We have just finished the first week of the new semester here in Iowa. As for many, the start of the fall semester is the only date on the academic calendar that feels as if something new is starting--or that at least contains some degree of anticipation. (Our "spring" term begins in the dead of January winter, when everyone feels like lamenting a lost existence along with Falstaff and Shallow). It is also the moment when we professors start doing that most visible aspect of our job--teaching the thousands of students who have recently returned. Of course, we've been preparing to do this part of our jobs for weeks (if not months!) beforehand, labor that is often lost and invisible to those unfamiliar with what it takes to plan and prepare for this kind of teaching.
The end of summer also brings to an end the survey of our STC collection, a task that has taken my intrepid undergraduate researcher Rachel the better part of eight months (with a bit more aggregating and updating our database to come). We are finally at a point to start thinking about the collection as a whole--the patterns which have emerged, and in some cases the surprising patterns that have emerged from this page-by-page venture through every printed book in the library's Special Collections up to 1640.
Together, these two things--a new beginning of sorts, and an ending of sorts--lead me to what I'd like to discuss here: the way a book begins, and how that beginning is often lost or obscured by what happens to it afterward.