On keeping things as books

Abstract

Music, literature, history. These things are not quite alike. But in Europe, before the advent of recording machines thatmade it possible for sounds to be recorded and played back, the three activities relied on the same technology ofpreservation. They were kept in/as books. Bookishness, in European and colonial imaginaries, was an often idealized,powerful means of keeping things from slipping away. An understanding of bookish things as a repository can beevinced in laws that required preserving a copy of newly published literary works and music for the benefit ofposterity; or in popular novels where a book featured as the chronicler (both recorder and narrator) of its ownadventures, beyond the lifespans of individual users. Scholars have paid specialist attention to the ontologicaldifferences among music, literature, and history when they are kept as books. Discipline-specific trainings andconversations tend to emphasize how different these objects and practices are. Yet focusing on their shared mode ofbookish preservation offers other rewards. Our multi-authored article is a creative experiment in bringing togethermusicologists, literary scholars, and historians to test the potential, for our own fields and with implications for otherhumanities disciplines, of foregrounding this technological convergence. We propose the more capacious categories ofbookkeepers (people who keep things as books) and cultures of note-taking (whether glossing a textbook or notatingmusic) as fruitful avenues to avoid writing the artificially separate histories of creation versus consumption, publicversus personal, authoritative versus amateurish, or artistic versus documentary practices. Music, broadly conceived,and the nineteenth-century album (a book of blank pages to keep verses, music, memories, and many more things)serve as the starting point for our reflections. Both exhibit a tangential connection to the normative codes of whatRoger Chartier called“the order of books.” In considering actors/artefacts/acts at the very margins of textuality, orexisting in a perverse relationship with bookishness, our aim is to redraw the knowledge-making structures we use toinvestigate our objects of study, calling attention to the intermedial and social practices, and cultures of remembrance,in which they are historically imbricated.

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ORCID for Erin Johnson-Williams: orcid.org/0000-0002-3305-5783

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