Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic

310 Pages·2022·7.667 MB·English

by  Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Shafquat Towheed

NEW DIRECTIONS IN BOOK HISTORY
Bookshelves in the Age of
the COVID-19 Pandemic
Edited by
Corinna Norrick-Rühl · Shafquat Towheed
New Directions in Book History
Series Editors
Shafquat Towheed
Faculty of Arts
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
Jonathan Rose
Department of History
Drew University
Madison, NJ, USA
As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of
maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the
goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish
monographs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new
frontiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars.
Its scope is global, extending to the Western and non-Western worlds and
to all historical periods from antiquity to the twenty-first century, including
studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions in Book
History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the vanguard. It will
experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored archives,
debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected
subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic
fields. Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiography
of the book, and every one will point to new directions in book scholarship.
New Directions in Book History will be published in three formats: single-
author monographs; edited collections of essays in single or multiple
volumes; and shorter works produced through Palgrave’s e-book (EPUB2)
‘Pivot’ stream. Book proposals should emphasize the innovative aspects of
the work, and should be sent to either of the two series editors.
Editorial board
Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Brazil
Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, USA
Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia.
Corinna Norrick-Rühl • Shafquat Towheed
Editors
Bookshelves in the
Age of the COVID-19
Pandemic
Editors
Corinna Norrick-Rühl Shafquat Towheed
English Department / Book Studies Faculty of Arts and Social
University of Münster Sciences (FASS)
Münster, Germany The Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
ISSN 2634-6117 ISSN 2634-6125 (electronic)
New Directions in Book History
ISBN 978-3-031-05291-0 ISBN 978-3-031-05292-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05292-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Chapters 1, 2 and 10 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details
see licence information in the chapters.
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Dedicated to the memory of
Rosemary C. Norrick (1922–2015)
and
Syed S. Towheed (1966–2018)
F : T B e
oreword he ookshelF ndures
There isn’t a single aspect of life that the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t
touched.
To date, over 5 million people around the world have died. Countries
have locked down for quarantines again and again to try and stop the
spread of the disease. Back in March 2020, we wondered whether or not
to wipe down our groceries. Over the ensuing and months, we started
compulsively baking. We joined TikTok. We obsessed over COVID-
tracking dashboards. And people read books.
Specifically, while we were so very much stuck at home and trying to
make sense of the world on fire around us, people read books like Albert
Camus’s The Plague, José Saramago’s Blindness, and Octavia Butler’s The
Parable of the Sower in droves—myself included. Leah Henrickson’s chap-
ter explores what, exactly, people read with their #PandemicReading—or
at what they were tweeting about reading, finishing with the iconic
“Ummm, guys? Don’t microwave your books” tweet that I remember
working its way through my own Twitter timeline. After people finished
reading their pandemic-inspired books, then what? Where did the
books go?
Presumably, the books went to a bookshelf. A physical IKEA shelf, a
digital shelf on a Kindle, but a bookshelf, nevertheless. Interestingly, our
relationship with bookshelves has bifurcated depending, in no small part,
on whether the bookshelf was in public or personal space. Some purged
their shelves of uncomfortable or unfortunate titles in the wake of social
justice movements that rocked the world partway through the pandemic,
a theme picked up by Chiara Bullen in “Your Bookshelf Is Problematic.”
vii
viii FOREWORD: THE BOOKSHELF ENDURES
Just as we are not the same readers that we were prior to COVID-19,
bookshelves are not the same as they were pre-pandemic.
On a cursory level, it’s easy to see how our personal bookshelves quickly
became a prop de rigueur in our Zoom-life of the pandemic. For millen-
nia, personal bookshelves—personal libraries, really—have often been
understood to be a bit of cultural shorthand for how a person projects
their education, socioeconomic status, and taste. Bookshelves and, of
course, the books on them are what twentieth-century philosopher Pierre
Bourdieu might call the stuff of habitus. Fast forward to the COVID-19
pandemic and personal bookshelves became profoundly performative
backdrops for virtual meetings and streamed interviews and, as Claire
Battershill notes in her chapter, helped facilitate a then-emerging pan-
demic aesthetic. Be honest. Who among us hasn’t paused a video clip of
someone famous talking in front of a bookshelf to have themselves a good
gander at what titles are lined up on the shelves behind them? Many of the
volume’s authors—Amanda Lastoria, Paizha Stoothoff, Emily Baulch, and
Jennifer Burek Pierce—found a plethora of ways to engage with the com-
plicated question of presentation, performance, and self of the private-
turned- public bookshelves in our virtual backgrounds, reminding us that
bookshelves constantly navigate a complicated sociocultural space. When
we sat ourselves in front of our bookshelves, we invited those watching to
