Week 48, AMA No.3: What is your favorite part of your work?
part three of the ask-me-anything series
This week’s question(s) comes from my first reader of this newsletter, my Grandma Phyllis, who asked, “What is your favorite part of your work?” I’m combining this with a question from one of my long-time besties, Al, who asked, “What is your dream job?”
I tell stories of two kinds: stories about things and stories about how we describe those things. That is, the story of an object—what it is, who made it, who helped them, how and why all those people made those decisions, where they got the materials from, how long it took, who owned it or borrowed it or stole it, who has it now. And the story of how we describe that object—what is it made of, what does it mean, how does it relate to all the other things we have, how do we know what we know about it, how do we preserve it, where does it live, and why?
These intertwined tales sprung out at me Tuesday evening (it’s Thursday for me now) as I read Patrick Olson’s description of a fragment of Ars Minor by Aelius Donatus, possibly from the earliest years of printing around 1454-1457 in Mainz, Germany. As Olson put it:1
These fragments are observable in portions bound into another book printed in 1490 (go look at the photos!!), and Olson’s description is gob-smacking. In addition to technical reasoning for dating these fragments (we get details on the type used, the line justification, specific initial designs), Olson writes a broader history of printing and type use in Mainz, contextualizes the significance of Ars Minor (and who Donatus was anyways), and relays the fragments’ relative scarcity (and these are extremely scarce), with auction and price records to boot.
To cap off the story of the object, Olson explains its provenance and the significance of its survival. And then he cites his sources. The story of how he describes this thing (2,828 words) clocks in as nearly as long as the story of the thing itself (3,035 words).
This is bibliographic, book historical, bookdealing research at the highest level. Alongside being a once-in-a-lifetime (once in many lifetimes?!) object, the description communicates many stories of labor: about those who printed the original text, those who contributed to the remarkable survival of these fragments, and those (Olson) who synthesized gads of research (from many experts) into a detail-oriented, compelling, sharp, and funny retelling of that survival.
The description is a monument to books and book work. I love that in my book work, these dual stories (what is this? how do we describe it?) are not limited to the rarest, most intricate objects we encounter.
One of my favorite items I’ve ever catalogued is a pamphlet I found in a filing cabinet in a basement of an abandoned schoolhouse in Gloucester, New Jersey, now home to Between the Covers Rare Books. The pamphlet was Consciousness Raisers About Racism (written? edited? by Fai Coffin and Ash Eames, but definitely) published by Movement for a New Society in 1979, which was founded as A Quaker Action Group (that was the actual name of the group). MNS was a non-violent community organizing collective that hosted direct action trainings, consensus building, and liberation education to advocate for anti-nuclear politics, anti-US interventionism, and food and worker cooperatives. MNS is credited with developing community organizing tactics used in many major activist movements in the United States, as well as anti-Apartheid advocacy in South Africa and the Arab Spring revolution.
In my notes, I described the slight tri-fold as
A compact pamphlet from the Philadelphia Racism Task Force that calls to action laypeople and organizers to disrupt racism using provided reminders and tips. Succinctly addressing white guilt and the function of solidarity, the guidelines resonate today: “What is important is to sort out the difference between rights which should be available to all and privileges which are available to white people only and require the exploitation of Third World People.”
MNS also ran New Society Publishers, which published pamphlets and books with practical advice for working on social change. At the time I researched this pamphlet, I couldn’t find a full list of MNS’s publications, but Swarthmore’s finding aid lists 112 boxes of mostly unprocessed materials for a curious and hearty soul to dive into. Swarthmore also has archival material for New Society Publishers, which continues as an imprint based in British Columbia.
I love working with ephemera because they capture slivers of community. I return time and again to this pamphlet because it’s disquietingly relevant to our current moment. I flipped through folder after folder of papers in that metal filing cabinet and any item could have touched as deeply as this one did. I wonder what I missed and what will be someone else’s to discover.
I like stories about objects because I like discovering small reasons for wonder. I think a lot about the people I meet through the things they made or saved: Caresse Crosby, who has been credited with inventing the modern bra but more notably printed some of the earliest works of 20th-century Anglo-American literary giants; the Duchesse de Luynes, who survived the French Revolution tucked away at her estate, where she pulled her press for the sake of her son’s education and her own intellectual fulfillment; Marie Rosenthal-Hatschek, whose work survives by way of lucky escape.
My favorite part of my job is pinning down (or, often, lightly tapping into place) where, who, and what these objects have touched, and then figuring out how they relate to everything else we’ve got thus far. The most moving part of reading Olson’s description was the monumental care evident in every line. Again! And again! Someone cared, and so it is here. And someone cares enough to tell us all about it. And someone will care again. Reminds me of this Tumblr post about bookmarks.
