked out the book from the library. The rarity—the particular memories and wonder a book inspires in you individually deserves to be featured in the collective library.
American art collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) was highly interested in provenance, especially related to women rulers who were book collectors like her. Stewart Gardner's collecting practice indicates entrance into a book's rich history, but not necessarily the end of it. Dr. Anne-Marie Eze shared that Stewart Gardner wrote "Mine now" in a Venetian manuscript once owned and inscribed by John Ruskin. Deliberately expanding the meaning of scarcity to include inscriptions by anyone—not simply wealthy men, women, or public intellectuals—privileges the lives, the active, unique, and valuable collections of those traditionally unable to participate in, let alone drive, the rare book trade. Although Benjamin might consider these only "booklike creations from fringe areas," collecting books with these notes and marginalia as valuable alongside traditional "points" of value—like intact dust jackets or author signatures sought after by rare book collectors now grants enjoyment and learning from the personal histories of ownership expressed in writing in books (66). Chapter nineteen of Rebecca Rego Barry's Rare Books Uncovered features a "book with no financial value at all but tons of sentimental value" (100). In "A Library of One's Own," rarity is based more upon sentimental than financial value. Thus, the qualification of rare shifts from material points of condition and scarcity to an experiential, deeply personal notion of rarity.
Rare book collectors wield immense power in connecting and highlighting bodies of knowledge. Illuminating, but also limiting. As the identities of rare booksellers, collectors, and librarians increasingly more representative of the world, it is only right that not only the books prized as rare but the very designation of "rare" itself evolves with us. Why strive for alignment with a "pristine" (to quote Devers) set of points when the deeply imperfect, perfectly human connections and questions and histories are what make books rare to us anyway.
These stories become the collected materials and the point of invitation to a library in a new form. The collectibles transcend any idea of a dichotomy between private and public libraries by being dually ownable and loanable. This library honors and elevates the intermingled experience of reading a text and handling a particular material form in order to read that text. In this collection, the true point of rare books is personal. This is a "Library of One's Own."