Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings

Janelle Rebel (Everyday Press, 2024)

An anthology of idiosyncratic bibliographies seems, at first glance, unlikely to have much appeal for any non-specialist reader. The very word “bibliography” has a soporific effect … some of us might already be asleep trying to figure out how a book about lists of books could be interesting.

Janelle Rebel, Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings (Everyday Press, 2024) cover.

But Janelle Rebel’s volume is a treasure trove of interesting ideas and projects that makes for completely absorbing reading. It is not simply a bibliography with a single focus, but instead, a remarkable bibliography of bibliographies in which each entry describes a book list put together according to the whim and passion of an author, scholar, or artist. That passion comes through in each project and Rebel uses this to illuminate the often curious connections between books, the classification of knowledge, and expression of ideas in custom-designed schemes. These are collections found in the wild, far from the rule-governed shelves that follow Library of Congress subject headings.

At the outset, Rebel briefly outlines the selection criteria she used for picking these projects. To be included in her catalogue of “unconventional” collections the projects had to be innovative in some visual or phenomenal way, their presentations necessarily performative—that is, having some element that engages an audience through graphic or interactive means. Each addition had to contribute to the goal of being broadly inclusive of diverse perspectives, and in addition, the projects had to be public and open, accessible to a broad readership. But most important, each had to have some distinguishing feature, something that made it unique, experimental, even un-categorizable. In most cases, that meant a combination of unusual subject matter or an unusual classification scheme, as well as a visual component to the presentation. Another consideration was that the projects needed to be user-friendly and display some measure of hospitality to their users. No password protected, behind a firewall, or esoterically obscure systems. Some of these works were presented in galleries or other exhibition venues as interactive works or novel modes of display, and encouraged interaction through their physical form.

            The process of collecting these entries took Rebel about eight years, which is not surprising given their range and variety, and the task reflects her expertise in librarianship as well as in the arts. The projects in the catalogue are from a twenty-year span in the first decades of the 20^th century, though Rebel’s intellectual framework draws on a much longer perspective.

As an object, this is a thick, solid, little block of a book that handles beautifully. Rebel has collected, described, and presented more than 60 projects in print, gallery spaces, and online platforms that show how inspiring the acts of selecting and organizing books can be. As used here, the term “book” within bibliography need not reference a physical object, but can indicate a title that exists in digital form or other surrogate. Still, the principles of bibliography underpin these works by virtue of the lists and descriptions of which they are composed.

            Bibliography properly belongs to the realm of library science and information studies where it serves to provide a foundation for description and authentification of objects. The systematic description of books and their organization is essential for “collections management,” a phrase that does not exactly inspire immediate enthusiasm the way, say, “girls night out” or “cats on the prowl” might. However, for the geeks among us, the intellectual frameworks that guide shelf order and cataloguing systems are pure catnip. Here we see the spiritual profile of a culture, its hierarchy of values and beliefs. For years, for instance, books on homosexuality were catalogued under the category of mental illness until Sanford Berman challenged this and other designations within the Library of Congress system.[1] In most libraries, the Apocrypha are not shelved with Old Testament works with which they are contemporary and to which some scholars argue they belong. My book Dark Decade, published in 1995, a prescient creative work about techno-fascist futures, was classified under the subject heading History—American, 1990s. These examples raise all kinds of issues that expose the biases of classification.

            Still, bibliographic systems are inflexible on purpose since they are meant to make things identifiable and findable. The earliest known bibliography, the Pinakes, was made by the Greek poet-scholar Callimachus to organize the library at Alexandria. Considering that the library was meant to contain copies of all the known volumes of the time, estimated to have included several hundred thousand scrolls, this was no doubt very useful. Organizational schemes existed in earlier antiquity and arose with habits of record-keeping and stored goods, not connected with current bibliography.

But in modern times, bibliography arose in tandem with the market in rare and antiquarian books. Collectors wanted a means of authenticating their purchases through descriptive practices that would guarantee that the volume on offer was the original, genuine, article—complete and intact. Ways of describing books in terms of their physical features, their production history, and other factors became codified into “analytic” and “descriptive bibliography” and other variants (enumerative) still taught within the professional sphere. The pantheon of bibliographers includes such monumentally acclaimed 20^th century figures as W.W. Greg, Thomas Tanselle, Philip Gaskell and Fredson Bowers, whose Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949) served as the touchstone text for decades. Their work dovetailed with the work of critical editors whose pursuit of textual authenticity required bibliographical skill as well as literary detective work. Significant forgeries were discovered in part at the intersection of bibliographic and textual studies. But mostly these methods were applied with a seriousness that could be spirit-killing and deadly to all but the dedicated. Symptomatic of the attitudes of bibliographers were entries in Thomas Dibdin’s 1805 publication Bibliomania: Book Madnessa and Bibliophobia volumes where, without irony or reservation, he penned sections with titles like “Women, the enemy of books.” No joke.

