I’m not sure whether it was nostalgia or convenience that led me to the BPL Rare Books Room – I’d hoped to branch out, but the transportation shutdown made that trickier to manage with my schedule – but it felt like falling into an old routine from last spring when I was in the Books, Manuscripts, Libraries seminar (and seeing my portion of the exhibit on the way in is always cool.)

I wonder a little whether I cheated myself, and a bit more whether I’m cheating on this assignment: there are finding aids and a private stack system like any archive, sure, but in the rare books reading room the collection is detailed at the item level and stacked in two long card catalogs: sorted by name on one side and by region and date on the other: so that I always feel tempted to — and this time I did — spend some time sorting through Ireland, Galway, 19th c. or Philadelphia, mid-18th c. and trying to look for genealogical hints. The latter proved more successful, since my mother’s great-great-etc.-grandfather was a Revolutionary War era painter: it’s not the first time there I’ve pulled Rembrandt Peale’s letter or two out of the archive and ran my hand (gently!) over the signature.

And what I thought was going to be a tangent brings me to one of the points I’d like to bring up in passing: I feel really interested in the margins of an archive, which makes me, perhaps, more a dilettante than a proper researcher. It’s obviously more useful to find a complete set of papers or union records or letters, but I’ve always been interested in the odd pieces out — the one or two letters that a Philadelphia artist, say, wrote to a Boston historian, or that a great British writer wrote in passing to an acquaintance in America — the edge cases, let’s call them, of an archive that is otherwise slanted toward certain types of literature and documents.

The discovery process happens so often, then, at the card catalog level (rather than on the individual item level or higher up in a finding aid), and sometimes I think the effect of this organization is not so much one of discovery – the bag of seeds moment Farge describes, say, or the surprising letter sandwiched between two more generic documents, or the experience of rifling through boxes for surprises – but instead one of depth.

You know you’re asking for a letter written by Robert Browning, for example; you know the recipient; you may even get a brief one-sentence summary on the weathered index card, and know that he was responding to condolences on the death of his wife. All this you already know before filling out the small paper request slip and waiting for the material to be (slowly) found and pulled – a brief summary of your experience is already laid out for you —

What you experience instead then is the physicality of the object: in this case, the thick black of the ink, the flourish of the handwriting (an experience that always makes me want more paleographic training), and, most strikingly, the black border on the paper, part of the elaborate system of Victorian mourning custom for a widower.

(Farge was writing before the advent of smartphones and pocket cameras, and the preface does a good job preemptively defending the physical archives by talking about the errors of technological reproduction, but here I think for a second about recopying. If “the hand, by reproducing the written syllables, archaic words, and syntax of a century long past, could insert itself into that time more boldly than thoughtful notes ever could” (17), what about what the hand misses in direct transcription that the eye can catch?)

The experience of working with the details of an object which often escape transcription is one I’m interested in while doing archive work (or maybe this is better classed as “rare book work” or even “special collections work.”) Even more so than the unpredictability of sifting through a box, I like knowing exactly what I’m going to get — and then, it will always turn out, not knowing at all.