 Good afternoon everyone. I'm here for the good afternoons back So my name is Devin Fitzgerald and I'm the curator of rare books in the history of printing at UCLA library special collections And I'd like to welcome everyone to feminist bibliography bibliographies sponsored by UCLA library special collections and UCLA library Before we start today, I'd like to begin with a land acknowledgement. This is something we do routinely here at UCLA and it speaks to our core values of elevating and raising up voices that have been left out of our historical records UCLA is located on the ancestral lands of the Gabrielino Tongva tribe We acknowledge their presence here since time immemorial and recognize their continuing connection to the land to the water and to their ancestors Um, so the first thing I want to do before we get Get the panel going is introduce our director of library special collections, Athena Jackson Who has a few minutes of welcoming remarks and then after that you'll hear from me again And I'll describe some of the motivations behind this panel. So without further ado, here's Athena Jackson Hello everybody on on the floor and online My name is Athena Jackson. I'm very happy to welcome you here today It's a very important event that addresses our core issues of special collections, librarianship And those of our colleagues across the disciplines bibliography And this welcome I would be remiss not to draw from the work of april hathcock Sharon farb charlotte roe Jimenez Del Rio Grande Ivan Lujano and sandra enema who while at the 2019 Triangle scholarly communications institute held in chapel Hill, North Carolina developed the feminist framework for radical knowledge and collaboration As noted in hathcox at the intersection a blog about the intersection of laws librarian libraries feminism and diversity The work toward this framework started with three questions How has the patriarchy affected you? How has the patriarchy impacted your work? How have you been complicit in perpetuating the patriarchy? I encourage you to explore their overarching principles if you haven't already As so much of what they say may be echoed or alluded to in these talks with respect to trust reclaiming space and time And critical reflection to name a few As someone who began her work in this field through rare book librarianship I recall in my early days a sense of otherness Not only as a woman of color from a low socioeconomic background Which is something I grapple with often in terms of perception But really it also has a lot to do with the stringency of rules and historical practices And even knowledge hoarders that seem to withhold from me the very tools and experiences I needed to succeed I found a way and I even used this experience to underscore a point In an article I wrote on succession planning in our field back in 2015 I stated our past is still relevant to the work we currently do But it need not be presented as a long lost possibly never to be recreated expertise Rather than a useful activity Worthy of mastering giving today Mastering today given the proper exposure and training I wrote that in the middle of the last decade A lot has changed since 2015 That I think if I were asked to rethink this sentiment via those questions posed by the feminist framework for radical knowledge Collaboration I would own a few things right now I was complicit in perpetuating the patriarchy back in 2015 even while working directly against it And many other ways my work up to that point It's the worst kind of complicity the invisible Even to the self kind of complicity At the time of writing it affected me by my thinking that other lenses even my own Still needed to be secondary or was even less than what was already in place Seemingly etched in our professional stone I was so quick not to question the training training I received I was certainly not encouraged But that was then and this is now Since then I've grown I've learned a lot about myself my work my field and my place in it I'm indebted to the colleagues who went through that journey with me and those who arrived in our field later ready to take us further I'm an elbow grease and relentless woman I take risks. I fail and I make mistakes I don't know everything And all of those things are frankly good because you know what? There's a lot. I do know a lot that I can attempt and succeed in And a lot of agency I have now to create space and time for others I now know that there there are these things lenses not one lens perspectives not one or two perspectives challenges and not just the ones that make you and me comfortable And new insights, especially the ones that afford me the space to learn These are what I imagine our thoughts I may share with our speakers today So without further ado, I will join you in the audience to do that just now Learn and grow. Thank you Thank you so much Athena And thank you for the very provocative opening Obviously, this is something that someone who looks like me should be grappling with on a daily basis Unfortunately, it's not something that's talked about explicitly. In fact, I was going back and forth whether or not to center the My identity here and it's something I grapple with a lot. You know, I'm an east asianist I work on the history of non-western traditions. I talk about diversity and book histories a lot But my activism actually has its roots in a rather interesting place, which is in classrooms at Smith College because I went to college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Made the great decision of taking most of my elective courses at Smith College And that immediately charged me with the sense of how important feminist perspectives are For asking a myriad of questions Now when I was first thinking about this talk today, I was maybe going to give some examples of The important role of women in book history I could have told you that our oldest printed object in UCLA special collections is a small buddhist Chance that was commissioned by the Empress Shotoku in 8th century Japan I could have also talked about the fact that the first person to sell a book in Japanese book history was a woman a female bookseller Then I also was thinking about talking about this great collection of Chinese female poets That was published in the 17th century that collected the writings over over 1500 women but As I was reflecting This quote kept coming to mind. It's a quote by Dorothy Porter A bibliographer and the librarian and curator at the Moreland Stinger and Research Center at Howard University She passed away in 2004, I believe And she noted that the only rewarding thing for me is to bring light to information that no one knows What's the point of rehashing the same old thing? So I'm not going to tell you about these things. I already know we can talk about that afterwards Instead, I want to start by thinking about these two terms that we're provoking Discussion around which is feminism and bibliography Listeners unfamiliar with these terms or more likely the combination of these terms, right? This is something that one of our panelists Sarah Werner Was a pioneer in popularizing this term, but it's still new and We all have space here to find out what this means to us So when I was thinking about feminism, I would thought specifically about patricia hill collins and her work black feminist thought Knowledge consciousness and the politics of empowerment in her idea of the matrix of domination This is a really fantastic idea Especially for me, you know work in class first generation But also a harvard phd candidate who's a white male to think about the different ways our intersectionalities Contribute to forms of oppression and hegemony in fact Collins defines this matrix of domination as something That is structural disciplinary hegemonic and interpersonal And these domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression And that's something I learned from feminist theory was how to interrogate these different intersectionalities And the fact that power is always active power is part of every form of negotiation every form of relationship And in libraries this seems especially apparent because lots of us work in buildings With the names of man carved on the outside while the labor done internally in libraries Is are these carts of books pushed around by less privileged hands? Now paying attention to hegemony's as feminist theory taught me to do And thinking through how these hegemony's intersect with gender race and class Helps all of us think about our own experiences and also allows those of those of us engaged with histories of the book To consider how classification and description and in fact the rare book trade and publication Reinforced different power relationships Different power relationships Now critiques of classification Abound and this is where we get to the bibliography Which is the core of what so many of us do in the library profession is to promote Books by creating lists of books sharing our knowledge of books with the world This is always a matter of choice and as I've learned in the last Year year or so at this job, but the curators who were telling me they weren't interested in getting Non-western african-american materials into those collections We're actually saying that they personally weren't interested. This was a personal choice Now one of my favorite librarians in history again will return to dorthy porter Who attacked in a fundamental fundamentally bibliographic way the hegemony of classifications Uh while she was at Howard University She focused specifically on the duo decimals Dewey decimal system and this is what she noted in her oral history They had one number 326 that meant slavery and they had one other number 325 as I recall it that meant colonization In many white libraries every book whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson Who everyone knew was a black poet went under 325. That's colonization And that was stupid to me I think we can all agree that that is in fact the appropriate adjective for this form of classification It is pure stupidity, but it's stupidity with purpose. It's the stupidity of the hegemony and today our purpose I hope is to Through three provocative talks with scholars who have all personally influenced me and one way or another To address the stupidity of the hegemony And you know thinking historically it's really important to point out that porter Porter's career as an early black female librarian is really pivotal pivotal and allowing us to have these conversations in the field It's a testament to the impossibility of separating bibliographies from history of power histories of power and the importance of explicitly putting critical theories Like feminist theory into dialogue with bibliography Now That's all I have to say about these two terms. I I think you're provoked. I see wheels spinning in the audience But before I go into the actual talks, I just want to make visible some of the Invisible labor behind this conference. So I'd like to personally acknowledge Jet Courtney Jacobs head of public services outreach and community engagement who this morning described Events I organize as perpetually cursed Last time I organized an event on my teen ex bibliography It was across the same exact day as collecting Los Angeles conference Which also had a radical agenda. And so it was A choir conference at the LAPL. And so Courtney Oh, and the city was on fire. This time I have one up myself with global pandemic Uh, which has kept one of our conference presenters on online. So Wait for next year because I think my the next thing I probably do will be around election time So invest in prepping The next person who was really important to this event was molly hamphill the curatorial assistant who has done impossible amounts of work behind The scenes and this morning has also bleached the entire unit of special collections With fervor and I wouldn't let her get to my computer because I was writing my opening comments And so she said she'll do it tomorrow So this is a lot of this labor behind the scenes and of course Caroline cubae who's allowed us to have a digital component to this and that we're sharing with lots of people online Susie lee has also made this streaming possible by facilitating us being in the library conference room And finally, of course, athena jackson Who well you've heard her comments. I don't need to talk about how great she is and sharon farb Who for christmas gave me pencils engraved with fight the patriarchy abolish ice Because sharon farb has my number Um So without further ado, I'd like to introduce our first speaker Who is sarah warner? And of course