This past weekend, I attended the Past, Present and Future of the Book conference held at nearby Cornell College. It was one of the more intriguing book history conferences I've been to (and not only because one of the keynotes featured an out-of-tune ukelele with a hidden book inside). The conference brought together both academics -- like Iowa's very own Matt Brown (the director of the UI Center for the Book) -- and book artists (such as Peter Thomas who played the aforementioned ukelele). It was a chance both to discover and celebrate the book-work being done locally, and to think more broadly about the role of craft in the digital age.
I was there to deliver a report on the survey of STC books we've done here in the Iowa Special Collections over the last year or so -- a report that was part of a joint presentation with Rachel Stevenson, the undergraduate researcher who actually did the work of surveying the collection. Most of what I had to say has appeared here before, in a post I called "less known libraries" which considered the differences between our own survey of STC books -- which focused on used books -- and a previous survey conducted in the 1960s, which focused only on books of established literary merit. Rachel's part of the presentation was a distillation of the honors thesis she's been working on, which takes as its subject a copy of Spenser's 1679 Works annotated by an eighteenth-century woman reader (!). What follows here is a version of her conference paper, which, for a number of reasons, I'm calling "Her Book."