It's March. It's 2015. And well into my sabbatical, I am finally making some time to get back to this blog. Which, as I flick back through previous posts, is a good thing for personal bibliotherapeutic outcomes, just like making more time for fresh air and walks every day. What's helped nudge me back to this space? Andrew Piper's Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (University of Chicago Press, 2013). I have so much to catch up on, but rather than try and backfill, let's start from right now, and the visceral and intellectual jump-start responses evoked from the first pages of this book: this beautifully produced, pale cream-paper, Spring-coloured-cover, book! It arrived today, after I'd ordered it after starting to read another of Piper's books, Book Was There (University of Chicago Press, 2012). This one, too, excited with the promise of the first few pages, so more will follow on that, am sure. I've been doing a lot of talking about books - specifically academic books - recently, as part of the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future project that I'm involved in, but ironically, haven't had much time to read any. Yet my to-read list has been growing, glutting, on all the recommendations that people have been passing on. Books about books; books about reading books; books about conserving books; books as containers for research, for ideas, for dreams....
Piper says, in the Acknowledgments section of Dreaming in Books, "Academic books by their very nature belong to a profession. But as my Doktormutter once wrote, the dividing line between professing and confessing, between public speech and private sentiment, is hard to trace." It's made me think hard about Acknowledgments: rare to find an academic book that doesn't have some sort of acknowledgment declaration, or a dedication (although I find I must immediately undermine that declaration by noting that Piper's Book Was There has none!) We write and research courtesy of our colleagues' generosity with advice and time, and with the patience and support of friends and families. The domestic, as well as professional, contexts in which research is produced are co-existant, co-dependent.
So, what effect might these contexts have had on the final, disseminated product? Any published work has a hidden set of histories and secret agents: but what might we learn about the processes of academic research from these? Since studying the recent Crossick Report, I have become intrigued by the idea that some works of research become iconic - they shape the field, and remain an important part of it for generations of scholars who follow. Take C. S. Lewis's The Allegory of Love: a key text for medievalists, I'd argue, and certainly one which helped direct my own academic research. Lewis thanks many people in his Preface, including some very familiar names: do the comments that Tolkien made on the first chapter, for instance, still exist? What impact did his input have on the final draft? Alongside academic thanks, though, Lewis says "the greatest of these debts -- that which I owe to my father for the inestimable benefit of a childhood passed mostly alone in a house full of books -- is now beyond repayment". A glimpse of a very personal history, yet clearly one which the author felt had bearing on his research. The book is dedicated to Owen Barfield, Lewis's long-standing friend, "wisest and best of my unofficial teachers". The debts Lewis feels he owes to people reveal, very quickly in this Preface, the web of influence that surrounds any great work. Barfield dedicated some of his own books to Lewis, and Lewis's fictional bestseller, arguably also iconic piece of children's literature, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was written for Barfield's daughter, Lucy. As Lewis says, "facts and inferences and even turns of expression find a lodging in a man's mind, he scarcely remembers how". Yet as academics, as writers with any sort of integrity, we must try and acknowledge where these come from, trying to create a road map of the genetics of ideas. There's more to pull on, here, but am signing off to do some more dreaming in books of my own.....