K

Kelly (Gary)

University of Alberta, Canada

Scrapbooking and the modern liberal state

Though scrapbooking has been around for almost two centuries, there has recently been an explosion in this activity, especially in North America, with the development of scrapbooking circles, scrapbooking product lines, scrapbooking supply stores and even megastores, scrapbooking magazines, scrapbooking advice books, and scrapbooking websites. This explosion draws attention to the coincidence of scrapbooking with the formation of modern liberal states sustained by--among other things--complex relationships between new ideologies and practices of the sovereign subject, domesticity, consumerism, nationalism, imperialism, and cultural hierarchy, as these are channelled through the culture of print and the book. In this presentation, I argue that the present explosion in scrapbooking also indicates historic contradictions and a current crisis in the liberal state and its ideological, cultural, economic, and political foundations.

Scrapbooking, or the making of what have been called "assembled books," has been practised by all sorts of people since about the 1820s. This activity appears to be related to and arise from an older practice of private book assembling going back to the seventeenth century or earlier--the keeping of albums of a particular kind: books in which the album-keeper and/or her or his friends, visitors, and other acquaintances were requested to inscribe original or memorized pieces of prose or (more usually) verse. The shift to the scrapbook, incorporating manuscript inscriptions but also, increasingly, printed text and images, usually cut from periodicals but also supplied by publishers in "scrapsheets," seems to coincide with the constitution of the reading public as the political nation, the construction of new literary discourses and orders, and the rapid increase in and dropping prices of printed matter brought about by technological innovations (steam presses, cheaper paper, railways).

Nineteenth-century scrapbooking enabled the assembling of personal-familial books from commercialized print, and thus the insertion of the sovereign subject in the national-imperial print order in a way rarely available to the individual apart from actual published authorship. Scrapbooking, that is, facilitated kinds of self-fashioning, and also family- and community-fashioning, in terms of what Benedict Anderson calls "print capitalism," and the public sphere of the modern liberal state, but kinds of fashioning that this "print capitalism" and mass print, as well as new orders of national Literature, by their very nature, made increasingly difficult for the "ordinary" person.

The scrapbook itself was swept into these larger processes, with specific kinds of scrapbooks being supplied by publishers in increasing numbers and diversity (examples are shown), and scrapbooking was made easier and cheaper by the technological and publishing revolutions of the late nineteenth century, the availability of photography, and such crazes as the postcard mania of the early twentieth century. Inevitably, fully printed books of various kinds were also published as some form of "scrapbook," and this form of commercial book production continues to the present (examples shown). Closely tied to current events and to social, economic, cultural, and political change, scrapbooking has continued to afford an opportunity for self-fashioning in relation to and often or in certain respects in resistance to the processes and institutions of the modern liberal state.

Like its predecessor and relative the album, however, the scrapbook remained a low-status cultural product, strongly associated with women and domesticity. As with similarly low-status genres and print-forms, however, this fact seems to have also presented an opportunity, now being exploited by scrapbookers in the current explosion of this activity. Much research remains to be done, but preliminary investigation indicates that, in North America, at least, this movement is dominated by white middle-class women, with strong links to the new domestic ideology, ideologies of sovereign subjectivity, liberal discourses of education, popular (as distinct from institutional) heritage and genealogy interests, certain aspects of ecology and nature discourse, and what might be called purposive consumerism. There also seem to be correlations between highly active centres of scrapbooking and centres of concentration of Mormons (Utah; southern Alberta). A tentative conclusion could be that current scrapbooking subsumes some of the historic motives for this activity but also indicates gender-, class- and culture-specific dissatisfaction with official, public, and institutional cultural forms and ideologies, and with the historicalclaims of the liberal state to representativeness.

Gary Kelly is Canada Research Chair at the University of Alberta, Canada, and Director of the Humanities Computing Studio and the Streetprint Project (www.streetprint.org). He is the editor of the Toronto History of Women's Writing and the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, and has written books on and edited texts from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Britain.

Kimball (Melanie)

Department of Library and Information Studies, School of Informatics, University at Buffalo, State University of New York

Cultural gatekeepers : children’s librarians and the control of children’s reading, 1903-1930.

