on Book Anatomy

Alp Eren Pirli (AEP): We would like to begin with the theoretical grounds of your project. Studying the book through the lens of body studies is in and of itself not new. Chapters come from the Latin word caput, meaning head; then there are footnotes, etc. Books are, in essence, bodies. I am wondering, though, what exactly inspired you to study Indigenous books and publishing in the context of the resonance between bodies and books.

Amy Gore (AG): I had some excellent training in my doctoral program, and part of that training was to question what seems “natural.” It does seem remarkably natural–and I love that you brought some etymology into this–that books do seem like bodies in this very particular way, more so than other objects. Maybe we identify ships as “female” and there might be a smattering of similar language with other objects, but not to the extent of books. And so, even though the connection between books and bodies does seem natural and is really embedded in our language, even down to etymology, I wanted to question that seeming naturalness as part of the foundation of my project.

My book project started out very differently. My master’s thesis was on the Indigenous Gothic, and I thought that my dissertation would take me in that direction. But then, as I was starting to draft my project, I realized that each chapter could be said to focus on a different body part, and I remember going to my dissertation advisor and discussing the two potential directions for my project. I could stick with the Indigenous Gothic and continue to explore its literary traditions. But the way in which, all of a sudden, I found myself talking about the body parts of books felt like a more productive way to go with this book, although you might still recognize it as coming in some ways from this Gothic tradition and the ways in which the Gothic draws our attention to the body.

Around the same time, I was taking a class with my mentor, Dr. Jesse Aléman, and he mentioned in passing in the class that books move–that in the nineteenth century, books were being left on trains for other passengers to pick up. It was a revelatory moment for me: books had movement. Even through the late-twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, with magazines and waiting rooms, we might see a shared social experience emerge through documents and the way they move between people and through society. I became fascinated with the ways in which a book’s materiality created and facilitated a social experience, and I started taking classes with the Rare Book School out of the University of Virginia in addition to my coursework at the University of New Mexico. In this way, the dissertation changed direction. I would also say that the crystallization of the turning point for my project was coming across Beth McCoy's “Race and the (Para)textual Condition” (2006). I hadn't seen another scholar use bibliographical language to flesh out (no pun intended!) the relationship between books and bodies, and McCoy’s text became a touchstone for my own project.

So, I started to see what book history, what bibliographical language, could help us do in reading the book, and really, it provides an entirely new way of reading–one that I hadn’t come across before. As readers, and sometimes even as scholars, we tend to open the first page of the first chapter and go all the way to the end of the narrative, and we tend to overlook all of these paratextual elements, although they still make an impact on us without our realizing it. In the intersection of these influences, I started to question the naturalness of our reading practices and take a closer look at the agency and “naturalness” of the connection between books and bodies.

Colby Townsend (CT): As a first-generation college student, it was a pleasure for me to read your deeply personal acknowledgments page. You describe your own experience as a graduate student peering behind the veil of academic life as you would read academic books, gaining insights in a way not afforded to you, given our shared upbringing. Can you describe your decision to write such a personal acknowledgments page? And, out of curiosity for those of us who have not yet written our first books: what was the press’s response to the details that you shared?

AG: If I’m recalling the sequence of this book correctly, I wrote the acknowledgments after the peer review of the manuscript. I don’t think the acknowledgments are typically included in a full manuscript that goes out for review. My editor had no comment; it was a non-issue, and I would expect that acknowledgments are given a type of carte blanche. In fact, I had no comments from anyone on the acknowledgments page. So, I spent quite a bit of time drafting it, but it went from my pen to print without peer review. It is interesting how this genre comes to being–it’s not typically something that’s peer reviewed or commented on.

For me, it was particularly appealing to read the acknowledgments in other people’s monographs, to be able to hear about their journey and, in a way, to meet the scholar more directly. You engage with a scholar’s intellectual ideas, their intellectual style, and their training through the pages of the book. But the acknowledgment page is like a handshake. It feels like that conference experience when we get to meet someone in person and are able to come up to them after a conference and ask questions. So, there was no pushback in the publication of my acknowledgments, and I would say my decision to include them was really based off of my experiences as a first-generation student.

