Abstract: Gray Barker founded one of the first flying saucer fanzines, The Saucerian , in 1953. Over the following three decades, Barker operated one of the only publishers specializing in UFO books, often issuing works too unusual or eccentric for more mainstream presses. The path of Barker’s career as a publisher can be traced through a succession of printing techniques, varying with the expansion and contraction of his audience network. Throughout his career, Barker used office copying technology to produce his publications on a small scale for distribution to his core audience. This paper details the various printing and marketing methods used by Barker and his press in order to demonstrate the impact of print technology on subcultural communication and the growth of paranormal and conspiracist narratives in the pre-internet era.

Abstract: This article reconsiders the role of compiling in the modern history of authorship. Nineteenth-century readers viewed compiling as the purest form of "book-making," a mechanistic, market-oriented model of authorship that stood in opposition to authorial genius. The article examines these authorial models' intertwined origins in emergent industrial capitalism, and argues that book-making retained currency as a model into the early twentieth century partly because unattributed text reuse remained common. It also argues that in the aggregate, unattributed text reuse had epistemic and informational effects that anticipated challenges we are grappling with following the development of large language models.

Abstract: This article examines an ever-proliferating, little-discussed phenomenon: notes in contemporary African American poetry. Attending to the form and content of these threshold spaces elucidates how Black poets operate within but refuse incorporation into historically white institutions. Reading three examples— Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith, To Repel Ghosts by Kevin Young, and Dangerous Goods by Sean Hill—it argues that these successful poets do not view notes as of an "incidental nature" but manipulate them, operating in but not of the discourses they mimic. Poets exploit this textual space to subvert institutional limits; their annotation yields self-reflexive outcomes that demand attention as descended yet distinct from paratexts of Black precursors.

Print-by-subscription schemes proliferated in eighteenth-century British North America, but how exactly did they work? This article argues that authors and publishers relied upon networks of ministers, merchants, and printers and postmasters, as well as newspaper advertisements, to sell to readers in small-town New England during the Seven Years’ War. While print by subscription networks demonstrate the interconnectedness of the North American British colonies during the Seven Years’ War, the books themselves speak to the subjects that intrigued colonial readers. Ultimately, print by subscription helped to create a marketplace for American books.

