Sarah Werner's blog about reading, early modern books, and digital tools
Is reading ever easy? Is knowing what you want to read possible? The times when the two click—when you find a book that says not what you know but what you need to hear—are the times I remember with the most longing. When a book speaks to you, and you are able to hear it, it’s everything. This year it was a struggle to find that match, to meet with a book each on our terms. My needs from reading…
I’ve been writing these posts since 2015, and, especially in recent years, I keep asking the same question: what is time anyway? This year is no different. Or, it is different because there are new griefs and fears and time is moving in ways both slow and fast and it slips through my fingers before I know what to do. Part of this feeling comes from the year’s circumstances. I went to New Zealand…
Isn’t a bit weird that we do end-of-year reading highlights? By “we” I of course mean me, but also I’m not the only one who does this. Is this the turn from 2022 to 2023? Is this the middle of 5753? Is this also the 1036th day of March 2020?1 All these things are true, time is a construct, I think I’ve said all this in other years, too, so I guess time is also a circle or something. It’s been a…
What follows is a talk I gave (over zoom) on June 29, 2022, for the London Rare Book School. I’m deeply grateful to Elizabeth Savage for the invitation to speak—both for her original invitation to deliver this in person back in the summer of 2020 and for her invitation to revisit this as a zoom talk now. Back when we had first planned this, I was in the early public stages of talking about…
I can’t believe I called last year’s reading post “reading in a hellscape” when 2021 was lurking around the corner. Is 2021 worse than 2020? By sheer dint of not being dramatically better, yes, yes it is worse. This has been a shit year of rollercoastering. I know Biden says this isn’t March 2020 and it’s not, but it is December 2021 facing another winter of isolating and feeling like you can’t…
Well, this year didn’t go the way we thought it was going to at the start, did it? And I can’t even really remember this year accurately it turns out. I thought I hardly read anything, but I read slightly more than I did last year—65 books over last year’s 58, although last year’s numbers were down over 2018’s, and those were lower than 2017’s. I did read a lot of fluff, which is true to my…
Back in the beforetimes, I submitted a proposal to the Shakespeare Association of America to run a workshop in the planned spring 2021 annual meeting in Austin on “Teaching with Special Collections.” My hope was to do the same thing that drives much of what I do—to help demystify the types of teaching that can happen in collaboration between faculty and rare materials librarians. And then came the…
One of my current projects has been thinking about what a feminist practice of bibliography looks like. As I’ve shared before, I struggled when writing my book to figure out how to build a feminist stance when I was focused on machines and processes rather than people. How do we create a feminist printing history when we’re not doing a history of a women printing? Over the past couple of years…
I’m not sure how to talk about my reading this year. My downwards trend continued—58 books in 2019, down from 72 in 2018 and 102 in 2017. I don’t love reading any less, but I am having a hard time figuring out what to read—as far as I can recollect, there are 19 books that I thought I would read or abandoned part-way through. And those are surely as much of my year in reading as the ones I did…
Remember how once upon a time I used to find weird old printing things and get excited about them and then blog about them? That was fun. I’m going to try doing that again, only this time in newsletter form. The tl;dr version is that you can head over to sarahwerner.substack.com and sign up for Early Printed Fun to get periodic (twice a month?) emails from me about some bit of early printed…