Back to the crucial point, these mainstream systems encoded standards that precluded idiosyncratic descriptions or personal collecting strategies. Part of the goal of professional practices was standardization. As catalogues migrated online, the need for standards only increased since they were to serve the desired goal of “interoperability” among legacy systems. The old inventories of ancient libraries were not aligned with those of the Dewey Decimal system, invented by Melville Dewey in the 1870s in a scheme that he derived in part from work of the 17^th century philosopher Francis Bacon. Raising Bacon’s name here shows immediately how closely classification and knowledge systems are linked. This leads us to the present, where the critical discussion of these legacy systems is bound up in conversations about “decolonizing” knowledge and classification because of the biases and values they embody no matter how new and “reparative” they appear to be.

By contrast, Rebel’s selection of bibliographies deliberately brings into focus those projects whose classification schemes do not even pretend to universal standards or neutrality, but which are idiosyncratic from the outset. What is fascinating about Rebel’s volume is the extent to which it shows how many individual artists and scholars are interested in bibliographic intervention. The very act of organizing one’s books, or other collections (records, files, documents, photographs) makes manifest underlying assumptions about the basis on which information should be organized. Rebel’s project calls attention to these curious systems as well as the object that prompt their development.

            Rebel uses Conceptual art as the historical start point for outlining the thematic categories in her volume, clearly situating her project within a framework in which process-based works and meta-theoretical projects came to the fore. These were art projects in the 1960s and 1970s that foregrounded ideas and intellectual premises rather than traditional creative practices. Handwork and studio methods were set aside in favor of documentation in language and photography. Rebel begins her discussion of her approach by using part of the title phrase of Lucy Lippard’s definitive, “Dematerialization of Art,” one of the definitive studies of conceptual art. In this section, she includes the 1968 publication known as the Xerox Book, curated by Seth Siegelaub and Jack Wendler, which conceived of the catalogue as the exhibit. Not quite a bibliography, but a collection of surrogates that were conceived as primary works in their own right, the work is considered a landmark publication for its commitment to documentation as art.

            This segues into the second theme in her project, “Publishing as a Creative Practice,” where such projects as renowned photographer, Richard Prince, used his book collection as a subject for his artwork and Steven Leiber, inventive bookseller’s catalogues are cited as examples. Another theme “Literary Intersections” include 16^th-century French author, François Rabelais, who included an imaginary book list of 140 fictional titles in Book 1, Chapter 7, of his now-canonical, Pantagruel. “Experiments in Arranging” and “Diversifying the List and Black Bibliography” complete the themes under which Rebel selected her examples. For the first, she quotes Italo Calvino to provide an example familiar to many of us, no doubt, from “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler”:

            The Books You’ve Been Planning

                        To read for Ages

            The books you’ve been hunting

                        For years without success

            The books Dealing with Something

                        You’re working on at the moment […]

One curiosity in Rebel’s ever-intriguing list of examples was cited by the founder of Rare Book School, Terry Belanger, who discovered a quote in “an etiquette book of 1863, which decreed that ‘the perfect hostess will see to it that the works of male and female authors be properly segregated on her book shelves. Their proximity, unless they should happen to be married, should not be tolerated.’” Fleshing out her scheme with vivid examples, Rebel cites many recent projects that use digital platforms for their bibliographic work, such as the Pilot Project for Linked Jazz, created in the School of Library and Information Sciences at Pratt Institute, 2011 or the Black Bibliography Project, (BBP) Web-Based African American literary studies, initiated by Rutgers and Yale universities in 2017, still ongoing.

            In her final theme, Rebel introduces the category of the “Commonplace book,” a practice once widespread in creating personal collections of cited passages for study and reflection by hand-copying into a notebook.

            With her intellectual scheme established, Rebel enumerates the core of the work, organizing her entries alphabetically by title. Here we get to the heart of the catalogue and the benefit of Rebel’s skill in presenting these projects through the perspective of her appreciation and insight. For instance, she describes a publication by Kathy Slade, Fifty-Two Weeks of Transactions at the Lending Library. This is a conceptual project, to document the books the author checked out of the Vancouver Public Library for a year, from September 2006 through September 2007. The book simply presents a history of her reading, which includes work by Dusty Springfield, Ant Farm, Philip K. Dick, Djuna Barnes and a wide range of other popular and literary figures. Such a project prompts critical reflection on one’s own reading practices and the way they form a distinctive profile.