Reorienting “Lost” Time: Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in the American Civil War Charlotte Hand (bio) Since Frank Luther Mott disparaged Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most influential women’s magazine of the American antebellum period, for being “absolutely untouched by the great conflict” that was the American Civil War, scholars have often claimed that the publication was apolitical during the sectional crisis.1 Susan Belasco, for one, argues that Sarah Hale, Godey’s editor from 1837 to 1877, “made no reference to the Civil War throughout the years of the conflict.”2 Scholars who have acknowledged the political impulse of Godey’s during the sectional tensions nonetheless suggest that the magazine only responded indirectly to them, never actually addressing partisan politics. Joseph Michael Sommers claims that in the years before the Civil War. Hale “appropriated seemingly innocuous sentimental modes and devices already present in the magazine” to rally her female readers against the secession of the southern states from the Republic.3 Despite recognizing Hale’s obvious call for national unity in her promotion of Thanksgiving in Godey’s, Patricia Okker writes off this effort for political peace as “idealistic and naïve.”4 It should be noted, too, that neither of these scholars examined Godey’s political effort during the Civil War. Yet the studies of Sommers and Okker demonstrate that Godey’s was very much concerned with the sectional tensions. It is high time, then, to re-examine Mott’s influential claim. These scholars’ dismissal of Godey’s participation in the partisan politics of the Civil War, whether as a refusal or as an oblique and thus politically ineffectual campaign, may be traced to two intersecting critical inclinations. First, an understanding of the Civil War as a battle between Union and Confederate forces over ideological differences and, eventually, slavery. Second, a rigid interpretation of the ideology of separate spheres as a spatial phenomenon. A predominant framework in criticism of nineteenth-century American literature during the mid-1960s, the ideology of separate spheres, [End Page 172] which determined that the proper roles of women and men were within the private and public domains respectively, has retained a spatial focus despite extensive revisions since. The metaphor of the separate spheres has also continued to occupy discussions on the ideology’s counterpart, the Cult of True Womanhood, an idealized image of the wife and mother as a domestic Madonna, and which set the social, aesthetic and political terms for the definition and performance of white middle-class womanhood. Indeed, modern scholars who have argued that the reality of white middle-class American women was vastly different from these ideologies that they themselves subscribed to—that the private sphere of white middle-class womanhood often converged with the public realm—relied on a spatial conception of these ideologies to demonstrate their claim.5 The spatial focus of their critique of these gender ideologies has led scholars to overlook Godey’s political attempt to ease sectional tensions. According to these strands of scholarship, Godey’s had refused to let its female readers venture into the male sphere of partisan politics and war—in other words, to keep the respective spheres of men and women separate, Godey’s had remained spatially removed from the Civil War. The current trajectory of nineteenth-century American studies does little to promote a re-examination of this assessment. Rightly recognizing that issues of race, sexuality, class, religion and other variables complicate the paradigm of the separate spheres, scholars of American studies have sought to move beyond a binary understanding of nineteenth-century America, rendering the ideology of separate spheres and True Womanhood obsolete concepts in the process. Consequently, publications like Godey’s that appear to promote the rigid gender demarcation of nineteenth-century American society that were aimed at white middle-class and elite women have garnered little critical interest from modern scholars. Yet Godey’s popularity demonstrates that the concept of separate spheres was influential in nineteenth-century middle-class society, even if it did not effectively condition gendered behaviors. It seems premature, then, to disregard these gender ideologies. As this essay will show, revisiting these ideologies sheds light on a critical battle that...

Paratextuality Between Materiality, Interpretation and Translation: The Case of Psalm Incipits in Jewish Late Antiquity A.J. Berkovitz (bio) The field of Book History binds together the destiny of books and their readers. As a principle, it posits that the material reality of a text will have an impact upon the way in which readers engage with it; and that, in turn, the way readers engage with a text will shape its material representations. This interpretive schema has produced volumes of thought-provoking and persuasive academic literature.1 This article joins this tradition of discourse by exploring the complicated relationship between the opening words of compositions within the Hebrew Psalter and the late ancient Jews who read them. In particular, it examines the various interpretive frameworks that Hebrew- and Aramaic-literate Jews who lived between the years 70-650 CE in Roman Palestine and Sassanian Persia imposed upon the opening words of a psalm. These readers could understand a psalm—or verses from it—in light of its opening words. But they could also read against those words, ignore them or rewrite them. By mapping this diversity of practice, I hope to highlight the importance of considering historical readers when thinking about the dynamic relationship between material texts and those who used them. Where possible, we ought not reconstruct presumed readers solely on the basis of material remains. And further, material texts should be mapped for use with reference to multiple kinds of readers and reading practices. Methodological Remarks Of the poems that populate the canonical Hebrew Psalter, 116 of them begin with words that clearly differ from the poetic style that characterizes the Psalms. Modern bibles almost always segregate these opening words, or ‘titles’, from the rest of the psalm. The NRSV, among other translations of [End Page 31] the Bible, goes one step further and does not mark them with a verse number at all. These words or ‘titles’, which I will call incipits (see an example at Figure 1) throughout this article, often supply data such as the musical setting, the “author function,”2 a rhematic function,3 or circumstances under which the text that follows was composed.4 Psalm 52:1-2 seems to provide an example of an incipit with the potential for all four functions. It begins in a prosodic manner: For the leader, a maskil5 of David, when Doeg the Edomite came to Saul and said to him, ‘David has come to the house of Ahimelech’ Only after delivering this information does the text move to poetry: Why do you boast of your evil, brave fellow?God’s faithfulness never ceases.Your tongue devises mischief,like a sharpened razor that works treacherously (Ps 52:3-4).6 These incipits are paratexts, material that surrounds a work—such as titles, dedications, endnotes, illustrations etc.—and attempts to shape the experience of its readers.7 As biblical scholars rightly note, many of these opening words were added to the psalm they adorn well after the poem was composed.8 Whether they are actualized and in what manner, I argue, depends on readers, their exegetical needs, and their cultural conditions. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Psalm 67:1-4 in the Aleppo Codex [End Page 32] The Psalter provides a distinctive lens through which to examine the dynamic relationship between historical readers and incipits as paratexts. Like other biblical books, Psalms existed in material form from the times of the Second Temple period and onwards. The earliest extant fragment of what would eventually develop into the canonical Psalter dates to ca. 150 BCE.9 Ancient readers of the Psalter could memorize its layout while holding, reading and rolling physical scrolls. Some of these readers, additionally, left traces of their interpretive conclusions as well as the habits that underpin them in the texts that survive antiquity, texts that exist apart from the material Psalter. In other words, we need not guess based on the material form of a scroll how those in the ancient world interacted with sacred texts. They tell us. Furthermore, only the Psalter contains both small literary units— often under twenty verses long—and incipits that might govern them...