As the profession of children's librarianship developed and matured in the early twentieth century, librarians believed that their central role was to connect children with literature. Their aim was to interest children in reading from an early age, not just any books, but the "best books." Librarians were certain that if they could capture young minds and interest them in good literature, it would naturally follow that the child would continue to read only the best books into adulthood. Librarians were clear about their role as trained professionals who were better suited than teachers or parents to judge which books were appropriate for children to read for pleasure. While teachers were experts in teaching children how to read and in the use of textbooks, librarians had expertise in evaluating which books were of the highest quality and most wholesome content. They assisted teachers to choose books for their classrooms, and guided children toward those materials that were best suited to young minds.

In order to keep children turned toward the "right channels," children’s librarians were very careful in selecting books for purchase by the library. It was also essential to guide children toward appropriate reading material by recommending specific titles to their patrons and discouraging them from checking out other, less suitable books. How did librarians make their selections? What genres, authors, and subjects were considered to be “the best?” Were the opinions of other professionals taken into account? Were children ever consulted regarding book selection? What kinds of personal interactions did librarians experience as they guided children in their reading preferences?

An analysis of new titles purchased for the St. Louis Public Library juvenile collection from 1903-1930 serves as an exemplar of what types of books for children were typically considered “the best” in early twentieth century public libraries. This analysis along with an examination of entries in the daily work diaries of St. Louis children's librarians provides insight on the techniques that librarians used to provide recommendations, such as displays of books and lists of recommended titles for children, parents, and other adults concerned with children’s reading.

Koivunen (Leila)

University of Turku, Finland

Visualizing Africa. Complexities of illustrating David Livingstone's Missionary Travels.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, when almost all the corners of the world had already been “discovered” by white men, Antarctica and the inner parts of Africa still remained unknown. Every time the Europeans tried to solve the “riddle of Africa”, they encountered tropical climate and strange fevers. If they were lucky enough to stay alive, they were often forced to give up the journey and return to the coast. As a result, the information about the interior increased very slowly and the image of Africa as a “dark” and “mysterious” continent remained for a long time in Western thinking. The situation changed, however, as many of the obstacles to travel gradually disappeared in the course of the nineteenth century. As a result of the invention of new medicines and new guns, Central Africa became an increasingly popular target for exploration, and, soon after that, for imperialist conquest. Following on these close encounters, a long process of image formation started. During this process, which still continues, the images and ideas of Africa and its inhabitants gradually took shape in Europe as well as those of Europe in Africa.

Simultaneously with the exploration of Africa and the flow of information, Europeans experienced a “visual revolution”. Due to the inventions in printing technology, printed images began to appear in great amounts in books, journals, pamphlets and advertisements thus changing the everyday environment once and for all. In addition to causing a revolution in communication, printed images also made it possible to redefine all the things in the world, now in a visual form. Also, in the case of Africa, the pictures had a tremendous impact in creating a notion of this “newly found” continent. The impact was further increased by the fact that pictures of black people, elephants or other astonishing things were actually seen for the first time. The legacy of this impact can still be found everywhere in our modern representations of Africa.

In my presentation, the combination of visual information and the creation of the image of Africa will be approached by analysing the process of illustration of travel literature in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As no picture could be printed as such but had to be first converted into a wood-engraving, the process of illustration gives us an idea how the European images of Africa were constructed.

The complexities of the process will be approached by focussing on one of the most famous African travel books in the nineteenth century, David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857). As a subject of a little case study, it proves interesting in many ways. More material of its illustration process survives than in most other contemporary cases. Besides sketches, written descriptions, correspondence, and other documents, plenty of literure of this Victorian favourite explorer is available. Another interesting aspect in Missionary Travels is that the illustrations in it were only partly based on Livingstone’s own sketches so that other means had to be used to complement them. In addition, thanks to the wide collection of correspondence, it is possible to describe the roles of the publisher, John Murray, and some of the artists involved.

Kovac (Miha)

Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies, School of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Slovene

From Kitchen Language to Modern Language. The Role of Print in its Transformations.

