Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books

by Jason Camlot (Editor), Jeffrey Weingarten (Editor)

Overview

Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to public libraries.

Contributors explore libraries at particular moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes Alberto Manguel’s account of the Library of Alexandria as well as chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson, Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration, dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and public spaces.

Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical poetics of the personal library within its extended social, aesthetic and cultural contexts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771125680
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	07/19/2022
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jason Camlot is Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University. Recent books include Phonopoetics (Stanford, 2019), CanLit Across Media (MQUP, 2019) and Vlarf (MQUP 2021). He is director of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb research partnership that focuses on literary audio collections.

J.A. Weingarten is a Professor in the School of Language and Liberal Studies at Fanshawe College. He is also the author of Sharing the Past (UTP, 2019), as well as more than three dozen articles, book reviews, and papers on Canadian arts and culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Private, Public and Personal Libraries In Situ and In Circulation – Jason Camlot

Part I: Private Libraries Made Public

1. In Memory of Alexandria – Alberto Manguel

2. William Osler and the Collecting of the Middle Ages – Anna Dysert

3. "A Gift to the Nation Worth While”: The Library of William Lyon Mackenzie King – Meaghan Scanlon

4. Personal Libraries of the State – Bart Vautour

5. Remaindering the Difference: Book Collections of Radical Protest Libraries – Sherrin Frances

6. Serious House: On the Future of Library Print Collections – Andrew Stauffer

Part II: The Personal Library as a Field of Interpretation

7. Virginia Woolf’s Poetry Library – Emily Kopley

8. Unpacking Duncan’s Books: Remarks on the Personal Library of Robert Duncan – James Maynard

9. Her Books Filed for Divorce: Embeddedness and the Question of Belonging in Relation to Sheila and Wilfred Watson’s Personal Library – Linda Morra

10. Al Purdy’s Lives and Libraries: Speculations on Poetry and Biography – Nicholas Bradley

11. jwcurry’s Room 3o2 Books: The Small Press Bookstore as Library and Archive – Cameron Anstee

Conclusion: "In My End Is My Beginning": The Library as Heraclitean Archive—Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten

CONTRIBUTORS

Jason Camlot (Concordia University) – Montreal, QC, Canada

Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten (Fanshawe College) – Toronto, ON, Canada

Alberto Manguel (former Director of the National Library of Argentina) – Bueonos Aires, Argentina, and Ottawa, ON, Canada

Anna Dysert (McGIll University) – Montreal, QC, Canada

Meaghan Scanlon (Library and Archives Canada) – Ottawa, ON, Canada

Bart Vautour (Dalhousie University) – Halifax, NS, Canada

Sherrin Frances (Saginaw Valley State University) – UniversityCenter, MI, USA

Andrew Stauffer (University of Virginia) – Charolottesville, VA, USA

Emily Kopley (Concordia University) – Montreal, QC, Canada

James Maynard (SUNY, Buffalo) – Buffalo, NY, USA

Linda Morra (Bishop’s University) – Montreal, QC, Canada

Nicholas Bradley (University of Victoria) – Victorian, BC, Canada

Cameron Anstee (Independent Scholar) – Ottawa, ON, Canada

Editorial Reviews

Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is a seminal, informative, and fascinating work of collective scholarship that will be of immense relevance and interest to authors, publishers, and bibliophiles with respect to the history, diversity, and continuing relevance of libraries. — Midwest Book Review

For archive rats, librarians, and deep-dive historical lit nerds, Unpacking the Personal Library offers a prismatic lens on how libraries speak. — Emily Raine, Montreal Review of Books

Unpacking the Personal Library is a beautiful edition of sharp academic essays on the intricacies of owning books. — The Literary Review of Canada

From the Publisher

At a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the wholesale migration of the academic world online, and an urgent re-think of how teaching, learning and research are conducted, this book's enthusiastic interrogation of issues around the value and purpose of libraries, and of the nature of humanities research conducted within them, is timely. It is fitting in 2022 to be thinking about these things, and this book offers an interesting, stimulating and encouragingly positive answer to the question, “Why libraries?”

Alice Crawford