The Early Modern Commons

What follows is a talk I gave (over zoom) on June 29, 2022, for the London Rare Book School. I’m deeply grateful to Elizabeth Savage for the invitation to speak—both for her original invitation to deliver this in person back in the summer of 2020...

Back in the beforetimes, I submitted a proposal to the Shakespeare Association of America to run a workshop in the planned spring 2021 annual meeting in Austin on “Teaching with Special Collections.” My hope was to do the same thing that drives...

One of my current projects has been thinking about what a feminist practice of bibliography looks like. As I’ve shared before, I struggled when writing my book to figure out how to build a feminist stance when I was focused on machines and processes...

Remember how once upon a time I used to find weird old printing things and get excited about them and then blog about them? That was fun. I’m going to try doing that again, only this time in newsletter form. The tl;dr version is that you can...

Today is the Global Climate Strike. I don’t know how anyone can look at the world around them and not be worried about how the climate is changing and how we are not taking action to prevent disaster. About a year and a half ago I started thinking...

Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly curious about how we might imagine and create feminist book history. And so I was thrilled when I saw that Valerie Wayne was leading a seminar at this year’s Shakespeare Association of America...

For the last couple of years, I’ve had a bit of an obsession with finding examples of early printed books that aren’t available as open-access digital facsimiles. Why have I been thinking about this? It started off with some frustration that...

Last weekend I attended a wonderful conference at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for the History of Digital and Print Culture, “BH and DH: Book History and Digital Humanities.” It was a great gathering of people who live at the...

Last August, Emma Smith’s The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio was published and I was and am delighted to have a piece in this one-stop-shopping introduction to F1. My contribution, to the surprise of no one, is on digitized...

A view of books on the shelves of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vault; detail of a photo by @pleasant_peasants (all rights reserved)Because I have a project coming up that will need lots of pictures of early printed books, I’ve been trying...

I’ve just come back from the annual conference for the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (more commonly known as RBMS, thank goodness, because that’s a mouthful). I was honored to be asked...

detail of armorial stamp (Folger 269- 362f)I’ve been thinking about the digital landscape of special collections recently (hi, RBMS16!) and while I have lots of thoughts on how I come across and use the digital incarnations of rare books and manuscript...

Greetings! If you are, like me, waiting for the big blizzard to come and bury us all, might you like something else to read? Or if you are far away from the panic and are sick of everyone talking about it, might you like something else to read? I have...

I thoroughly enjoyed “How To Decorate Your Dream Library” by Amy Collier for The Toast. But because I am me, I was made insane by the lack of captions identifying any of the libraries pictured, so I went ahead and worked my way through...

In the last few years I’ve started to keep track of what I’ve read. I don’t do anything fancy: I have a google doc and I write down the author and title of each book I’m reading and some quick notes on it, keeping track of the...

Look at this amazing map: 1837 Ōmi Kuni-ezu (Branner Earth Science Library & Map Collections, Stanford University) I’m not a Japanese scholar, so I’m not going to have a good explanation of this, but my understanding is that it’s...

beach photographer ca. 1890 (National Media Museum, via flickr commons) Some days you wake up and you see announcements of a new project to digitize a collection of primary source materials. Perhaps an archive that covers centuries of technological and...

the verso of John Starkey’s bookseller’s advertisement in the back of John Dancer’s translation of Tasso’s Aminta (London, 1660; Folger Shakespeare Library, T172) I have a lot of pictures of this book. I’ll write something...

I’ve written about digitizing Shakespeare’s First Folio before, looking at the interfaces of the many different copies out there. But I’m turning my attention to this again for my contribution on the subject for the in-progress Cambridge...

I just got back from a wonderful trip to Rare Book School to deliver a talk in their 2015 lecture series. It was the last week of their summer season in Charlottesville, the week when the Descriptive Bibliography course (aka “boot camp”) was...