I think about all the help that I’ve received, all the debt that I’ve accrued. Some of that is financial, and I wanted to lay that bare with the state of student loans. But some of it is emotional, personal, or social debt–actually, debt isn’t the right word. Reciprocity, maybe, or mentorship. As book historians, we’re well aware that “monograph” is a misnomer. There’s no “mono”–no single person–in a book. All books are collaborative efforts, even if there’s only a single name in the byline. I wanted to emphasize that more fully in the acknowledgments page by saying: here’s everyone who has supported me, who has enabled me to be a scholar. This is down to pets, down to people who have pulled you aside at a conference and just checked in, down to the environment in which I wrote. I was lucky enough to write in New Mexico and be able to step outside frequently and absorb that sunshine that kept me going sometimes. I think perhaps every graduate student can relate to feeling burned out physically as well as mentally, and for me, being able to step outside helps me write. I wanted to, as fully as I could, try to acknowledge all the support I received.

AEP: One element that connects the authors that you discuss in your book is their deployment of established literary genres. In the first two chapters, we see the Western story, the autobiography, and the sentimental novel. How do Native authors navigate the limits of these genres to challenge narratives of colonialism?

AG: I appreciate this question! I think one of the ways in which I’ve learned to think about the book is as ongoing–as not having “ended” with its publication. One of the ways in which my book has not ended is the way in which it’s initiated, for me, an ongoing consideration of genre. I feel, in some sense, much less certain of what genre is. I’m thinking of Derrida here, and the way in which he pushes back against the concept of generic categories. Texts contain multiple genres, and I found that the way Native authors engage with genre is to constantly reinvent, to rewrite our conventions, our understandings of genre. But in some ways, I think all authors do that, and I think that there’s something productive and fruitful about thinking of a text as engaging in multiple genres rather than just one. So I think about that with my chapter on Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. Her book has been called an autobiography; I call it a war memoir in this chapter. I think that it’s easy to say that it does both; it contains both. Then, I think we can have a productive conversation about genre from both lenses. Genre is more amorphous for me after writing this book, and I think productively so.

CT: Your book explicitly works to get scholars to be grounded in the historical, not just in the past, but in the present as well. You share many examples throughout the book that highlight the need to pay attention to context and politics in our academic work. Pretty Shield is a fascinating case study for several reasons. Not only is the material book imprinted with her physical body, but it’s also done in a way that is highly political. This made me think about how fingerprints had only recently been added to US jurisprudence. Would you mind speaking about what that important historical context might add to our understanding when you have an Indigenous American author not only imprinting their body onto their book, but in doing so essentially saying this is strong enough evidence that you could use in court to prove my “guilt”—so to speak—in writing this narrative?

AG: I love this question, and I’m going to answer it in a slightly unexpected way. One of the issues that I had in thinking about how to market or present this book was how to place it historically. Originally, I had a first chapter that I later cut, which began with Samson Occom’s A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, published in 1772. So, the original book project spanned from 1772 to 1936! I struggled with what to call this era: the long, long nineteenth century?

Plus, so much here is contemporary for me. So, even though the texts that I chose end in 1936, I also address the twenty-first century in my conclusion. I think some of that is my training in Indigenous studies, which primed me to think of time as interconnected and cyclical, and to consider what it means to think about the past and the future always being in the present. It felt like the most productive way to read these books was to emphasize that these are ongoing, living issues, in living Native communities. Another way in which I had difficulty placing this book is that I trace every reprint of these books into their most contemporary printing. So, even though in the dissertation version, I can say I began the project’s timeline in 1772, my book extends to Joanna Brooks’s most recent publication of Occom’s works and to the Penguin edition of Murieta, just published in the twenty-first century. Time became amorphous, the era in which I was working in also became amorphous, and genre, also. I felt like that was important to bring to book history—that even though we ground our study in history, it’s very much an ongoing and relevant history, with ongoing issues of preservation, of archives, and of access.