Slovene language started to get its modern shape in 16th century, when the advent of Protestantism introduced printing into everyday life of society at that time. The first Slovene grammar was published in 1550, and the publication of the translation of the Bible took place in 1582. However, at the beginning of the 17th Century, these developments were brutally stopped by the catholic Counter-Reformation, initiated and conducted by the Imperial court in Vienna and the Vatican. As a result, not only Protestant clergy, but also Slovene-speaking nobility and merchants fled the country. Slovene protestant books were banned and burned: survived predominantly those ones that were taken away with the fleeing protestants.

This process created a significant rupture in the usage of the Slovene language. Printing in Slovene almost stopped, as the Catholic authorities tolerated limited usage of the Slovene language that took place predominantly in churches. As a consequence, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, speakers of Slovenian were rural lower social classes and clergy. Educated lay inhabitants of that-time in Slovenian towns wrote and read predominantly in German and were served with a decent net of bookshops that supplied them with the same books that were available in that time in Vienna and other European metropoles. The »urbanization« of Slovene language took place in the second half of nineteen century, with the advent of the Slovene national movement, when first lay poetry and novels appeared. The first Slovene commercial publisher started to operate as late as in the beginning of 20th Century. The development of Slovene language gained momentum after the establishment of the kingdom of Yugoslavia, when Slovenes won significant cultural autonomy, as their first university was established and book publishing started to flourish. It is significant to note that neither Italian fascism, nor German nazism and ethnic turmoil in Yugoslavia didn't suppress the growth of Slovene print culture throughout the twentieth century. Slovene language got its moment of glory with the dismantling of communism and Yugoslavia, when it became the official language of the new Slovene state.

The paper will try to identify quantitative and qualitative milestones in the developments of Slovene print culture and will focus on its role in the process of preservation and development of Slovene language. Furthermore, it will try to sketch the model of its development in order to make possible comparisons with the role of print culture in processes of preservation of Afrikaans and the other African languages of South Africa.

Dr.Miha Kovač is assistant professor at the Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He graduated at the Department for Comparative Literature in 1984 and began work as a journalist. After 1989, he moved into book publishing and in 1996 became editorial director of Mladinska Knjiga, the largest Slovenian publishing house. In 1995, he started to investigate the Slovenian book industry in order to write his Ph.D. He defended his thesis in June 1999. In 2000, he quit professional book publishing and started to lecture at the Department of Library Science, Information and Publishing Studies at Ljubljana University. His main interests of research are books in socialism, book culture in small-language communities and textbook publishing. He is author of a book and numerous articles on book studies.

Kovacs (Susan)

Université de Lille III

Mise en forme et mise en page des savoirs et des savoir-faire : l'exemple du Notionnaire ou Mémorial raisonné (1761) de François-Alexandre de Garsault

The shaping of knowledge in print : the example of the Notionnaire ou Mémorial raisonné (1761) by Francois-Alexandre de Garsault.

Résumé

Comment le livre imprimé, en tant que dispositif de transfert de connaissances, codifie-t-il et véhicule-t-il des savoirs à différentes époques historiques? La question fondamentale de la structuration et de la transmission des connaissances se pose aussi bien pour les savoirs “informels”, non institutionnels, que pour les savoirs légitimes, officiels. L’histoire du livre offre des perspectives riches mais souvent inexplorées dans le domaine de la “vulgarisation scientifique” et ses spécificités discursives et formelles.

