In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning, as libraries increasingly reconfigure access to public-domain texts via digital repositories such as Google Books. Even libraries with strong commitments to their print collections are clearing out the duplicates, assuming that circulating copies of any given nineteenth-century edition are essentially identical to one another. When you look closely, however, you see that they are not.
Many nineteenth-century books were donated by alumni or their families decades ago, and many of them bear traces left behind by the people who first owned and used them. In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer adopts what he calls "guided serendipity" as a tactic in pursuit of two goals: first, to read nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left in their books and, second, to defend the value of keeping the physical volumes on the shelves. Finding in such books of poetry the inscriptions, annotations, and insertions made by their original owners, and using them as exemplary case studies, Stauffer shows how the physical, historical book enables a modern reader to encounter poetry through the eyes of someone for whom it was personal.

In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer reads nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left behind in their books and defends the value of the physical, circulating collections of nineteenth-century volumes in academic libraries.

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

Reviews
"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's lively monograph makes distinctive interventions in several ongoing debates, primarily the recuperation of affect in criticism and editing; the turn to material culture and the single copy, in the context of distant reading; and the future of the academic library. Its unflagging energy supports its controversial topicality. If rooted in bibliography, the culture of libraries, and the history and process of nineteenth-century reading, it also offers subtle exegesis of specific poems alongside the traditions and analogies they invoke in Stauffer's well-stocked memory and critical erudition." * 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 offers a transformative methodology for the study of nineteenth-century poetry and book culture. It is a rare combination: a monograph that is beautifully written, thoughtfully argued, and genuinely affecting...By reanimating the experience of reading poetry as a lived phenomenon through the study of individual copies of books and recovering the traces of emotion that are embedded in them, we encounter multiple remnants of the human past that are recuperable if we only care to look. And through the force of Stauffer's powerful example, we do care to look." * European Romantic Review *
"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 *


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



Book Information
ISBN 9780812252682
Author Andrew M. Stauffer
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press
Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press