there are debts to her because in some ways sarah has been at the center of a lot of these recent conversations about feminism and bibliography and their relationship Sarah warner is a book historian and author of studying early printed books 1450 to 1800 a practical guide And she's joining us remotely And I think she's worked at the folger shakes for your library actually that studying early printed books was her second book She's done a lot and you're about to hear how wonderfully smart she is So without further ado, please give a hand for sarah to distract from me trying to set up the zoom Hi everyone. I think I unmuted myself We're just setting this up Hold on a second sarah Okay, I think it's because I didn't end my slideshow Hold on hold on. We knew this was gonna happen Okay, now go full screen. Oh wait, you see it now. I just have to Last time we checked this there was always a slight delay. So you're still seeing my notes, but it should be presenter view Oh, there we go cool And I'm gonna turn up your volume All right say say a word for us Hi, I'm sarah. I'm so happy I can be there from far away Does that work? Yeah I'm loud enough Okay I have just lost My it's right. It's this is why I printed it out. I cannot figure out how to do the presenter view from me But you guys see the slides. Maybe I'm in the corner. I have Paper so it's this awesome combination of really old-fashioned tech and really exciting new tech Um, I just want to start by saying thank you to Devin and to jet and to molly and to Susie and everyone else that devin just listed for you for all the logistics and making this possible And a thank you to my fellow panelists, but I'm super sad I'm not there to Say hello in person, but I'm looking forward to the conversations that this session is going to Enable us to have so I want to use the time today to think about what crafting a feminist practice of bibliography looks like And to think about why we should want to attempt it But first I'm going to explain a little bit about the backstory because it helps set up my perspective And why I got anxious about this topic a few years ago at the time One second slides to change. Oh my god. Why is it change? Oh, there we go um So I've spent the past few years writing a book about how the western printing press worked I've focused Specifically on machines and the processes from the hand press period things like How paper was made how type is set How or whether books are bound And on the uses and processes in today's period things like how do we find books? How do we understand their uses by looking at their material features? It was a pretty consuming project And about halfway through writing the book in part because the vast majority of students that I were teaching were women in my classes I suddenly got worried that the I suddenly got worried about whether I had inadvertently left behind my origins as a feminist scholar and was Inadvertently writing a book that re-inscribed values that I had fought against The first book that I wrote was about Shakespeare on feminist performance And this was something that had really been central to my Um scholarly process But I had this realization and I wasn't really sure how to correct it How can I make this book? I was writing a feminist project when it wasn't really about people involved in these processes One option I thought was a deliberate citation strategy Even though the book wasn't about people It does use lots of examples of work I'm sorry. I was distracted by something here Lots of examples of work by people to explain what I'm looking at lots of past and modern publications I tried to cite women very deliberately Both as authors and printers of the early printed books And as modern scholars of bibliography I thought I had done a pretty good job But when I was doing my index and I decided to count my citations I found that I had failed miserably to achieve any sort of balance I'd horrifyingly recreated that situation that we've all heard studies of In which women speak for a small percentage of time But are perceived by men in the room as dominating the conversation Citations obviously are a strategy if you pay close attention to actual numbers and not perception But it's also hard to cite work that isn't there And no matter how much I pay attention to what I'm doing I cannot discuss printers manuals and make women's voices prevalent when I'm focused on the hand press period I believe strongly in the value of handling and understanding the materiality of the texts we work with And I want that to also be a feminist practice I'm not particularly interested in the book trade to be honest or in how authorship is crafted I'm interested in the artifacts we hold in our hands and what they can tell us It may be because of my training as a Shakespearean who focused on feminist theater I want my feminism to work for studying all texts regardless of who has written or printed or created them And most importantly, I want my practice to be replicable for others So how do we craft a feminist practice of bibliography that can do these things? Tackling this question also means defining our terms. So what is bibliography? A term bibliography gets used in all sorts of ways I think we're going to discover that all three of us in the panel think about it slightly differently, which is great One of the ways that we are probably most familiar with Is when it's used to refer to a listing of sources for a paper The formatting of which our students all grown about It can also be a gathering of material related to a specific subject What I would describe as enumerative bibliography and a great example of this for our concerns today is the Women in Book History Bibliography run by Kate Coker and my fellow pals Kate Osment Bibliography is also sometimes used to mean just the study of the history of books or print culture For instance, the development of printing in the west Or the connections between women writing printing and publishing in early modern England But because I spent so many years working and teaching in a rare materials library My type of bibliography is physical that is studying material artifacts for signs of their making and their use Fritz and Bowers, Philip Gaskell, Don McKenzie Their work is at the core of this discipline For years bibliographers have gotten a bad rap for being dull and obsessed with obscure facts And uninterested in explaining to anyone else what they were doing and why it mattered And honestly that reputation is not entirely undeserved Many bibliographers wield their expertise as a weapon Keeping those outside the field from crossing in And I should acknowledge that McKenzie is a real exception to this pattern He's someone who argued for why bibliography mattered and who was able to do so in a compelling and accessible way But he is the exception that proves the rule This insistence on expertise is partly why it took until last year for an actually accessible introduction to studying this subject came out When that tries and succeeds, I hope In welcoming new covers to the field and in giving them a sense of why it matters and how to enjoy it So that tells you what my sort of bibliography is And that brings us to the other noun of my title What is feminism? This is even more possible answers than how to define bibliography But it does give us a chance to wonder why we're invested in what a feminist bibliography might be Like many of us perhaps I read a lot of feminist theory as an undergraduate and graduate student at the time Back in the 80s and 90s that meant Julia Casteva, Helene Siksu, Toro Moi, Judith Butler and Peggy Fallon And a lot of other very smart people writing very dense performative texts That were sometimes grounded in a pretty limited notion of what women's bodies were And were frequently focused on white women's experiences in the world What thinking about feminism means for me now is a lot of rereading Sarah Amon This 2017 book Living a Feminist Life is compelling for how it blends life and theory to illuminate the structures we bump into And for its intersectional strategies for understanding and responding to them Part of Amon's argument is that being a feminist means living in a world that constantly tells you what you are Experiencing isn't there A feminist movement this requires that we acquire feminist tendencies A willingness to keep going despite or even because of what we come up against We could think of this process as practicing feminism One of the lessons I take from Amon here is that this From this is that a feminist practice is one that is willing to return to the beginning Over and over It's something that we are constantly relearning One that therefore takes as its premise a willingness and an obligation to welcome in newcomers In other words, what I take from Ahmed and thinking about this type of feminism Is exactly the opposite of what I had been seeing and how bibliographers use expertise To block people out instead of welcoming people in So If bibliography for our purposes Is the study of material texts as they are made and as they move through time What is feminist bibliography? Is it the study of texts made by women the study of texts made by feminists? Neither of those approaches would have helped me write my book Nor would that be a methodology necessarily different from regular old bibliography I could quote Audre Lorde here on the master's tools, but I assume you all know that even if we don't always remember to enact it What I find more interesting so far in my experience of leading workshops and giving talks about feminist bibliography Is that people find it incredibly difficult to separate text from object And to think about the object through a feminist lens rather than focusing on the text Even bibliographers who are trained to focus on the artifact Still want to think that a feminist praxis is only interested in text So I thought what I would do today Is with you look at a set of illustrative questions that we can use to ask In thinking about what a feminist bibliography might do So instead of approaching our task only from the question of what books we study Let's also ask how do we study books? Where do they come from? Why do we study them and who studies them? That seems like obvious questions maybe but once you start really pulling them apart There's a lot of things that we take first granted When maybe we should be thinking more carefully So how do we study books? Do we prop open the book on our desk and start reading immediately? Or in the case of the Australian soldier on the left I guess prop open a book and let it drape over the edge of the desk I love the photo but every time I look at it I kind of get the No, it's going to fall apart Do we look at the four edges of our books? Do we wonder about the bindings or do we just open it up immediately and not look at what's happening before the text starts? Do we study how books are made and try that out ourselves setting type and making paper? Where do books come from? For most of us books come from libraries If you are interested in provenance books might come through chains of owners until they're acquired by the library you're using But how does your library get them? What are the gender circumstances shaping this interaction? Last fall, as some of you know Rare book librarians and dealers suddenly started talking openly about a long-standing fact of these transactions male only book clubs In september a curator at Princeton announced a change in policy Logging in a post titled men only that beginning today new acquisitions for the graphic arts collection Will no longer be purchased from collectors or dealers who belong to the restricted bibliographic societies in america such as the club of odd volumes or the rowfront club This note will give those men time to resign their memberships should they wish to continue to provide items for graphic arts Looking forward to great new acquisitions in the future best julie This was in and of itself An incredible spark for conversation lots of people hadn't realized both scholars and some librarians that male only bibliographic societies were still a thing And it turns out that they are a very influential thing A couple of weeks after julie melby's original blog post had gone up Folks started to notice that it had been anonymously edited to now read An earlier blog post incorrectly described university policy for acquiring material Princeton university library supports and follows the university's policy on supplier diversity Although I have heard that there were some dealers who took the notice to heart and quit their clubs It seems clear from having watched the