Cette communication propose d’étudier, à travers l’exemple d’une anthologie publiée en 1761, le rapport entre la mise en forme des connaissances et l’activité d’appropriation et d’apprentissage qu’elle induit. Le Notionnaire ou Mémorial raisonné de F.-A. Garsault, publié à l’époque-même des projets encyclopédiques et des sommes vertigineuses, offre à son lecteur, en un seul volume, un choix de “ce qu’il y a d’utile et d’interessant dans les connoissances acquises depuis la création du monde jusqu’à présent”. Richement illustré par des dessins et tableaux de l’auteur, le Notionnaire témoigne d’un esprit d’ouverture, de simplification et de condensation, dans le but de répondre aux besoins réels de ses lecteurs. Ce qui se dégage de la préface de l’auteur, mais aussi du soin avec lequel le volume a été conçu, présenté, et illustré, est une triple ambition : la valorisation de l’activité humaine, la transmission d’un ensemble de savoirs pratiques et utilisables, et une incitation à un approfondissement des “notions” sélectionnées. Membre de L’Académie des Sciences, polygraphe et auteur de nombreux traités dont certains qui figurent dans les Descriptions des Arts et métiers, faites ou approuvées par messieurs de l’Académie royale des sciences (1760-1788) de Garsault fait preuve d’une activité inlassable de codification, de mise en forme, et de transmission des connaissances à l’attention de publics variés. Cette activité mérite d’être examiné dans la mesure où elle nous fournit des indices précieux du rôle conféré à l’objet livre dans le processus de normalisation et de transfert des savoirs.

En quoi le choix, la structuration, et la présentation des chapitres du Notionnaire orientent-ils une activité d’appropriation des connaissances? Pour répondre à cette question, une double démarche est nécessaire. D’un côté, l’étude de la mise en livre des contenus textuels et iconographiques, et de l’autre côté, un examen d’un choix d’imprimés de la même époque, des traités et des dictionnaires produits par de Garsault et par ses contemporains, pour dégager les spécificités matérielles, graphiques, et formelles, du Notionnaire.

Abstract

How does the printed book, as a vehicle for the construction and transmission of knowledge, codify and propose scientific and practical know-how to its readers during different historical periods? The issue of the structuring and transfer of knowledge pertains not only to official and institutional disciplines but also to ‘informal’ knowledge and learning. The history of the book provides new insight into the discursive and formal characteristics of the diffusion of scientific information.

I propose to study the ways in which the form of the printed book (page layout, use of illustrations, ordering of elements) shapes the reader’s appropriation of its contents. I have chosen to focus on the Notionnaire ou Mémorial raisonné (1761) by F.-A. de Garsault, because of the author’s ambition to select and to simplify the key concepts of a wide range of disciplines, arts, and techniques, and to make these topics both comprehensible and palatable to readers. Unlike the encyclopedic projects of his contemporaries, which seek to record and to memorialize all of human knowledge, de Garsault’s Notionnaire stands out as an attempt to condense and to select an ‘appropriate’ content for a general reading public. The preface and the material presentation of this one-volume richly illustrated edition show that the author sought not only to glorify human intellectual and technical achievement, but also to communicate practical, usable information on a wide range of activities, and to encourage the reader to pursue study beyond the ‘notions’ which were chosen for the compilation. De Garsault, as member of the Académie des Sciences, published many treatises on varied topics (including dressmaking and tennis), certain of which were included in the multi-volume Descriptions des Arts et métiers (1760-1788). De Garsault’s many publications attest to a life-long ambition to codify and to prepare knowledge for his contemporaries; his work offers a rich and diversified example of the ways in which the printed book contributed to the shaping of knowledge, in both the intellectual sense (selection, structure, and style) and material sense (page layout and book design).

In order to examine the modes of learning which are implied by the material presentation of the book, I propose to examine the structuring of the textual and iconographic elements of the volume, and also to compare the Notionnaire to other scientific and technical treatises, manuals, and dictionaries authored by de Garsault himself or by his contemporaries.

Maître de conférences en sciences de l’information et de la documentation à l’université de Lille 3 (UFR IDIST) depuis 2001, je suis de nationalité américaine. J’ai soutenu ma thèse de doctorat en 1994 aux Etats-Unis, à New York University, dans le département de littérature française, sous la direction de Michel Beaujour. Ma thèse de doctorat porte sur la transition du manuscrit à l’imprimé du recueil de poésie lyrique française. Recrutée en tant qu’ATER en sciences de l’information à l’université de Lille 3 en 1998, puis nommée en 2001 à un poste en 71e section à Lille 3 dans le domaine de l’histoire des médias, je travaille actuellement sur l’histoire de l’édition et de la lecture, et en particulier sur l’histoire de la mise en forme des connaissances dans la culture de l’imprimé.