Abstract
In early 2007 there was an art exhibition in Stockholm by Swedish artist Kajsa Dahlberg,1 entitled A Room of One’s Own/A Thousand Libraries.2The exhibition included a printed edition of a quite peculiar book the artist had composed. The book and the exhibition triggered some thoughts about book studies and the role of the reader, about bibliography and textual studies, and about marginalia and other kinds of reader interaction in books. But let us begin from the beginning — here is the background of the exhibition and the book.
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Notes and references
Book historian Per S. Ridderstad has suggested that the term ‘base document’, as an alternative to the ‘copy-text’ (or ‘base-text’) of textual criticism, emphasizes not only the text of a document, but also refers to the entire material document as potentially significant for the meaning of the text. The focus of this essay on marginalia arguably justifies the use of the term. See Ridderstad, ‘Hur dokumenteras ett dokument? Om kravspecifikationer för materiell bibliografi och immateriell textkritik’, in Varianter och bibliografisk beskrivning, ed. Pia Forssell and Rainer Knapas (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2003), pp. 113–30 (p. 127 ).
Kajsa Dahlberg, Ett eget rum / Tusen bibliotek (Malmö: The Artist, 2006. Printed in Värnamo by Fälth & Hässler, Pagination: [6], 128, [1]). Available in i.a. the National Library in Stockholm, where its call number is Sv2006 10859.
Admittedly, there are multiple editions of some ‘livres d’artiste’ but the unique hand-made object is the norm. See Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary 1995 ). Furthermore, Dahlberg’s book differs somewhat from other artist’s books in the sense that the artist herself takes a step back in the final product, as it were, and lifts the reader evidence to the foreground.
The Coleridge marginalia were published in five volumes as: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Walley and H. J. Jackson, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 12 vols (Routledge & Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXXV, 1980 ), I–V.
See also Mario di Gregorio, Charles Darwin’s Marginalia (New York, Garland, 1990)
Mark Nixon and Dirk van Hulle, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
From 2006, the Department of English at Boise State University has been working on Melville’s marginalia, which is available online: Melville’s Marginalia Online, ed. Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon, http://www.boisestate.edu/melville/[accessed 24 January 2010]. Information about ongoing work on Valéry’s marginalia is available at http://www.paulvalery.org/[accessed 24 January 2010].
Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus ( London: William Heinemann, 2004 ).
For example, Matthew Driscoll, ‘Postcards from the edge: an overview of marginalia in Icelandic manuscripts’, Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, 2–3 (2004), 21–36;
Jonas Carlquist, ‘Medieval manuscripts, hypertext and reading: visions of digital editions’Literary and Linguistic Computing 1 (2004), 105–18.
Heather Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
Heather Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005 ).
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own ( London: Hogarth Press, 1929 ).
By, for example, Anne Fadiman, Exlibris: Confessions of a Common Reader (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998 ).
Stephen Colclough, ‘Readers: books and biography’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 50–62 (53 f.).
See also the discussion by Jonathan Rose in his ‘Rereading the English common reader’, in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 424–39.
Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1993 ).
See, however, Meg Meiman, ‘The anonymous reader: marginalia in library books’, talk at the 2005 conference Material Cultures and the Creation of Knowledge, arranged by Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh, and R. C. Alston, Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library ( London: British Library, 1994 ).
Anthony Grafton, ‘Is the history of reading a marginal enterprise? Guillaume Budé and his books’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 91 (1997), 139–57.
Catherine C. Marshall, ‘Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation’, in Proceedings of Hypertext ’88 (New York: ACM Press, 1997), pp. 40–9. This kind of research is to some degree performed in the fields of English and cognition studies as well.
See, for example, J. Wesley Miller, ‘Functional underlining: an essay in bibliography, criticism, and pedagogy’, College English, 41 (1980), 575–8
Sarah E. Peterson, ‘The cognitive effect of underlining as a study technique’, Reading Research and Instruction, 32 (1992), 49–56.
See, for example, Jerome McGann, ‘The socialization of texts’, in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002 ), pp. 39–46;
Donald F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts ( London: The British Library, 1986 );
Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Typically, McGann sees text as: ‘an interactive locus of complex feedback operations. . . . We must attend to textual materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in “poetry”: to typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to “poetry” or “the text as such”.’
Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 ), p. 13.
Perhaps the best overview of scholarly editing and its various forms is provided by G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘The varieties of scholarly editing’, in Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. David C. Greetham ( New York: MLA, 1995 ), pp. 9–32.
Most notably, perhaps, in her Writing Machines ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002 ).
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Dahlström, M. (2011). A Book of One’s Own: Examples of Library Book Marginalia. In: Crone, R., Towheed, S. (eds) The History of Reading, Volume 3. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316737_8
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