subsequent interactions that melby and the library were overruled Probably at the instigation of a powerful donor or alumni who belong to one of those clubs We should ask ourselves what we don't normally how are those systems for circulating books silencing voices and shaping what we study today We should also ask why do we study books and this for me is where things start to get exciting Why do we study books as artifacts instead of as texts? If the works you are reading are available in later editions or in digital copies Why are you sitting in a rare books library? Well one reason is that we can learn more not only about how they were made and corrected As with that cancel slip showing in the Chaucer volume on the left But how they were used as with this history of scotland Here with an initial letter that had been cut out and then later replaced with a pen and ink facsimile And of course so many categories of texts don't get made into easily accessible editions or digital images Books with moving parts like the vavels and Cortez's art of navigation aren't readily replicable in other formats Almanacs tend not to get imaged nor do vocabularies or genealogies or courtesy books If we don't study books in person we exclude large swaths of our printed history studies books Since front since feminist practice should be about expanding access bringing in new people and new questions We should also ask who studies wear books Is it something professors do in isolation? Is it something that college students do in classrooms? Is it something that we welcome in all members of our communities to undertake? for me In other words a feminist practice of bibliography is one that is focused on bringing in everyone who has been excluded So that we can build a future as widely imaginative as possible If bibliographers of the past have been focused on identifying printing processes so that we can know exactly who pirated Shakespeare's works And a lot of anglophone book history is built exactly on those origins I want the bibliography of the future to look at artifacts and processes that we have not yet even created I want to come back to something that I glancingly referred to at the start of my talk That I focused on the need to create a feminist bibliography because my classes were overwhelmingly taken by women Your classes if you teach in humanities are probably similar But the professions we occupy as librarians and as teachers have become become increasingly male the further up the hierarchy we rise Our students might be women, but our leaders are usually men And that is not only not right. It's not sustainable We cannot assume that doing things the same way we've been doing them is going to continue into the future What I suggest that our field is facing problems today because it is white and male What I want to focus on is how much knowledge and experience we are missing and how unsustainable this pattern is Think about dorthy porter at howard university and how she saw what the white librarians of her era did not That's the dewey classification system collapses any possibility of blacks being seen through the lens Of anything other than slavery or colonization And what about paula mcdowell's revelations of women's participation in public print and debate in the 18th century? How could we even begin to think about book history as a discipline without elizabeth eisenstein? Our world would be immeasurably poorer without these women The future of printing must be written by a much broader range of people if our field is going to not only be relevant and exciting But if it is going to survive Bibliographers are a small group of scholars heavily indebted to the past A past when women could barely squeeze through the entrance into frets and bowers classes And it's a past of male scholars and female typists that still determines how we understand and describe books So why do we need a feminist praxis of printing history? We need it so we can thrive A feminist pedagogy that centers on asking questions instead of mastering knowledge Welcomes in newcomers to the field A feminist pedagogy that models the act of learning it makes it possible for students to become teachers And then our bibliographies and analyses can become the groundwork for exciting new histories Thank you. All right, I'm going to stop that a share Oh and now we're in now we're in the infinity tunnel Which is the end result of hearing sarah talk usually So Well leave the infinity tunnel up as we reflect So we have a about 10 minutes or so for q&a. It's open to the floor Maybe if someone pops something into the chat box jet is watching it So if anyone has any questions for sarah and is not too distracted by the infinity, I can also move it Please, please raise your hand This is a question from Athena Jackson Hi, sarah. I think we've met before Hi, Athena I have a question from your opening remarks. By the way, thank you. That was a brilliant talk and it should be Heralded across all of our streams henceforth Thank you. Um, you mentioned It was hard to cite work that isn't there And one part of a paragraph and you're the end of that paragraph. I'm assuming you said that you hoped that your work could Um, essentially be replicable by others and I feel like there's some moment here of of the beginning stages of creating Time, you know, the first level to be replicated going forward And I wondered where you start where you're starting to see now In some of the research happening where you're seeing replic replicability and your work happening with other Feminist bibliographers. Does that make sense? I think it makes okay good. That's um So one of the if if I had been able to be there in person um The talk was actually going to move into a moment where I could sort of Do a weird workshop with people in the room Even though it's not set up with that is or we could look through a book together and think about what questions Would we ask of this book and how can you bring these expertises back from back to your classroom? and part of what got lost when I had to cut that out was Coming up with a methodology that doesn't center expertise Um, because you you you can never be expert enough I'm not expert enough by far on these things that I That I write about there's always stuff that we don't know And we can't ever hope that our students or anybody new to the field can then suddenly become experts That's not going to happen But if instead of a methodology that depends on knowing all the answers We create a methodology That foregrounds asking questions that I think is something that becomes more replicable and I actually See that happening Not necessarily foregrounded in feminist terms, but Just in teaching and access to rare books Across special collections libraries Not only in the states but in England and in Canada Those are the library systems they're most familiar with But it's sort of inviting a shifting sense from what it used to be of inviting people in To look at books and inviting in students and having them work with that and what I'm hoping we'll start to see more of is thinking about The dynamics that we create in those spaces through a feminist analysis. I'm not sure if that answers your your Question what I didn't want to do was come up with a like this is how you do feminist bibliography You have to have mastered all of this stuff and you have to be able to do Work that people have done that's great But like here's all of the gendered analysis of these printers manuals and now we can go forward and I thought Like that's just yet another barrier of knowledge So I'm hoping that we can Look at things from an angle of exploration and openness I don't know that Thanks, sir. Any other questions in the room? Questions Um, I had a question so generally speaking Lots of students will be open to this Because they haven't encountered rare books for the first time But how do you see this working with more conservative members of the the profession? More generally people who like to guard their treasures I mean, how can we retool this message to get everyone on board with a more activist feminist approach? to rare book description That that devin is the big question um I don't I it's hard I don't it's hard to I think see how that's going to happen except with really persistent work But for 2000 really persistent work from those of us doing this type of teaching As as Universities Oh god, the virus is throwing all this off. What I was gonna say is as universities Have sought to distinguish themselves from other universities One of the ways that they have started doing that is by turning to special collections libraries Because by definition what we have in those libraries Other universities and colleges do not right, um as opposed to The library system holds, you know, 300 million volumes are like, well, yeah, everybody's does now because we're all in consortia um faculty faculty research, so I see libraries as Having already shifted to coming in share our stuff um Faculty research, uh, if there are faculty members there, you can you can tell me differently I don't I still see a lot of hoarding treasures happening with how what we value in faculty research Um, the ways it gets talked about is being discoveries the ways that There are people who object to sharing information until it finally appears in print, which is a forever process um and I think the way that that's going to change is when people see the conversations that Happen and that proceed by leaps and bounds forward While they're being muzzled because they want to keep their treasures to themselves So they're going to be left out of conversations that other folks are having Um in bringing in and sharing openly what they're working with It's a it's a shift from how lots of folks have been Trained um and a shift to valuing the ability to Ask questions as opposed to Um discourse that length on your expertise It's it's work. We're going to have to really push people to think differently about How to teach and how to conduct research if that's what's going to happen Great. Thanks so much Sarah. Uh, if there are no questions left I'll like to invite everyone to give Sarah another round of applause Thank you And momentarily Introduce our next speaker So our next speaker this afternoon is kate osment. Uh, one of the founders of uh, Women in book history bibliography, which sarah mentioned mentioned and Dr. Osment is assistant professor of english at cal poly Pomona She specializes in early modern english literature, especially after the restoration With an emphasis on gender studies book history and digital humanities In addition to being the co-editor of women in book history bibliography She's the general editor at the stainforth library of women's writing project and runs a marvelous blog and you should also follow her on twitter So without further ado, please give your hand a round of applause to dr. Oz Um, so Malita Sarah, I'd like to start by saying thank you to everybody at UCLA for organizing the symposium And thank all of you for being brave enough to come out today. Uh, despite the fact we're canceling everything Um, but sarah actually set this up perfectly for me And um, I'm incredibly grateful for that because one of the questions that she asked are where do books come from? And she brought up the male only bibliophile societies And that's exactly what i'm here to talk to you about today is a male only bibliophile societies Except more specifically, uh, what women did anyway despite the fact that they couldn't get into these So I'd like to start by introducing you to mariam young holton Um, this picture is fabulous. My life if I could have a library and a dog would be perfect forever But this is mariam young holton. She was a book collector and bibliographer in the mid 20th century united states Who amassed a collection of more than 6 000 books on the history of women Well, she was committed to women's issues in the united states Her interests were wide-ranging and extended to greece china in the bizantine empire Like many collectors holton's library was personally motivated She used it to ameliorate a lack of institutional interest in women's history and she collected books that were not necessarily beautiful But useful she articulated this philosophy in 1960 in an address to roast with the club at her new york city brownstone She said please remember when you see my books that I do not have them because they are rare or because of their value I collect them only because I hope that they contain within them some significant record Of women that will be meaningful to those who are seeking and using them Most of this collection is