CT: In the first chapter, you spend a lot of time explaining how reprints of early American fiction can continue the violence against Indigenous and presumably other minority authors in the ways that reprints set up the text, its notes, images, and added material. What do you hope publishers might do differently in the future, as they consider reprinting Indigenous authors’ texts?

AG: I think one of the ongoing considerations for me, even after publishing this book, is what would it look like to have an Indigenous editing process, or Indigenous-informed editing? What would it look like to produce an encompassing paratextual edition of Murieta, for example? Would one go back and make sure every cover of every edition was represented to truly claim that this is the collected works and to be able to give that historical access to scholars? Would we go back and reprint every introduction to the book, and include that as being able to give scholars access to the changing ways that the text has been marketed and received over time? I think that that is something to consider in the practice of editing. What does twenty-first-century editing look like? Perhaps it includes this attention to the paratext, to a reproduction of the paratext as well as the text itself.

I am working on a second book right now. It’s an edited collection, so I’ve been thinking a lot about Indigenous-informed editorial practices, and we are including a chapter by an Indigenous book designer. I just finished editing that chapter and reading it over. It was fascinating. I think not only should we continue to consider what twenty-first-century editing practices might look like, but to think about better representation of Indigenous practices. I just picked up Richard Jean So’s new book, Redlining Culture. I think there’s a lot to scrutinize about our publishing monopolies in the US and how to do things differently, how to engage with those monopolies, how to support independent publishers, and what those final products might look like in taking into consideration the paratext.

AEP: In the next question, we will address what’s outside the text and—to borrow from Derrida—what cannot be outside the text. To me, one of the most memorable parts of your book was the fourth chapter’s opening, where the controversial Three Peoples paintings at the University of New Mexico’s Zimmerman Library provide a backdrop to a discussion of the cover of University of New Mexico Press’s reprint of D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded. To what extent did the institution and its history, where you did your PhD, influence or inspire Book Anatomy?

AG: My institution and its history, as well as other places that I’ve lived, deeply influenced this book. I was working and studying at UNM. In the early stages of this book I would study in the Zimmerman Library, and that was a time before the Three Peoples mural was covered by drapes, and I would regularly walk by those murals. I was also teaching English 120, a writing class, and sometimes I would include a unit that taught students to engage critically with art as well as text. So sometimes I would walk students to some of the different murals in the library, including the Three Peoples mural, and ask them to consider it critically and write about that experience. At the very tail end of when I was studying at UNM, the university put together an institution-wide class on the Three Peoples mural and the issues surrounding it. The class offered students the opportunity to have an extended conversation about the murals in a semester, then have multiple speakers come and weigh in, and then have the class actually make a recommendation at the end of the semester about what to do with the mural. This was very much an ongoing issue at my institution—embodied in these murals—which I brought to the book as an obvious connection.

I also had the opportunity to go and look at the UNM Press’s back catalogs from the 1970s at UNM’s Center for Southwest Research to see how the early issues of The Surrounded were selling or not selling, as the case was. Place deeply informed my book in layered ways. I also gained my master’s degree at Montana State University, so there was the Montana connection with The Surrounded by D’Arcy McNickle, and then, of course, Pretty Shield as well. And then the earlier chapter that ended up being cut, the “ghost chapter,” as I’ve been calling it in my head, was with Occom and Apess, who are Indigenous to the New England area where I was born. Most of what I wrote about felt deeply connected to place and issues of place that were manifesting in the books that I was taking up.

CT: I think always paying attention to the details and what is and what’s not in our subject matter is so important; the black and the white space. As a scholar who also spends a lot of time in book history and focuses on paratextual matter, I was excited to see how crucial paratext was to your argument. Why do you think scholars have not paid attention to paratext and different paratextual matter through multiple editions in order to understand the history of the books that they’re studying?

