Description
Book SynopsisUnpacking 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.
Trade ReviewUnpacking 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
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. The Promise of Paradise: Reading, Researching, and Using the Private Library: 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: A Bibliographical Essay – Nicholas Bradley
- 11. jwcurry’s Room 3o2 Books: The Small Press Bookstore as Library and Archive – Cameron Anstee
- Conclusion—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) – University Center, 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