currently housed on the first floor of prince sin's firestone library in open shelving Similarly to how it was set up in holton's home Unable to find what they were looking for elsewhere Researchers like girdle learner came to holton's meticulously organized space where she allowed them access to her private collection learner wrote In this library the history of women was a reality The possibilities of comparative and interdisciplinary approaches were evident To be in that library was to be in the presence of a pioneer A woman who formed a link between the lost women accessible only through the printed page And the ongoing struggle of women for their rights for equality and opportunity for autonomy and decision-making Learner positions holden is exceptional and in any way she was Her drive for collecting books and writing about women's history was not a profession But a life within but a project within a life of political advocacy She was involved in community organizations like plan parenthood the NAACP and the urban league The fact that holden had the financial ability to collect house and care for thousands of books is notable As it is that a prestigious library like princeton was interested in taking the collection and maintaining it In other ways though holden was incredibly typical for a woman in the united states in this period Her formal education was sparse She took a few courses in social work at simons college before leaving after one year in 1914 And this was before most universities were open to women and speaking broadly women's post-secondary education was limited to programs focused on Professions like librarianship nursing education or secretarial work And with of course the rarer option of attending one of the women's colleges or co-educational universities Most of holden's education was self-guided then drawing directly from these books While she became very well versed on her topic This experience proved to her that it was essential to codify women's history in higher education Alongside eugenia lennard eugenia lennard and mary ridder beard She positioned universities for decades to teach a course on women's history Learner reports that they wrote proposals curricula bibliographies and position papers They nagged college presidents and alumni trustees and for the most part failed to make a dent yet they persisted And it's this particular quote that resonated with me immediately recalling elizabeth warren's unsuccessful bid to block Jeff's sessions from being confirmed as attorney general in 2017 To find it written in 1980 Clues us into why what mitch mcconnell intended to be a censure immediately became a memeable feminist slogan Women's speech, especially in public discourse has always been a history of persistence Of slow-moving advocacy of bits and pieces that build toward change The strand of feminist bibliography that i'm tracing is no different despite her many many sitbacks Holden's library helped germinate a generation of women's history scholars And she ensured its impact would continue by depositing her material at one of the universities that previously refused to teach a women's history class But holden did not collect an obscurity in 1957. She joined a group of women bibliophiles called russ with the club The club was formed in 1944 by new england book collectors bibliographers librarians and book artists And it survived until its official disbanding in 2004 Many of the initial members had connections with the grolier club Which did not admit women until the 1970s and they wanted a space to celebrate their own collections Share expertise in the fashion of uppercrest new york socialize They named their group after russ witha a 10th century nun whose authorship they found admirable And they planned to do a few informal gatherings a year But within the space of a couple years, they had almost 40 members plus additional honorary members who were vocational bibliographers So my interest in russ with the club um grows from a question that I began to ask in 2017 Which is where are all the women bibliographers? I didn't find them on my preliminary exam list for book history when I was doing my doctoral degree Nor most of the readers that I scoured didn't have a lot of articles written by women much less about them I spent my doctoral research tracing women's participation in the 18th century print trade and I learned a very important lesson Women are always there sometimes exactly in front of you like elinor james or mary catherine goddard But more often than not they're there in ways. We're just not prepared to find them Women may not have been booksellers and substantial numbers in the 18th century for example But maureen bell has convincingly argued that booksellers wives and widows ran shops kept accounts hired and fired They were certainly in the book trades Tracing the history of women bibliographers has been eerily resonant with that with identifying women in 18th century print Despite a host of scholarship on book studies in rare books that seems to imagine a genderless and sometimes womanless space Here they were they were librarians catalogers and archivists. They were curators and collectors And just like with the book trades. They were wives and widows Rest with the club is one nexus within a wider intersection of women's bibliographic labor And that has been gerrymandered away from the english and history departments who were taking control of this Masculinized and professionalized discourse and kept within social clubs and libraries As always there's exceptions to this norm elizabeth eisenstein is the first person that comes to mind But by and large the history of women's bibliographic labor that I will be presenting today Happens outside the university I argue that this club is a notable example of the ways that women who did not have access to the same institutional power In education as men formed an alternative to those institutions Even with the benefits of race and class most of these women are white and incredibly wealthy The rust withians history has not been fully explored because of the assumption. It was a niche group Ask me later about the drama on the wikipedia page Uh, this mirrors a general apathy toward women collectors Perhaps epitomized in the otherwise interesting invention of rare books by david mckittrick, which does not mention women at all But in some rest with the club makes Visible the great gender disparity of bibliography that while gragan bowers were writing what we see is field defining articles They were doing so from positions within universities that were not admitting women in any significant numbers much less employing them as professors So now on to the club itself So rust with the club positioned itself from the beginning as an organization for the brilliant woman bibliophile In a 1957 interview in the new yorker then president and hate offered this description Only after a lengthy lecture on the merits of the historical rust witha. She always had her priorities So she says the club is an organization of women book collectors very serious and very excellent ones We are limited to 40 members plus a few honorary ones We felt that there should be a club for women bibliophiles and rust witha was a great scholar and a great bibliophile We have members in philadelphia, boston, kittsburg, washington and so on and we get together four or five times a year For lunch and then a short business meeting then we're off to review a private or public collection We all send marked catalogs to each other whenever we spot anything another member might fancy The range of interest is surprising So while they may have intended it as an informal social club on paper Their choices suggest that the club members took very seriously the impact that they expected to have on the rare book world First of all, they intentionally attracted very notable collectors and scholars At the first informal meeting at the cosmopolitan club in 1944 these eight women were in attendance Each was an established collector with a special emphasis on botany and urbals for the initial group But that changed pretty quickly over time You can also see three vocational bibliographers who I marked with asterisks Near the beginning the club heavily favored what they referred to as amateurs Largely society women whose main focuses were philanthropy and raising families with book collecting as a significant hobby In this emphasis the members positioned themselves as a social club Not a professional organization for working bibliographers or librarians Yet perhaps with a nod toward the legitimacy they also sought the initial members included three highly notable women in vocational bibliography Ruth Granis was a Groyer librarian and actively published in the papers of the bibliographical society of america So did bell de costa green who's down here on the left She was the first director of the morgan library and has become incredibly well known lately partially because She has a named award from the medieval academy Of america a reserve for scholars of color So she was black and passed this portugese for most of her life in order to avoid social stigmas and then we have henry at a Bartlett who was most well known to those of you who study shakespeare And Bartlett received an honorary phd and was one of the most well known women bibliographers in the 20th century And so truthfully while writing this talk I had a really hard time trying to decide which ones to tell you about I kept having a series of more more more more because Each one of these women is amazing Heights flights around the world buying examples of women's print history from latin america and publishing it in the Fantastically radical bookmaking on the disc staff side has fascinated me for months. I would love to find a copy out of it If anyone has me hit me up But I get pulled away by rachel hunt's exquisite book findings and the library of botanicals that she felt so strongly about She donated three million dollars to carnegie melan to give it a permanent home. So her name is on that library And this is before we get into the explicitly feminist projects from people like miriam holden and marjorie barlow So when we stop to consider that there are more than 100 women in this club over 60 years The impact of their collecting is almost hard for me to calculate And that's why I can't tell you the full scope of this project yet There's also a couple other wrinkles and figuring out everything about these women Um, so as membership grew librarians catalogers and vocational bibliographers remained a significant portion of the group Uh, but club records also have detailed meanings Detailed minutes from every meeting for 50 years and this is something that I think only comes from when you get a group of bibliographers together They're very exacting So I have seen three complete sets This is uh, one of the notebooks that I think belonged to julia whiteman who was secretary for a long time And so all the meeting minutes are standardized and you get them in this exact same size And so not only did multiple people keep every single copy of the minutes They got minutes from the meetings before they joined and then would hand write annotations to them So actively being involved in this archival practice was part of membership in the club So this is what a set of meaning minutes Looks like and I'll kind of walk you through this We always have the number and the date in the location So they they number all their minutes and they celebrate the milestones like the 100th meeting was a very big deal So they're very um aware of how often they're meeting and what they're doing Secondly, we have an update on club members lives and achievements This one has um three things that tended to be pretty typical one henry out of Bartlett. It's an honorary phd Sometimes this space is taken up by the collaborative works that they're doing together Which I'll talk to you about in a second And then we have people donating to the rust with the club library that library is now at the Grollier club archive And they were collecting together as a group for about 50 years actively as a club And then lastly whenever one of the members dies, there's an obituary This one is pretty short for Ruth Granis But as time went on these got longer and this is some of the only obituaries that exist of these women because they weren't widely known So they didn't get a new york times obituaries very often, but you have them in the club minutes So then at the top right you have kind of the meat of this which is the meeting details Catherine bull is a secretary in this example and she was kind of scant Julia whiteman