judge us by our books and our bookshelves.
But what about the bookshelves that we can’t see? The bookshelves
that aren’t on display behind us in Zoom or in our own personal spaces?
What has happened to public bookshelves—the shelves in libraries, schools,
universities, and a plethora of places that were inaccessible during the
COVID-19 pandemic? What will the future of bookshelves in public
spaces look like as we begin to think about bookshelves in a post-
pandemic world?
In short, it depends on the shelf and the space, a point that Kenna
MacTavish picks up with the analysis of how bookstores in Melbourne
connected with readers during the pandemic. Libraries are typically cham-
pioned as necessary civic spaces, as institutions that are bastions to their
patrons in a world disinformation. Closures of libraries—or at least a lack
of access to public shelves—disproportionately affect those who do not
have the resources and funds to recreate public spaces in a private. During
the pandemic, the loss of public bookshelves was the loss of public life in
a microcosm for many people.
FOREWORD: THE BOOKSHELF ENDURES ix
Public institutions scrambled to come up with clever workarounds for
finding ways to keep readers connected to the physical books on institu-
tions’ shelves. Here, in Austin, Texas, for example, the Austin Public
Library offered surprise “book bundles” for young readers who could not
peruse the shelves and pick out books for themselves. Readers received
physical, tangible books, but distanced from the physical, tangible shelves
they would have interacted with pre-pandemic. Corinna Norrick-Rühl’s
chapter on pandemic parenting and book accessibility explores if and
where pandemic bookshelves for very young readers have formed. In
Queen Creek, Arizona, the Queen Creek Public Library had pre-recorded
Story Line where readers could call in to hear a different story read over
the phone each week. Many public libraries leaned into having patrons
request books online and then picking them up in person. As communities
have tentatively relaxed social distancing guidelines, patrons have returned
in person to visit tangible, public bookshelves at community libraries.
And, of course, many patrons explored libraries’ eBooks when in-
person perusal of library shelves was impossible. All types of libraries
expanded their digital bookshelves—from university and research libraries
using HathiTrust to community public libraries that encouraged options
like Hoopla for checking out digital books from digital shelves. The result
of this now-18-month-long experiment? Not all digital bookshelves are
the same. This theme is picked up with Nelleke Moser’s reflections about
university students’ bookshelves for coursework.
Like their physical counterparts, how well digital bookshelves put digi-
tal books in the hands of their readers is a function of the institution that
facilitates them. Reading the latest Susanna Gregory murder mystery on a
Kindle via Hoopla, for example, is very different than trying use an eBook
from a university for reference or background material. Chandni Ananth,
Ellen Barth, Laura Ntoumanis, and Natalia Tolstopyat’s chapter explores
how bookshelf insecurity profoundly shapes students’ online learning
experience. Although rehashing the “digital or physical books” debate
feels very tired, especially considering the necessity of social distancing
during the pandemic, it’s worth noting that the current pivot toward digi-
tal bookshelves has highlighted that how digital books currently sit on
their respective shelves is still, and always will be, a question of permissions
and access—the presence of non-physical books doesn’t change that.
eBooks tethered to their digital shelves have always been reminiscent of
medieval books chained to their medieval shelves; the pandemic has simply
highlighted this sort of relationship.
x FOREWORD: THE BOOKSHELF ENDURES
Although the pandemic has forced us to think about public book-
shelves—particularly in library settings—this isn’t the first time that ques-
tions about “public” bookshelves have been raised. It’s worth noting, too,
that the pandemic isn’t the first time that “public” libraries have not been
available to everyone in communities. Historically, many marginalized
communities have not been allowed to participate in public spaces, par-
ticularly library spaces. “Even as we celebrate the library as a public com-
mons, we should recognize that not everyone participates in that space, or
not in the same way,” anthropologist Shannon Mattern points out. “By
choice or by necessity, many marginalized communities have established
their own independent, itinerant, fugitive libraries, which respond to con-
ditions of exclusion and oppression” (2019).
What does this mean, then, for the future of post-pandemic book-
shelves? For public and private shelves? As Shafquat Towheed explores in
his chapter, bookshelves have always offered a liminal cultural space; the
pandemic has forced a specific temporal element to our bookshelves, the
effects of which we’ll see in decades to come. Perhaps the pandemic has or
will inspire the speciation of new, fugitive, subtle, slightly out-of-view
physical bookshelves when the traditional public shelves have been inac-
cessible. Perhaps we might imagine more inclusive, more accessible public
bookshelves in a post-pandemic world.
Bookshelves are one of the most malleable, adaptable objects in human
history—made, unmade, and remade over millennia. While the COVID-19
pandemic has undoubtably left its mark in how we access books on shelves,
it certainly has not perpetrated any sort of mass extinction event. The
bookshelf, as always, endures.
Institute of Historical Studies Lydia Pyne
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX, USA
November 2021
reFerences
Mattern, Sharon. 2019. Fugitive Libraries. In Places Journal (October).
Accessed October 25, 2021. https://doi.org/10.22269/191022.