AG: I love that question. I think because we have thought about what we do based on the textual narrative, we perhaps have been reluctant in some ways to think about the book as an object or to fully consider all aspects of the book. Perhaps there are labor issues that are being ignored there. I’m really excited by the work being done in recovering historical printers—James Printer, as one example—and by the work of Jonathan Senchyne and others in recovering enslaved workers in print shops. I think that there is certainly a race and class issue in the ways books are being produced—the issues surrounding the textual narrative itself. I think part of that comes with this romanticism that the text has become removed from these historical processes. Sometimes, we want to think of the text as surpassing time, whereas I think book history returns to embedding the text in time and labor and how crucial that is.

I think that the most exciting work of our era is to widen the lens—to look at what’s happening across the globe with the production of the book and to extend our panoramic scope of literary history when we think through that lens.

AEP: I want to bring the topic of discussion to digitization, which so often ignores the paratext. In the conclusion of Book Anatomy, you problematize the disembodied nature of digitization as it is practiced today. It often ignores paratextual elements; it does not note the differences between different versions and reprints; it forgets the material history of different copies of books. At the same time, you note that digitization does have the potential to greatly increase access to materials that otherwise would not be available to readers. What would be a good pathway to a process of digitization that accurately represents the biblio-diverse materiality of Indigenous works? Would that even be a feasible goal?

AG: My conclusion was the most challenged part of my book, first by my dissertation committee and then by my peer reviewers. I’m skeptical about the possibility of digitization fully representing biblio-diversity. There are so many copies that include unique marginalia, for one. I would have a hard time imagining trying to capture every copy of every edition of every book digitally. To some extent, I question: why would we? We already have them to the extent that they’ve been preserved in every copy of every edition of every book. Do we also need to digitize those? I feel like there is a commitment to place that comes with archival research and that digitization can help us gain access, but in helping us gain access to a digitized copy, we ourselves become disembodied from an obligation to place.

That is what I write about in my conclusion. Archival research is, to some extent, prohibitively expensive—you have to find grant funding or come up with the funds in some other way to enable you to go and do archival research. On the other hand, many of the major research grants available to nineteenth-century scholars are through archival grants, which support our careers when we receive awards and the departmental leave that enables our research. So, despite the ongoing issues of access and inequity, the commitment to an archival place—which is an embodied commitment—cannot and should not be replaced by digitization. There is value in reproducing the digital and gaining preliminary research access to materials, but I hope my book will emphasize the importance of materiality.

AEP: It’s interesting that your conclusion was the most challenged part of your book, because it’s such an important argument to make. I am from a developing country—I did my BA in Turkey—and I would not have been able to write my bachelor’s thesis without digitized materials. At the same time, digitized copies of books are never accurate reproductions or even replications of the original material itself; they often become new material, so to speak. It’s never actually the original copy that one experiences when one reads a digitized copy. So, it’s just such an important contribution that you make in your conclusion.

AG: Thank you. It’s complex, right? I rewrote and revised some of this book during COVID, so, of course, I also would not have had access to archives during that time. In fact, some really important archival research happened at the very tail end of revising this book. I was able to go to Kansas State and look at a second edition of Wynema and add that material in at the eleventh hour. I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I have not been able to see in person a first edition of Wynema due to COVID restrictions (and some funding restrictions).

Ultimately, there is a place for the digital, and I don’t mean to undermine that. However, my argument is that the digital is not a replacement for the material object—it cannot ever be that. We should also question the assumption that creating a digital copy of something makes it more accessible. There are well-known issues with internet access in Indigenous country. As I write about in my conclusion, through COVID, we saw the real inaccessibility of internet service and digitization for whole communities of people who had difficulty, either financially or logistically, getting equal access to the digital. I think a part of the work of book history is to question assumptions about access.

CT: Yeah, I think to extend your argument just a little, it’s almost like we should really think about digitization as an invitation to the original. It’s out there so that you can get a sense of what’s there, but then it invites us to go and actually see the original, pending funding and everything else.

AG: Yes, and there are other issues as well. There are well-known gender issues with archival research because women primarily, but not exclusively, become caregivers for their families and have a much harder time leaving their families—especially for extended periods of time—to do archival research. So again, there are very real access issues regarding digitization and print. But I think that we need to fully acknowledge, instead of assume, the complications of both.