would sometimes write up to six to eight pages telling you exactly what happened in this minute So I think Catherine bull was a little bit more doable But julia whiteman was really committed to the idea that even if you weren't there you were going to learn something And then lastly they always have tea and lunch So even when they get together they talk about the food they talked about what they had And this is where we get into my actual favorite example, which is from February 9th 1950 and this is from Alice Brayton host this meeting and she is best known as the owner of green animals, which is a topiary garden in Rhode Island She also worked on Rhode Island history. So this is how Alice Brayton throws a party Beautiful white lilacs were flown in from Holland I am very middle class. So this is a very very foreign world to me Champagne bottles were placed on the table as a sign of frivolity and little dolls represented the members Each holding a miniature book in which their names were inscribed A bust of abraham lincoln stood appropriately in front of mrs. Frank's frog and the chef had a magnificent cake marked ross with that and surrounded by pink roses A record of brush up your shakespeare from the musical comedy kiss me kate was played as a suggestion for a theme song And miss brayton had prepared a clever questionnaire on walt whitman too much to which mrs. Frog, of course knew all the answers So I give this to you partially because I find it pure joy But also because this is exactly the tone that you get from these ruckwissa clubs meetings They threw a really good party and then you had to show off how smart you were. It was kind of like a salon and so by the way, uh, Harriet Chapman's frog who went by mrs. Frank's frog There's three mrs. Frogs all with multiple names who pop up through the years She was an expert on walt whitman. This is the catalog for the exhibit that happened at the library of congress in 1939 And as you can see here she actually publishes it as mrs. Frank julian's frog And so this is the challenge of working on these women is they were very committed to their formal names Meaning I don't know about 40 of their first names yet Because the only way I find them is when we have articles on the husbands and some of the husbands were boring And so if you don't merit a new york times article or an obituary then I don't accidentally find the women's names So there's some of these that I still don't know who they are And I'm very much hoping to figure that out And part of the way I've been finding is just by asking living book collectors because they were all friends So I'm trying desperately to ask everybody before this generation Leaves us because they the ones that I can't find are the ones from the 50s and 60s And so people who remember them are going to get smaller and smaller every year So I'm on a time clock, but hopefully I'll find them all So in addition then to their regular meetings and minutes Ross with the club is also involved in bibliographic projects specifically about the historical Ross with the These took shape in several publications in a library So these are the three A bibliography of Ross with the here on the left by Robert Herndon 5th in 1947 And then they did a longer biography with a full bibliographical checklist in 1965 And then this one on the right is kind of out of theme But it is notes on women printers in colonial america and the united states and this was in 1976 So I identify these as major because the club put out several smaller pamphlets of members lectures quite frequently Several of them are here within the UCLA library. If you type in Ross with that, you can find them Usually one of the members would self fund these pamphlets as a gift or a kind of coterie publication These were the ones that took up a good deal of the club meetings minutes and things that they were actively working on So this first one is the one I'll spend the least amount of time on This was done by Robert 5th who was the husband of Sarah 5th And she was Ross with the club's first president and is often cited as the person who wanted to start this club She died pretty quickly into The club's life and they named the library after her. So she's not as big of a figure in the minutes But she was remembered very fondly So this pamphlet was written by Robert 5th because he was a history of german scholar or german history and culture scholar And it's about 40 pages You can see that they use the der woodcut here, which is supposed to be russ with it and then an image that became their letter head for years after Then shortly after or 20 years later. Oh, yes They also decided that they wanted to tell you how to pronounce her name, which I found vastly useful as a person who's not very good at german But I love that this was a part of the pamphlet is like you must say her name correctly if you're going to love her as much as we do So this is the next one and this one is a pretty big deal for the club So this was 20 years later and it represents a decade of work for more than a dozen of these club members This 1965 book built on the first pamphlet and was much longer And it was hardbound and printed for about 20 or 1200 copies Russ with the afghanersheim lifetimes and works was referred to affectionately as the checklist in meeting minutes And so I'll refer to it as that as well They use bibliographical publishers and instead of tapping a useful spouse This was them actually doing their own bibliographic work for the first time in a collaborative group As this table of content shows you can see the names under each title all of those are russ with the club members This was truly a collaboration across the group And hate the editor Checked and double checked with german language experts and russ with the experts Which makes a convincing argument that the club sought its own form of international peer review Jane quimby who was a vocational bibliographer did much of the meticulous labor of coalition Attended to render the book for maximum usefulness to research students Which emphasizes that part of the club's intent was to increase scholarly interest in russ with the That is by building a library on russ with the works and writing through a thorough bibliography in english They intended to have more students and collectors in the united states take seriously the contributions of this woman writer Similarly the club men the club minutes demonstrate members earnest desire that this text showcased their own abilities Meta harsen and quimby were elected by the club to this task because of their expertise as professional bibliographers harsen worked at the morgan and quimby had cataloged several major libraries including rachel hunt's botanicals barlow wrote to every major library in north america and europe and hunt commissioned research in germany Barlow visited several manuscripts in england in person at the british library and the bobbling library in 1958 And they also took it on pawn themselves to answer the question of russ witha's authorship So this has been called into question in the 40s And they almost didn't name the club after her because it wasn't as sure that she actually wrote the plays That we had now attribute to russ witha so the club says quote This started a long enduring controversy which could have been solved if anyone had made a paleographical examination of the known manuscripts It remained for russ with the club to do so So i like the slightly centering tone here like if any of you had cared enough about this to look So yeah harsen examines the manuscripts and again harsen's a Curator at the morgan so she knows her stuff and she conclusively established their authority once and for all Because that's how bibliography works i guess But the group was really adamant then that scans of these manuscripts or plates actually take place in this book So you can see all the different things that they compared to make sure that you can then check Check their work as well So i want to point out that this is 20 years after the club first settled on russ witha as a namesake And most of those original members have actually died But something about russ witha resonated with these bibliophiles So i believe it was a desire to contribute to the bibliographic legacy of women's engagement with literary history As collectors who were related to or worked with most of the rare book world in england These women were well aware of what was considered scholarly and authoritative They wanted to participate in these discourses publicly rather than privately Despite the club's initial design while promoting the work of a woman writer who they had taken on as a namesake I think that this desire is what propelled their last project And this is a massive undertaking in identifying every woman printer from colonial america to the present in 1976 This project was largely the work of marjorie barlow although similarly to the checklist the club was very invested in its production for several years And financed its publication To compile the list barlow sent queries to every institution. She could think of in every state Her notes exist in these red clam shell boxes on the right with a pencil for scale Which doesn't help because you don't know how big the pencil is But we're all going to imagine because I wasn't being very thorough when I was in the archive. It's in new york. So sorry They're pretty big As you might imagine then california and new york have very thick files There's a ton of printers in california in the 20th century Whereas hawaii and kentucky were quite slim either because she couldn't find them or they just didn't answer her Barlow's queries in this book project should be an entire talk its own. So heroically i'm only going to tell you about two letters Um, I think that this is one of the most understudied archives on women's print history in the 60s and 70s Because everybody writing back to her was thinking through their own identities as women printers When she got in return as highly representative of the messy world of letterpress They didn't know if they counted as a printer. They didn't know if what they were printing was really books And so they would just send her copies of things saying, I don't know. What do you think? And so this is one example and this is teresa terry who was in denver and she reported that she only employs women printers So she said we do employ only women printers though We have a various times found it necessary to employ male printers because so few women have attended to enter this field We are finding now that more and more women are getting into the printing field much to our delight Women are more apt and able at printing than most males One of the reasons for this is that women are as a role absolute perfectionists Except in their taking pictures and archives They pay attention to detail which is extremely necessary in order to turn out good quality work They take a great deal of pride in their work and oftentimes actually surprise themselves It seems to me that our gals have not been given the chance to show what they really can do in this particular vein And once given that chance as we do here they display an amazing amount of ability So several more responses are in this within the same vein Discussing the rise of indie printing in san francisco and their pride in pursuing a trade that was traditionally deemed too masculine And this is my personal favorite is shila may banks and she is a student at the university of kentucky press And she writes i like myself best with the smock on and printers ink on my hands It's a great thing barefoot too. I can exert more pressure and more swing I find this wonderful for a lot of reasons, but the it completely flips the idea of barefoot and pregnant to me It's like nah barefoot and printing That's the new way So notes on women printers was like any directory immediately out of date as soon as it was printed And this club also struggled to recoup its cost despite receiving numerous letters of support and admiration from universities and organizations like the american antiquarian society Feminist bibliography has never been a particularly lucrative venture But barlow's book sits as an important moment in the club as it began to transition to a new idea to a new identity in the 1970s And to think more openly about how it saw its history intersecting with gender in the rare book world These publications, especially the latter two are what I identify as feminist bibliography Whether or not Russ with the club would have understood their work as feminists is actually a lot more complicated The word feminist never occurs in the records I