Lives Written by Hand
Stories about the life writing that emerges in diverse forms and formats of eighteenth-century books, in both print and manuscript
About the Collection
Julie Park
Lives Written by Hand, A Digital Exhibition
Spring 2024
In Spring Semester 2024, Julie Park, Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and Professor of English, taught an English Department graduate seminar, “English 597.001: Writing Lives by Hand,” on the materiality of life writing in eighteenth-century England. Alongside more traditional examples of life writing, such as memoir, autobiography, epistolary correspondence and diary writing, this seminar considered life writing as a material practice of recording and documenting the experience of living. Students engaged directly with commonplace books, almanacs, miscellanies, and annotated or extra-illustrated books held in Penn State University’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library to uncover how life writing is deeply entangled with the bibliographic materials, tools and techniques used for producing it.
In doing so, the seminar developed perspectives on the material nuances inhering in classic experimentations in fictional life writing. From the intricate construction of letters in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela to the subversiveness of the marbled page in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, these novels’ critical positioning of material texts in their plots and narratives would be unknowable without our encounters with the corresponding bibliographic artifacts held in the Penn State University Library’s Special Collections, as well as the processes of making them.
To that end, a vital feature of the class was the program of workshops Professor Park developed in order to give students an opportunity to experience directly the textual materiality of eighteenth-century life writing. In a letter folding workshop, for instance, held in conjunction with our week on Pamela, students learned how to fold letters so they turned into their own envelopes, early modern style, from watching “letterlocking” videos produced by the Unlocking History team.
The seminar was fortunate to experience workshops led by live experts as well, and is indebted to the expertise of Marissa Nicosia, Associate Professor of Renaissance English at Penn State Abington, for leading a workshop on early modern penmanship. With her, the seminar practiced reading early modern handwriting and copied a seventeenth-century manuscript recipe with their own quill pens and iron gall ink.
The seminar is also deeply grateful to William (“Bill”) Minter, Senior Book Conservator, Penn State University Park, who organized and ran workshops on paper making and letterpress printing at Penn State’s Conservation Centre. The seminar made their own paper with cotton pulp and individual wood frames, and came back a few weeks later to use the same paper for a letterpress printing workshop in which the Conservation Centre’s own Washington Press, an iron hand press from the 1820s, was used.
The course culminated with a collaboratively curated class exhibition built around the book each student “adopted,” for which they wrote a biography as well. In their contributions to the class exhibition, each seminar member selected two books to accompany their adopted book, writing labels for all three books, and creating bibliographic, biographic and cultural historical narratives for their selections. In all these projects the graduate students learned how to describe and analyze the material features of rare books and manuscripts, contextualize them historically, and practice public humanities work by communicating their scholarly research on books as material objects to a general, non-academic audience. They also became familiar with scholarship in book history and bibliography studies in their weekly reading assignments and entered the scholarly conversations therein with their weekly reading responses and final paper assignment. Their final paper entailed writing the biography of the book that the seminar member had adopted at the beginning of the class, thus engaging with book history as practitioners themselves.
In this online exhibition, “Lives Written by Hand,” students tell stories about the life writing that emerges in diverse forms and formats of eighteenth-century books, in both print and manuscript held in Penn State’s Special Collection Library: two different travel diaries written respectively by a male teen and a middle-aged antiquarian scholar, a commonplace book with botanical specimens pressed between its leaves, a bible taken apart and pasted and rebound into a blank notebook by its owner to create more space for his annotations, a fictional narrative masquerading as the memoir of a white female slave taken captive by Algerian pirates, a communally written cookbook, and the serially formatted memoir of a canny courtesan with her own printing press who manipulated past lovers for money by threatening to share details of their sexual encounters in her publication.
The following critical themes about the material forms and formats of life writing that emerged in our seminar discussions can be detected in each student’s curation of their mini exhibition.
The material forms and formats of life writing…
- alter temporality through the strategic ordering of pages, sections, and lines
- reveals, shapes, and create and recreates the self
- bring together social worlds through communal writing practices
- stage the interplay of different media: print, manuscript, word, image
- inhere in the processes of material changes and alterations borne by the book object itself
- are created in implicit dialogue with an audience, even if that audience is only oneself
At the end of the semester, the class created a commonplace book together that allowed students to voice and distill in their own words the most significant realizations they made.
A pivotal critical insight that Chaunece Reed developed as a result of taking the class was: documentary life writing practices such as album- and scrapbook-keeping compel its makers to become archivists of their own lives. As she put it,
Despite the myriad functions, or the significance of context/situation/person that is being preserved, through this practice of documentation – authors/collaborators are archivists. The things they choose to (and choose not to) preserve are indicative of human experience – endured as we grow in age and closer to death.
Genevieve Gordon’s class commonplace book entry reflects on how the many different material genres and formats encountered in the class opened her eyes to the way life writing ineluctably serves as a vehicle for molding and forming the self:
This seminar’s focus on materiality has stressed to me the importance of one’s interactions with the book as an object to [an] articulation of the self. Life writing appears to me now as a set of physical and intellectual negotiations between a writer and their materials, out of which a sense of self and life are built and sustained. Self-fashioning is also material fashioning, and vice versa. Such a definition can account for the very wide range of life writing we have worked with, from the highly decorative social aesthetics of extra-illustration to the practicality of a family recipe book, an annotated almanac, or an accounts ledger.
The following exhibition will lead you through this range of eighteenth-century life writing, as interpreted and contextualized by the Spring 2024 graduate seminar members of English 597.001: Writing Lives by Hand:
- Ariannie Autie
- Chaunece Reed
- Mollie Bowman
- Genevieve Gordon
- Grace King
- Richard Lu
- Brett White
–Julie Park, Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and Professor of English
Acknowledgements:
In addition to our workshop leaders, Bill Minter and Marissa Nicosia, the seminar is indebted to the many other hands, ears and minds that made both the exhibition and class possible. First and foremost thanks goes to Jenn Isasi, Assistant Director of the Office of Digital Pedagogies and Initiatives and Director of the Digital Liberal Arts Research Initiative, who was absolutely critical in designing and managing the CollectionBuilder site on which the digital exhibition is mounted, and for visiting the class to give us a metadata tutorial.
We also thank Sue Kellerman, Judith O Sieg Chair for Preservation and Jacqui Quinn, Preservation Services Manager for hosting and facilitating our workshops with Bill Minter at the Conservation Centre. Bethann Rea, Digital Collections Management Librarian and Sarah Bildner, Digital Production Supervisor in Preservation, Conservation and Digitization must be thanked profusely for capturing beautiful images of the exhibition items at record speed.
Colleagues in Penn State Special Collections, especially Racine Amos, Special Collections Librarian for Instruction, Outreach and Engagement, provided invaluable support throughout the semester and warrant immense gratitude.
Technical Credits - CollectionBuilder
This digital collection is built with CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that is developed by faculty librarians at the University of Idaho Library following the Lib-Static methodology.
The site started from the CollectionBuilder-GH template which utilizes the static website generator Jekyll and GitHub Pages to build and host digital collections and exhibits.