Исследовательница из Университета Юты получила награду за изучение рынка разрезанных книг

Allie McCormack is the Original Cataloger for Special Collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. This past May, she was awarded the H.W. Wilson Foundation Research Award by the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) for her project, “Beyond Edge: Biblioclasm and the Broken Book Market in 20th Century North America.” Biblioclasm is the act of cutting up books, manuscripts, or other forms of writing in order to sell the deconstructed piece, create something new, or for any other purpose. McCormack is writing a book chapter for The Routledge Companion to Textual Scholarship, titled “De/Re-Constructed: Biblioclasm and the Remaking of Medieval Manuscripts.” Her text deals with Foliophiles, a name given to those who “primarily cut up books and manuscripts to sell off the leaves and pages individually.” McCormack said that the projected release date is late 2027. Biblioclasm Biblioclasm can reveal pieces of history that would otherwise be lost, McCormack explained to the Chronicle. “These are a part of our shared human cultural heritage. These books have a really intimate window into the psyche of people in the medieval period and other parts of history. When they’re broken apart like this, we are losing so much of that context.” However, it takes a long time to study the pieces and deduce if they’re authentic. “By digitally reconstructing [these pieces],” McCormack said, “we can recapture all of that information and learn a lot about individuals in the past; just ordinary people whose names are not passed down to us.” Differences in handwriting and drawings can provide researchers with a trove of information, such as the context of what people believed or the document’s time period. “Just by making some of these basic observations,” McCormack said, “You can start to tease apart the differences.” For example, researchers can tell the time period a piece was created simply by the way they wrote, McCormack said, which is related to paleography. “If you look really closely at the bottom of the letters, you can see they turn upward ever so slightly,” she said. “That’s a Gothic rotunda; that means that it was a later medieval writing.” Research McCormack says that she’s grateful organizations like ARLIS/NA exist. “Learning about our shared human cultural heritage, like the books and manuscripts cut apart by the Foliophiles,” McCormack said, “helps us understand people in the distant past who may have left no other record of their existence beyond a few of the objects they once owned.” Her research for the project she was awarded for was done in Bancroft Library in Berkeley, California, as well as two locations in New York. “Archival documents relating to the Foliophiles’ work,” McCormack said, “such as their book sales catalogs and the portfolios… were scattered across multiple research libraries in the US.” For students at the U, classes like Dr. Mira Green’s Roman Britain course, or other history and classics courses showcase and study these manuscripts. But these documents aren’t just limited to students in those classes. Anyone can come and see these in the special collections library through an appointment request. “You don’t need a special project. You don’t need a special research interest. We don’t ask for a letter of introduction,” McCormack said. “But you’ll never be able to do that if you don’t know they exist.”