have found Some members focus specifically on women's literary history Especially holden hate and barlow in ways that I think read as feminist But most did not their interests were wide-ranging and often their collections aligned with the dominant power structures As a club they tended more toward the conservative and radical end of the spectrum when it came to social issues While simultaneously challenging the idea that women could not seriously collect books It seems to uphold a separate but equal status with Grollier club and they seem to live in harmony with them for many years But while this was the club's party line for lack of a better phrase Official meeting minutes also glancingly record these fissures and cracks that reveal what I think was a long simmering belief for many members That their exclusion from Grollier based on gender was unfair and damaging By the 1970s there was also a different shift in membership We're getting more vocational bibliographers so their interests are naturally different than the socialites who saw themselves very distinctly as amateurs And this is where we finally get to see a little bit of this in 1974 Meeting minutes record that the club took up the question of Grollier refusing to admit women A woman named Elizabeth Swain who as far as I can tell doesn't have a direct connection to Ross with the club But I'm still trying to figure out exactly who she was And she writes to Anne Haight who was then the president and she asserts that The Grollier club is no longer strictly a men's social club but a professional organization whose interests and activities are germane to women as they are to men She expressed hope that the Ross with the club would endorse this viewpoint and give support to her efforts And persuade the Grollier club board to expunge all extra restrictions against women The club's response to this was mixed Haight declines to side with Swain's position and wrote back that quote She was not the slightest bit interested in joining the Grollier club That we are an ancient and honorable organization with our own ties and have no desire to interfere with the Grollier club Haight's response seems to uphold this separate but equal status Ross with the ends are frequently referred to as the feminine Grollier by both themselves and other people But for Haight and many others this divide did them no identifiable harm But for others it did Mary Haight Eccles was a member of both clubs and collector of johnson and wild He probably best know her for the Haight collection of johnson at the Houghton And she reported in her memoirs that a friend of hers swore to get married solely so she could use him to access Grollier events Love it But some Ross with the ends also felt similarly to this friend that they were disadvantaged And one of them was Phyllis Goodhart Gordon. He was a renaissance scholar And she argued that exclusion from Grollier events damaged her professionally So she noted that it was a great disadvantage to her when she exhibited her father's collections of bindings And was not there Bindings there and was not allowed to be president at the meeting when those bindings were the subject of an exhibit She too felt that the Grollier club is now a professional rather than a social club And there is a cause for reconsideration of its position I find this just amazingly hard to to put my my hands around The idea that it's your bindings and you give them to them for an exhibit And then you don't even get to attend to hear the lecture She did not like that and she became one of the first women that was admitted to Grollier Just two years later when they finally did open their doors The meeting minutes don't record much else of this debate unfortunately Gordon's arguments note a schism and professional versus social perhaps vocational versus avocational That both clubs were undergoing are we a social club or are we a professional organization? As Russ with the admitted more feminine or vocational bibliographers scholars and librarians Their professional interests diverged with maintaining the social status quo Status quo This isn't to say that hate unquestionably upheld a gender divide the disadvantaged women She advocated for women's agency within the rare book world and her response emphasized that she believed russ with that had done Equally as much as Grollier toward proving its legitimacy That is russ with it didn't need Grollier to validate its existence women book collectors Especially very serious and very excellent ones could exist on their own merits and through their own practices and histories So russ with the club did eventually decline Especially after the 1990s Grollier admitting women in the 1970s is often cited as the reason why I strongly disagree with that But my talk is over so I will answer questions about that later But the work of its members at its peak shows this is an important vehicle for community driven feminist bibliography Most of what we have of russ with the class is because of the members own desire to preserve their work and that of their colleagues The reason that I have that Miriam Holden quote that I opened with is because of rachel hunt She insisted on self funding a pamphlet of Holden's talk after she gave it And Holden kept the card that hunt wrote to her and hunt said thank you so much for the delightful afternoon Not only that but your very scholarly and erudite paper on women touched my heart I really meant what I said that I thought your article should perhaps should be published as perhaps a keepsake You're wonderful to do this for russ with the club I think it is one of our high spots and nobody appreciated your work more than I did This keepsake is of course a piece of women's bibliographic history A record of women's agency and ability to educate themselves even when social norms dissuaded them from seeking education formally Through community and collecting they built something remarkable And I hope that what I have shown today is that here under the guise of a simple social club for women Wrapped in the rhetoric of feminized deference that is all throughout these minutes We have one of the most remarkable examples of feminist bibliography in the united states. So thank you for sharing your stories with me All right, so we've got time for q&a about 10 minutes, so No, you can also go get some food, but anyone have any questions Will you share the wikipedia drama? Yes So I learned about russ witha because last year I was doing a 31 days of women's book history twitter campaign because I hate myself and I wanted to write 31 profiles in 31 days apparently And somebody suggested this club and I thought okay, that sounds like fun So I go on the wikipedia page by the week before it was supposed to post and there's just this flag notice That says deleted because it's not important enough And so I went to the discussion page and I was like what? And so I read it and this guy had done. I don't know if it's a guy, but I do but had done this bad research Terrible research and decided that this wasn't notable enough to warrant a wikipedia page And so then I just looked at it and I was filled with feminist rage And so then I decided that I had to write a book on this improve this guy on wikipedia wrong So hi, I'm here to make a very petty petty angry thing Correct with an entire book that will take up six years of my life I'm very comfortable with this But the librarians mobilized and so several people who work at the folder in particular went on and beefed up the page Added more citations and eventually they decided to keep it But you can go look at the discussion page if you want to see it still there still angry So I have a question from the control room Some of our colleagues at the cleric library have asked if the two volume list from 1965 is published Uh the 1965 was a single volume and it was published. There's 1200 copies. I think the clerk has one They might not I know the Huntington has one and there is one here at UCLA special collections And so there's one in the uc system for sure Yeah, and I found one on um a books for 20 bucks. So Um, I have a question. Um, what is the legacy of their work right now? In more general like history of the book bibliography circles So you've done this deep dive to re-excavate it was was there is there some sort of Field that was appreciating the work of the frost with the club and their bibliography or was it Something that we've seemed to have collectively forgotten Uh, I have found almost nothing written on this club at all The only person that I know of who's taken an interest in them is Elizabeth Denlinger Who's up in new york public library and she's a romanticist Um, so she sent me a conference paper that she did at Chotton And then the girder learner piece was an obituary for Holden and that's more or less it is these obituaries and then these tiny Library history pieces will pop up every now and then so in my larger work on living bibliographers Basically every librarian every library has a woman who was really good at something at one point And she appears in one article and then we never see her again And so at the clerk it was Korra eggerton sanders I believe who was in charge for a very few years and when you're in charge of a library like we talked about dorky porter several times You shape that library you shape its collections you shape the way that it talks about itself You shape the kind of programs that you want to build and so women have been shaping rare book history For years in ways that we haven't connected So I find it in library history The library history isn't as interested in the questions that i'm trying to ask as a book historian So within book history and bibliography circles. I'm sure individually. Some of them have been important Uh, bell decosta green has a full biography. That's incredibly rare Uh, there's almost nothing written on russ with the club And there's this also kind of irony to it with the sense that most of them were not allowed in grolure for most of their lives But now grolure is the one in charge of their archive And this is an irony that I found repeated over and over again with women's histories So i'm very grateful actually that grolure took the archive because there's a much worse scenario in which nobody took it And we don't have access to it, but that does feel like a bit of an irony to that. Yeah If you do listening out there have another article for me, please send it Yes Bell decosta green She is the director of the morgan library and there is a biography on her called an illuminated life I believe by haiti erid's eridie zone I'm gonna get that name wrong I can spell it for you later and she um had a black father But added the decosta to her name to sound more portuguese and she was the librarian for jp morgan And then when convinced him to turn his library into a public institution, which it now is And so she was remarkable in a lot of ways I got to look at some of her letters and she knew her stuff and was particularly interested in incunibles early printed books and manuscripts Which is why the medieval academy of america has kind of Acknowledged her as an early medievalist even though i don't think she talked about herself that way But i went to the morgan and they love bell green. They will refuse to you about bell green They will they stand their their director. They love her history and her work And so i would definitely just take a look. I think i'd love to talk to you if you want to know more And i think we have time for one more question anything Great, let's give kate another round of applause. Thank you so much So we've got plenty of food. So while we set up, you know, feel free to grab take we'll take a beat because I think do you want to Open your So I now have the distinct pleasure of introducing our last speaker Who the last time I saw give a talk actually made me cry And so I hope that doesn't happen again Um Tia Blasingame is a book artist and print maker exploring the intersection of race history and perception Utilizing printmaking and book arts techniques. She renders racially charged images and histories for a nuanced discussion on issues of race and racism Blasingame holds a ba in architecture from princeton an ma in book arts from corcoran college of art and design and an mfa and printmaking from RISD Blasingame is an assistant professor at of art at scripts college Where she teaches book arts and serves as the director of scripts college press So please give a big round of applause to tia. Great. Thank you very much. Um, I want to thank Devon everyone involved in Organizing this panel my co-panelists everyone here everyone here