“Out of the business once established could grow various enterprises”: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Ed. L. Simon & Co. Printers Elizabeth McHenry (bio) Sometime in the summer or early fall of 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois quietly purchased a printing business at 163 Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee.1 He did not live or work in Memphis, nor did he have experience in or knowledge of the business of printing. In theory, there were printing offices in Atlanta that were accessible to Du Bois, and as a professor of Sociology at Atlanta University, he also would have had some access to the university’s Printing Office. Described in the Catalogue of Atlanta University for 1901–1902 as “large and well appointed,” the Printing Office was used as a place of instruction where students learned the printing trade by working on publications for both the school and the larger Atlanta Community. It was where two monthly newspapers were published: The Bulletin of Atlanta University and a student newspaper called THE SCROLL. In addition, it housed Atlanta University Press, which, beginning in 1896, had produced the proceedings of the annual Conference for the Study of Negro Problems as well as related publications.2 And yet Du Bois invested his entire life savings—some $1,600—in the Memphis print business, entering into a partnership with two young recent graduates of Atlanta University who had been his students. Unlike Du Bois, both of these men knew the business of printing: Harry H. Pace had learned the printer’s trade as a youth, and Edward L. Simon worked as an instructor in the Print Department at Le Moyne Institute in Memphis after his graduation from Atlanta University. In this, Du Bois was the outsider of the group. And yet, he was the driving force behind the venture, which promised him something he did not have but felt he sorely needed: ready access to and control over a printing press. This printing office became the home of the Moon Illustrated Weekly, a publication Du Bois envisioned as circulating among African Americans to “tell them of the deeds of themselves + their neighbors, interpret the news of the world to them + inspire them toward definite ideals.”3 In reality, the [End Page 405] Moon was a modest, essentially local newspaper and it, together with the relatively small journal that followed it, the Horizon, have been considered mere footnotes in Du Bois’s long and illustrative career as an educator, an activist, a journalist, and a critical thinker. To the extent that it has been studied, the Moon in particular has become known as Du Bois’s most spectacular failure. This was the determination of historian Paul Parrington, whose investigative study of the Moon Illustrated Weekly was published alongside the three surviving issues of the newspaper in 1986. The Moon “failed before it began,” Parrington concluded, calling the journal “a dream which was not to be realized until 1918 when the circulation of the Crisis reached 100,000.”4 In some respects, this view accurately sums up the life of the paper: Du Bois could not find financial support for the publication, he was inaccurate about the circulation numbers that could be achieved; and the Moon was never, in any practical sense, an “illustrated weekly.”5 But the Moon is only one aspect of the venture that Du Bois entered when he invested in the Memphis printing business. Rather than focusing on the failings of the Moon Illustrated Weekly, this essay takes up the larger subject of Du Bois’s printing office, the Ed. L. Simon & Co. In doing so, I am attempting to divert our focus from the demise of one small newspaper to the more significant story of a small African American printing business. These stories are, of course, entangled, but focusing only on the shortcomings of the Moon detracts from our appreciation of Du Bois’s larger objectives in purchasing a printing business and the importance of the business itself. What he sought to do with that business, I argue, will draw our attention to areas of Black print culture studies that remain unexplored: the business of printing, the history of Black...

