Awards

• Winner of Winner of the Marilyn Gaull Book Award, granted by the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association 2021 (United States)

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9780812252682

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Reviews

This is a beautiful, elegant work: an intimate journey into the poetry of nineteenth-century readers' lives and books and an eloquent defense of libraries and the humanities. -Michael C. Cohen, author of The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America

Book Traces is an extraordinary work of scholarship-astute, humane, and methodologically innovative. But its greatest contribution might be in warning scholars of nineteenth-century literature that we should act before we lose a vast, largely unstudied archive of nonrare editions full of utterly unique observations by nineteenth-century readers. * Modern Philology * What do we hope to learn from our textual artifacts? Examining their textuality in conjunction with their materiality, we scour them for signs they were and were not designed to reveal about their ideation, composition, publication, reproduction, remediation, distribution, circulation, reception and even their destruction...It is refreshing to read a scholarly monograph in which all of that - love, hope, devotion - is right up front, coupled unapologetically with meticulous and imaginative bibliographic scholarship...Stauffer has done his job, much more than his job, advocating passionately and knowledgeably for the archive he cares about as a scholar of nineteenth-century literature and textual materiality. * Textual Cultures * This is a beautiful, elegant work: an intimate journey into the poetry of nineteenth-century readers' lives and books and an eloquent defense of libraries and the humanities. * Michael C. Cohen, author of <i>The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America</i> * Book Traces is a rallying call to scholars to explore nineteenth-century editions in circulating collections, but it works more broadly as a reminder that increasing use of digitised materials comes at a cost. Although Stauffer's rich book makes a solid case forthepresentvalueofthesecollections,his argument for preserving 'bibliodiversity' is grounded in protecting what we have yet to find. * British Association for Victorian Studies * Andrew Stauffer focuses on the smallest traces of reader response-pencil marks left in the margins, brackets inked around significant words, leaves and flowers pressed between pages-to write a book about some of the biggest issues facing libraries and the study of historical literary cultures today...Stauffer's study not only points to new ways of engaging with historical readers and reading practices; it also encourages us to rethink and reaffirm the value of physical library collections in a digital age. * Library & Information History *

Book Traces is an extraordinary work of scholarship-astute, humane, and methodologically innovative. But its greatest contribution might be in warning scholars of nineteenth-century literature that we should act before we lose a vast, largely unstudied archive of nonrare editions full of utterly unique observations by nineteenth-century readers. * Modern Philology * What do we hope to learn from our textual artifacts? Examining their textuality in conjunction with their materiality, we scour them for signs they were and were not designed to reveal about their ideation, composition, publication, reproduction, remediation, distribution, circulation, reception and even their destruction...It is refreshing to read a scholarly monograph in which all of that - love, hope, devotion - is right up front, coupled unapologetically with meticulous and imaginative bibliographic scholarship...Stauffer has done his job, much more than his job, advocating passionately and knowledgeably for the archive he cares about as a scholar of nineteenth-century literature and textual materiality. * Textual Cultures * Book Traces is a rallying call to scholars to explore nineteenth-century editions in circulating collections, but it works more broadly as a reminder that increasing use of digitised materials comes at a cost. Although Stauffer's rich book makes a solid case forthepresentvalueofthesecollections,his argument for preserving 'bibliodiversity' is grounded in protecting what we have yet to find. * British Association for Victorian Studies * Andrew Stauffer focuses on the smallest traces of reader response-pencil marks left in the margins, brackets inked around significant words, leaves and flowers pressed between pages-to write a book about some of the biggest issues facing libraries and the study of historical literary cultures today...Stauffer's study not only points to new ways of engaging with historical readers and reading practices; it also encourages us to rethink and reaffirm the value of physical library collections in a digital age. * Library & Information History * This is a beautiful, elegant work: an intimate journey into the poetry of nineteenth-century readers' lives and books and an eloquent defense of libraries and the humanities. * Michael C. Cohen, author of <i>The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America</i> *

Author Information

Andrew M. Stauffer is Associate Professor of English at University of Virginia.

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