virtually And I have to say that my interests around feminist bibliography Are really centered around the portrayal and involvement of african-american women black women women of color In the book arts field Book print history the future of the book But particularly the book as artwork Um, and I'm gonna actually I'm gonna go back and take that way. Um, so I'm gonna present About six of my own artist book projects And part of why I take this space and time to do that Is in many ways Taking this moment to Explain my own practice my own work. So it's not mischaracterized Aspects of it are not Missed and then I'm hoping time will allow and some of my work. I'll kind of Pass through very quickly because I want to make time To talk about some student work coming out of scripts college press imprint And then when we finish up, I'll kind of set up. I brought A few of my own pieces, but a lot of student work as Books know if you have some involvement or interaction with artist books The whole point is for you to handle the work So I'm hoping to give people that are here an opportunity to do that But I want to start with Coast to coast a women of color national artist book project And I want to sort of start my Talk there just as kind of inspiration for myself I would say that I think about this project a lot So it's a traveling exhibition 1987 originally conceived of by faith wringled And features artist books By women of color to the tune of about 200 women of color And I think about this project a lot And sometimes with a little Indignation and anger. I'm thinking about my own education and book arts and how this Project was never discussed And I think even in looking at the history of Artist books of the book arts field. It's not really discussed Which is kind of shocking and still disappointing and so Just thinking about my own work in relationship to these hundreds of women of color involved in Book arts and sort of writing themselves into history, but in many ways being erased from that history And showing a few pieces on the left An artist book by bissa washington in the event anyone Anyone disappears On the right a piece by faith wringled and lisa yi my best friend Also, chlorissa sly is what's happening to mama just to show three artists books out of 200 Some in the case of the work by chlorissa sly Many might be very familiar with But to think of that loss of these 200 works By women of color within book arts That we don't know we can't sort of come, you know conjure Images of because they're just not really discussed So I just kind of want to acknowledge that and kind of start from them From here, I'd like to sort of move through Some of my own work And I'll just say very briefly With my own work With artist books. I'm always trying to engage the viewer reader In a conversation typically related to historical contemporary racism Through materiality to kind of seduce the reader You know decisions related to color Tactility pacing also using archival documents archival research In sort of accepting that looks Sort of all over the place archival might be You know related to Newspaper and and television as well. I'm typically bringing my own writing in so I'll sort of Give that as some background and then kind of get into some projects and try to keep On time as well So the first piece I want to talk about is hers A primer of sorts And so this is a piece that was created 2013 as part of a larger artist book project Inventory of for Alma to Navi Street Sort of commemorating and building out of A car bombing To a book selling street With this project my interest was more Upon the sort of countless women around the world who may lack Access to education scholarship whether it's restricted or forbidden But despite that sort of lack of opportunity You know in relationship to threats of violence Intimidation that these female readers still kind of gain strength and knowledge from books In this case the covers are coming from discarded almanac pages This was a piece that I think for me is very significant in that You know I had signed on to this project And then once I got to the point of actually actualizing this project. I was flat broke Which was pretty distressing to me Originally conceiving of this as you know letterpress printed You know beautiful printmaking papers You know which I couldn't afford at all And I think for me is kind of a turning point in that With that sort of pressure of being too broke to afford kind of anything I had to use what was available to me, which was basically A pad of Washi paper that I happen to have on hand and my really crappy copier And I think it ended up actually ending up being a pretty strong project So this is a piece that again is digitally printed On the outside of each page There are letter forms. There are fabric that again are digitally printed And that text that you're seeing is the result of being backlit of some Sort of light coming through and shining through that text is printed In reverse on the back side And there is a piece of it kind of open you can sort of see because it's been pulled out from the covers This sort of flutter book That some light is getting in to sort of Illuminate that text which I'll read really briefly Hiding a book under cover under cloth this text sacred saves my life Verse upon verse recited inhaled For when it is found and taken away one day eventual too late Maybe I will know each word to speak it often low in day or dark Under this fabric skin And I'm just going to keep moving on so I want to kind of move Very quickly through the various kind of Interations of one project harvest And it's really to get to a sort of final and sort of current state of that project So with me you're going to see a lot of things quickly So I want to start with The first iteration of this project harvest as prints In this case This project was my way of kind of getting to know Road island Providence specifically Every day several times a day. I was following One street benefit street where you have brown university And wrote on the school of design campuses kind of intersecting I was Sort of performing this performative act of collecting leaves While I was doing research at the john carter brown Tied to the slave trade in that town or emanating from that town kind of thinking of The few slaves that would have been there. So first starting with sets of Screen prints in this case the yellow are leaves which you can see a little bit closer here Screen printed over and over and over again. Um, so they built up kind of A thickness and then coming back in with wax pigment paint as well And this is you know, I did several Of these series and it wasn't really doing anything exciting. There was no kind of interaction That I was having with the reader And then finally moving that to A book at the same time of doing that research kind of having this moment of being able to handle these slips of paper From the 1700s related to in this case the brown family's Interaction with the slave trade And having this sort of overwhelming moment of coming across tiny slip of paper That's really the transaction of the selling of a human being And I think that's when that information and experience Of collecting material Of making these prints came together in a way that was satisfying for me in a book form And I'll just kind of keep going. Um, so becoming harvest holding and trading So this covers matching my skin tone the sort of cacophony of colors of the leaves Sort of encompassing that moment overpowering moment for me this tiny slip of paper And I'm just going to kind of keep going And so out of that sort of came Out of the research came information That I sort of in the back of my head had but I didn't really have Proof at least for this project But sort of going through Different receipts different accountings Coming across in this next piece is A different version. So This accounting of the involvement of women So in this case someone's slaves have been Lent out. Someone is paying for That labor and the person who takes the money Some person who Answers the door at that point to take the money Is someone's wife And thinking about that that tie also for women in relationship to Whether it's when their husband dies And they might acquire the slaves as well This is something during this project that I was sort of looking for But not necessarily as a focus I'm going to keep kind of going in relationship to this project And still it, you know, I had the book that was satisfying but not necessarily The end I thought for the project And then starting to sort of move back into The visual information that I had created So those early prints coupled with The pages of the book trying to look for a way To bring those together And so actually moving digitally to start to combine them And then moving that onto fabric So that page becoming something that can be worn And then moving to harvest and actually slavery's historic house signs scarves So these were pieces that again sort of tying into The prints research that I was doing as well Around the brown family And the sort of historic Families in town as well their involvement with the slave trade I had a chance to have several students administrators faculty at brown and rizdy Wear these And sort of see what that experience was and sort of give that information back to me And that was very interesting but actually not The most interesting aspect for This iteration of the project it was actually having Private collectors acquire Some of the scarf pieces and sort of come back to me and explain That for them they saw these pieces as even though they were telling histories of specific families in a road island That they felt that they were Really kind of a stand-in for their family's lost history So in many cases they were seen as heirlooms that were going to be handed down to the next generation of their family And those women knew that that was going to be be the case when Their mother passed away. This was going to be one of the things that they would Be inheriting And you know recognizing that it's not speaking explicitly about their family, but again It was a stand-in for that and that was Very surprising to me and kind of still is But it sort of gives me a different sense particularly around this work This is me many years ago Wearing these pieces and there's there's some of the other pieces. So they're combining a cyanotype on silk in this case cotton mixed with african wax fabric and that's sort of choice sort of tied to A trip to south africa also velvet as well And so many of these are either in private collections or at public institutions So i'm interested to see what happens in the next 10 to 20 years of when that next generation of women and families Acquires those pieces and kind of what they they do with them and there's a piece At a show at a wringling college And there's another with no text So from there, I want to talk kind of briefly about negro's a handbook which is turning into A multi-set kind of series. I've sort of come back to the ideas around this project recently and Very quickly built it out into another three books. I'm excited to be finishing those later this year In this case thinking about What a book would look like if it could be a handbook to you So in this case, this is a handbook to me at a certain period in time And really sort of tying to a kind of patterning thinking about The beach And in this case actually i'm tied to summers at martha's vineyard But particularly thinking about and that in terms of not explaining that if you are fine with that That's great if you're not and you don't understand how A handbook to an african-american woman could be tied to that You just need to to read these pieces. So it's all my own writing as well And so I think around this time kind of 2015, you know as I speak to you about these projects Um For me, I had a point of just accepting the decisions that I'm making and how I'm trying to connect with individual readers Whether you question that or not I feel that if you actually physically engage with the piece the piece Sort of justifies itself and takes away those questions from you I want to move on to a smaller piece. Uh, you've that's purse um, and this ties directly to an incident in 2015 Actually, february 3rd When a 38 year old mother of two uvet headman person Was shot and killed by emery emery bill california police officers near Extra space storage at the border of oakland and emery bill And so with this piece started with my own writing around that And then really wanting to come back to that as a concrete poem To sort of hone in on my sort of Ideas around that. Um, so the concrete