            Another library-based project by Aaron Krach included a more active intervention The Author of This Book Committed Suicide, carried out with the collections of the New York Public Library between 2012 and 2014. Krach checked out books by authors who died by their own hand, stamped them with the statement that titles his project, and then returned them to the library. Subsequent readers encountered the stamp on the title page and could reflect on he significance of this biographical information. Krach compiled a list of these works for ongoing reference. Like Krach’s project, other bibliographies are established by identifying a singular feature of author identities such as David Maroto and Joanna Zielinnska’s Novels by Artists or Shilpa Gupta’s Someone Else, A Library of 100 Books Written Anonymously or Under a Pseudonym and so on.

            But other projects are more synthetic, such as the Société Réaliste’s production of The Best American Book of the 20^th Century: A Novel.[2] Using lists of bestsellers, the group took one line of each in ranked order for every year–first line of the top seller, second line of the second, and so on of each year in order, to produce a full-length novel. Rebel cites a representative passage: “Lord!” Well, you may go to heaven now if you really desire it, and if you know what heaven means. Scarcely were the words spoken when she was gone with the quickness of a bird, her long hair streaming about her like a veil as she ran.”

            Other projects are amusingly clever, like Olivier Lebrun’s four versions of Books from The Simpsons [3] or Craig Dworkin’s Further Listening in No Medium, a collection of silent works. Others have a melancholy slant, such as Josh McPhee’s Lonely Books, photographs of books the author finds abandoned in public spaces or Henri Lefebvre, The Missing Pieces, Semiotexte, South Pasadena, 2014.[4] Lefebvre’s list includes a 1919 opera by Paul Hindemith titled “Murder, the Hope of Women,” some poems by Robert Creeley placed a in bowl on a piano during drunken nights in Bolinas and saved by Richard Brautigan; and the author, JD Salinger since 1959. Rebel includes a few of her own projects, and, I should note, a screen grab and description of my own ongoing web-based auto-bibliography, All the Books I Never Wrote or Wrote and Never Published.

            Not every project is highly compelling, but most are. Rebel’s approach is mainly descriptive, but occasionally she offers some judicious criticism, calling a project “too niche” or calling attention to its poor design, bad interface, or other problem features. In the same spirit, I have one critical comment on the book, which is that the conceptual clarity of Rebel’s vision is not well-served by the graphic design. The font used for the title/author/publication information is not sufficiently differentiated from that used in the text, so an overall “grey page” is produced that makes navigating the volume difficult. The text is packed too tightly on the page without room for margins. The result is a bit like public transit at rush hour, unpleasantly dense, which is too bad.

            Still, this book was surprisingly fun to read, and I skipped through it rapidly, enjoying the discoveries Rebel presented. One book that would/could have been included in the collection is the wonderfully witty and engaging work by Warren Lehrer, A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley: Memoir and Retrospective Monograph Featuring All 101 of Bleu Mobley’s Books.[5] That volume contains finely drawn graphic and textual portraits of each of the fictional titles through which we learn the details of the character Bleu Mobley’s life and would have been a fitting addition. No doubt there are other omissions, or possible additions, but that is one for which I have a particular fondness.

            What do we come away with here, in the end? A colleague of mine with young children has been formulating an understanding of what he terms “the new literacy,” which, in his experience is about the acquisition of shared memes, vocabulary, references, and ways of interacting with materials in digital formats. The colleague is himself a bibliophile, learned and committed to both the preservation and transformation of antiquarian knowledge. He has been struggling to formulate an insight into the children’s activity as a form of literacy that does not involve books or traditional textual reading. Whether the generation of his children are a part eventually comes around to books as objects, valuable for their mnemonic and haptic support of knowledge and experience, remains to be seen. But the principles of custom collecting and selection that reflect individual passion and taste will transfer to these new modalities—already have, as Rebel makes evident. The imprint of personality and intellectual disposition becomes evident through these acts, and in turn Rebel makes these legible through the multiple frameworks she offers to her readers and the generous spirit with which she shares her own enthusiasms.

Order Janelle Rebel: https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/66078/

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[1] https://www.library.illinois.edu/ala/2018/06/05/out-of-the-closet-onto-the-shelves/

[2] Projects Projects; Eindhoven, Netherlands. Onomatopee, 2014

[3] Olivier Lebrun’s four editions were issued in 2012, 2013, 2018, and 2019 and Craig Dworkin, No Medium, Cambridge, MIT press, 2013

[4] Henri Lefebvre, The Missing Pieces, South Pasadena, Semiotexte, 2014.

[5] Warren Lehrer, A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley: Memoir and Retrospective Monograph Featuring All 101 of Bleu Mobley’s Books, Goff Books, 2013. https://warrenlehrer.com/life-books-rise-fall-bleu-mobley-2013/