In the pivot to end all pivots, this week I started watching Station Eleven, the television adaptation of the novel by the same name by Emily St. John Mandel that tells interlooping tales of death and survival after a flu-based pandemic that wipes out 99 percent of the global population. Watching the show warps me back to the final months before *gestures lazily* all of this: I read Station Eleven in November 2019, while I still lived in London, and I can recall how unnerved I was by how a world in motion jittered, then stopped. I can conjure that spectre of mass death hanging over me as I rushed through the book, thinking that if I simply finished it, it would be over. I thought then that I was simply too cowardly to wonder how closely we teetered towards that future. I didn’t realize that I was actually holding my breath.
Watching the television adaptation now is an emotional crush. I cried during the first episode during the long pan out over a hospital entryway mobbed by panicked and dying people. I cried during a scene in the second episode as a chorus of voices rose above a campfire, reminding me of that poem that asks, “What songs will people sing in the end times? | Songs about the end times.”
And I cried again when an unknown figure introduced himself to our protagonists as from the Museum of Civilization, “A place that values human culture and the past.” Out of this devastation arises kinds of humanity that we already know: the persistence of care, overwhelming and true. Again and again, someone cares.
An apocalypse (one of many). A desire to save (lives and, when that fails, their traces). Station Eleven heightens this union of loss and finds, as fiction often does, but not to the degree that it is outside the realm of possibility. Station Eleven hangs pointedly, poignantly after these two years, when undue death and unjust failure to protect can be set upon a mantle of indifference.
Caring is radical. We encounter so many opportunities to choose not to care, as I’m reflecting upon in reading Richard Ovenden’s Burning the Books: A Deliberate History of the Destruction of Knowledge. A cynic might chalk up the survival of printed objects as equally to indifference as deliberate care. Not arousing suspicion or ire—that is, being a bland book—may be safer than being the apple of one collector’s eye. It’s easier to figure out what someone loves and gun for that inked aorta, so to speak. Surer to be commonplace and skate by unsuspected.
Still, the remarkable survives, and with it, evidence of care. Were I to visualize the trails of the Mainz Donatus and the MNS pamphlet, I see the Mainz Donatus flying over time—an Albatross that touches down so infrequently and most often on the ocean itself, where any ripples it begins are lost in gulping waves of forgetfulness—leaving us small relevant remnants to help us track where it has been. The Movement for a New Society pamphlet, in contrast, frog hops to and fro, the tendrils of influence readily visible in this much shallower pond of some 40 years, as long as you venture a look.
It’s not lost on me the privilege-obligation-honor of getting to work with stuff and care about it. An honor that comes with a lot of caveats, sure—who gets to care and how have their choices, ideological of various ilk, resulted in the deliberate loss about which Ovenden writes? How many barriers are there to the expertise levels we deem necessary in order to care? (And how rapidly might those barriers disappear in the apocalypse?) And still, and still. It is.
Ultimately, a straightforward answer to the question, “What’s your dream job?” is not that compelling, lest you are a future employer, in which case, please respond to my application, even if it’s just to reject me. In my dream job, I would attend to that ecosystem of trace and time. I would zoom in and out on these objects, these dynamic animals of process and forethought and a generous splash of luck, and shout about how they managed not to be snuffed out by the constant shuffling against them. I would channel the staunch assuredness of the Museum of Civilization that there is still a place for wonder in a worn down world.
In this brief, unusually frank and non-cynical moment that consciously and unabashedly embraces the vocational awe I so often guard against, I suppose I would like best to revel in the cracking grief and joy that saddles those workers along this continuum of care.
Housekeeping and birdseeking
house
Special thanks to my beloved best friend Kate, who served as a medical consultant for that line about the aorta, and all of my family and friends who work in healthcare for their monumental acts of care every day. I love you.
What I read this week: finally finished Good Omens by Neil Gaimain and Terry Pratchett and The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
What I’m currently reading: Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge by Richard Ovenden
This is a good time to share the newsletter with friends & foes
Susbcribing means more of *gestures lazily* this in your inbox
bird
this bird courtesy of my bestie Grayson. Thank you!
More later.
A quick gloss for our readers: the Gutenberg Bible is considered a landmark moment in the coalescing of Western printing technology, or, even more plainly, the oldest books printed using moveable type on a hand-pulled press.
What IS the significance of the Ars Minor? (at the risk of sounding uncultured)