Field Notes From The Archive: Field Note No. 6

Ruthie Block | Yale University | November 2024

In past bibliographical work, I’ve learned to examine the materiality of early Black print objects, developing strategies for reading pulps mixed into paste overs and the rough edges of torn-out pages as evidence, rather than, merely, as absence. Omissions and injuries— through a bibliographical perspective— can serve as an entry point into the questions I’m often circling: What life did the author intend for her text object to live? What life did this object live, in reality? What aren’t we meant to know and what does it mean for us to accept the terms laid out for us by all of those who have handled and circulated and cared for this object before our encounter with it in the archive? Looking for nothing in particular and finding stories in all of the material quirks of a text has proven quite difficult when examining (exclusively, published) text objects in search of evidence to be entered as concrete data for the Black Bibliography Project (BBP). Here, the difference between bibliographical and bibliographic work comes into sharper focus.

Logging Jupiter Hammon’s A Winter Piece (1782 edition) and David Walker’s Appeal (as published in the 1834 Minutes of the fourth annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour), I was struck by the way in which my orientation towards sites of physical damage to a text object were necessarily informed by the imperatives of data entry. Hammon’s work, already weathered and unbound, had suffered a severe burn such that the final 1/3rd of the leaves had been entirely singed through the middle. The pages were left unreadable, possibly obfuscating evidence of, say, provenance or annotations. Walker’s Appeal had been torn such that only the top 1.5 inches remained of the title page. About 2 inches remained of the following leaf. Were this text not already broadly recognizable, I wouldn’t have been able to log the full title of the work, let alone other information traditionally consigned to the title page. Still, we will never recover certain information about this particular printing of Walker’s Appeal.

Bibliographically speaking, I’m drawn to an embrace of the fugitive nature of what has (been) disappeared from us, in the now.

And yet, working within bibliography to produce a record via data entry, I recognize that these absences pose a practical challenge.

Working on these texts in the context of the BBP demands that I contend with the implications of information lost. Anxious over missing links in our data model, I’m trying to reconcile the bibliographical and the bibliographic. I’m beginning to better understand both modes of research for what they might afford us and for that which they absolutely refuse. I want us, at the BBP, to build a database that attends to the history of Black self-publishing in as much detail as possible, but I don’t yet know how to do that without conceding to disrepair and decay as, solely: gaps in an already uneven Black information landscape.

If you have any suggestions, sound off!