Reading Themselves Sick:Consumption and Women's Reading in the Early Republic, 1780–1860 Carrie N. Knight (bio) Sickness is the mildew of life. It mars the fairest hours of enjoyment. In the morning the spirits are refreshed—the heart is rife with ambition. Herculean obstacles cower beneath your touch. But a little exertion & fatigue spirits Ambition and all are gone and you wonder at the power that could have nerved you to make the effort which has now prostrated your strength. The fever mantles your cheek… pain in your side and chest and these are the precursors of a restless sleepless night. You change your position for ease but pain also changes—a dry hard cough breaks the monotony of a midnight hour and leaves you exhausted. —Middlesex Diary of Adaline Lindsley, August 26, 18411 When Adaline Lindsley set her pen to the diary she kept between 1840 and 1843, she was participating in a tradition that subsequent historians have used to piece together a picture of women's lives in the early republic that would otherwise be lost to time. Lindsley's diary is typical in its record of the daily encounters and occurrences that colored her life in Middlesex, New York. In other respects, however, it is strikingly singular. The diary reveals a woman of considerable literary proficiency, both in its style and manner of writing and in its record of Lindsley's prolific reading. The diary is also a narrative of disease. Adaline Lindsley was dying of consumption.2 Some would have said her reading was the cause. Consumption is essential to any discussion of life in the early American republic. In the second half of the eighteenth century, its presence first among colonists and then among citizens of the new nation was ubiquitous. Some historians have attributed this prevalence to population growth and commercial expansion, a theory supported by a peak in cases around 1800 in Atlantic coastal cities.3 And yet, little scholarship has been devoted to its study within this period. This inequity is the result of diverse factors including an early ambiguity surrounding the disease, skepticism or outright derision of illness narratives, and a historiographical bias toward the disease as it affected European populations—the last a consequence of the relative [End Page 37] dearth of disease narratives or pathology treatises produced in America relative to those produced in Britain and France at the time. In addition to these impediments, scholars have not sufficiently addressed how consumption in early America might have been differently understood and therefore exist as a separate disease from its European counterpart. Susan Sontag has sensitively observed that tuberculosis constitutes a set of cultural metaphors that evolve over time and space. Her observation supports the idea that the disease reflected the concerns and values of early republicans. These concerns and values confronted observable differences between life in America and elsewhere, as well as imagined differences rooted in feeling and sentiment. Difference was a volatile construct used to assert a national identity alternately set apart from and intimately linked with a European past. Citizens of the early republic grappled with how to reconcile these differences, to turn back or to look forward, choosing instead to fashion a hybrid culture responsive to a rapidly evolving national and global identity. The American response to consumption followed a similar trajectory, taking many of its cues from earlier European conceptions of the disease while shaping it to its own needs. Consumption and the marketplace were early partners in this process. By the late eighteenth century, the marketplace was a preeminent ground for testing America's hybrid identity. Regulation and policing of material consumption were conspicuously tested as forms of dissent and individuation as evidenced in earlier pre-revolutionary consumer boycotts of British goods.4 Proscriptive discourse against the consumption of foreign goods, particularly the tragic novels of Samuel Richardson and others British and French writers, persisted well into the early republican period, focusing its harshest criticism on the corrupting influence of such goods upon the polity, despite or perhaps in consequence of their continued popularity among American consumers.5 Janice Radway reminds us that "'to consume'… was originally understood to refer to fire...