poem is Of her purse On the ground kind of in the aftermath Of her killing it tries to sort of summarize the events of and after her death and sort of Those two sort of conflicting stories of what is true So shoplifting. I am fleeing surrounded by police officers With ak 15 assault rifles embody cameras off Surrounded shot shot shot Fragments of me litter the pavement Fireman hosed down the site no spot of no spot on your daily commute like I never happened But people gather stolen Home depot flowers and build memorials marching people lock arms They demand justice for uvet henderson and transparency So I'm going to kind of keep going because I want to make sure I have time to show some student work as well Um, so this is another project that sort of has various iterations Um, so guilty and I'm just going to take you through a little bit of process Um, so kind of inking up and again, this is um having an idea just kind of playing around with it Um, this is sort of inking up again on the press Working with pressure prints so you can think of it as a very low relief In this case using sticker paper to create a tonal image On the left kind of have the aftermath or sort of creepy aftermath of what I've called on the press bed On the right you have that gray final image On the middle ground That red white and blue And actually at the top guilty Is one of my matrices So instead of using letter press Wood or metal type in this case. I'm using vinyl letters And starting to kind of play around for me. I have to be like purposefully Messy with my work or gritty with my work It's not stylistically something that I Would prefer So different iterations Especially can agree And then that version that I would prefer And so this was really looking at You know, who is considered to be guilty, right? And to me sort of ridiculously so That you would have to say not guilty obviously not guilty Um, and then for me um with this project I was looking at Victims of police brutality, but feeling very uncomfortable with Presenting their images. Um, obviously someone's loved one. Um I just wasn't comfortable with that. Um, and so to me the only Option was to have myself as a stand-in But I was not really comfortable with that And it took me almost a year to find a way to be comfortable with that And it became these images Of myself kind of across my lifetime with severe changes for you as the reader you may not Notice these changes or sort of lies that are in the images But I do and that's enough for me to feel comfortable That I'm presenting myself to you And so out of that becomes I am And so again, I'm sort of a stand-in For victims of police brutality So what does it mean to consider even the baby is guilty, right? And this is at a show at Santa Barbara Community College Taking you again through process So you can sort of see Image that's still on the press bed In the drawing rack these three Figures that's actually my those are my print matrices Let's see sort of the matrix here Here some Uding using photographs which I'm altering again to remove information change information So I feel comfortable kind of giving you my whole life To express this And there's a finished print Down to my mixing of colors Representing all these different time periods And that is kind of like the sum total of my life at that point in the different sections And then starting to kind of come back through with a text that I'm going to Connect with that So these assumptions that are made So particularly, you know, I think a lot of times we focus in on Black men and boys And don't really recognize The experiences of black women and girls So what is it for the toddler to be considered menacing? Or the child that you would have to say probably guilty In this case thinking about uh, mike brown In that moment of should be a very exciting day as the graduate, but you're considered suspicious And then for those who are not familiar with letterpress printing So this is the typeface Or portion of the typeface for the introduction of this book And then we agonizing over typos Different characters that need to be removed from that And then there's it printed Um as well as including an image of myself with the caption Not credible. What does that mean when the author? Is not a credible source or is not considered a credible source And then moving to the next project you are kind of maintaining That format that I created in I am Um, but having a slightly different or completely different Focus so with this project I started by looking at Hallmark romance films Where the overwhelming majority of the protagonists are white And then looking at the descriptions Particularly the descriptors of those protagonists Developing a list from that Recognizing that as an african-american woman most people would not use any of these descriptors to describe me And then trying to take parts of that and create another List of descriptors to create kind of a fractured list of affirmations for black women and black girls So again using myself as a stand-in um similar format where the texts really are captions some non-threatening deserving Not too black among others So I want to move into Some student work And then maybe after some q&a we can take a look at at some of that work um, so Students that I work with are interested all about all sorts of things Sometimes it's their position in the world as women as women of color Wondering if it's okay to center themselves in the book Or their sort of experiences within their body and in the world So one of the first books I want to talk about is divisive and diverse of voting story So this is a collaborative book that we created during It done 16 presidential campaign. Um, I think we were finishing that work across the election And this was obviously a really challenging project challenging time The students that I was working with this was the first time that they were voting um, and so they were just trying to make sense of all of this and if this was normal and Trying to find a way to sort of keep going And in many ways Their work on this project kind of kept them going And so this is At its base a sort of timeline Related to identity and voting So I think initially this group was looking thinking they were looking at women really they were looking at Access to voting for white women and so sort of Breaking that down and recognizing that that was what they were thinking of to really look at All types of voters all types of women and their access During this process, they also generated a survey That they sent out To friends family members of claremont university consortium as well Tied around to identity Voting rights rights that people were concerned about or scared that they were going to lose and they got about 160 responses, which is amazing And some of those responses factor into the book So this kind of takes you through The piece so it's a container That has their colophon Their sort of letter to the reader. It's a fishbone Doesn't have a hard cover Inside has those quotes with just minimal imagery So this is sort of up close of those sort of milestones around voting access And then you can sort of see in centrally some imagery To the right. If you look down is also some responses from that survey But primarily I want to focus in on some Individual students efforts. So this is a feminist introduction to data structures Which describes about four commonly used data structures in computer science In many ways, it's Introduction to data structures for feminists, but then it conversely is also an introduction potentially to feminism for computer scientists And this is a piece that Uses wood and metal type as well Kind of reads almost as a textbook But some of the examples are actually pretty hilarious This piece is loose leaf And this is just kind of fun. This was a student who right from the get go Liked tea and that's what they wanted to focus in on That's it And so it's a huge tea bag On the label is their colophon And then inside each page represents a different tea that's staying around the name of the tea is that specific tea With a line of cut kind of detail information about Where it's coming from in the world brewing information as well The next piece is changing face saving face And this is an accordion book That really is kind of an interplay between Changing face opera from szechuan province in china And then the sociological concept of face in chinese culture And so when you So when you remove The different line of cut masks Text information comes up. So you're kind of involved can't necessarily put the mask on But you have that interaction of removing the mask to get more information efflorescence Um Sort of kind of creates its own environment Um, so this is the student's attempt to kind of recreate their experience in nature Where a hike is kind of interrupted by a storm in this case. It's a modified double pamphlet instant book It kind of takes the reader on This sort of recreation of this kind of dramatic Journey as they sort of flip through With these paper cutouts That sort of take you through the journey the front and back cover Have clouds that kind of flip up and sort of embrace Um and sort of frame The whole experience as well And then i'm going to finish with one last piece para Akin mula saakin to myself from myself Um and this piece a pamphlet book This is a piece by a student who really wanted to explore Their experience as a filipina american Related to kind of not being considered asian but not being considered american and their own sort of Experience with their own culture and maybe not feeling that it's good enough And so that first letter talks about Those feelings and then kind of takes you through Different aspects of of her culture that she loves and sort of finishes on this letter of You know looking back now and really accepting and kind of loving Who she is and her culture as well Um and then i'm going to leave that up to sort of For anyone interested in some of the projects that i've talked about or haven't talked about Giving you links for um scripts press And then my own primrose press So we've got about 10 minutes for q and a so Any question? Yep Thank you so much. That was amazing and both you and your students do really inspiring work You shared a lot about your personal thought processes as you working through these and in one picture I saw that you had headphones in what do you listen to while you're doing this Lots of blues lots of blues Any other questions Um Can you tell me more about uh your your students so program and and who's Who's doing who's attracted to this work and and yeah just sure more general Sure, um, so scripts college is a women's college, but we're part of a consortium of schools So, um, pamona pitzer harvey mud claire mont mackenna So not just women are taking these classes But I think people who love books or some aspect of books You know, I don't necessarily have lots of like art majors Which is interesting to have those conversations Because I think most of us for particular if you're not an art major Have Certain feelings about your ability to create art and imagery Which is always Interesting to have So it's people coming with all different connections and feelings around books and I find that within the book arts field as well Which is very interesting recently the last few years. I I'll have a sprinkling of students who Um Had some sort of a book arts class in high school and I'm always like That's a thing now. Why like I need to be in that class Um, but but very few Um, and you know when students are not art majors Um, that doesn't mean that they're not artists even though they may think they're not Um, it doesn't mean that they can't make images. It doesn't mean they can't draw but they Probably at some point have been told otherwise Um, I think to me, I'm always very excited when the class is coming from all different disciplines Um, just because the critiques are stronger. So the feedback is more varied Um ways of seeing vary as well. Um, and through that everyone's work gets elevated whether they initially think that's going to occur or not Sure So I would say typically my work Um ends up living my little roommates end up living um in special collections libraries which I love because it can be really challenging subject matter and it's nice to know That there's someone there who can kind of give Contacts and not just have you like sit with something about a lynching and you need to like suffer through or freak out That they can sort of position you Um, increasingly my work is going into museums um, which is Has never been kind of like an interest or reason for doing this um I'm interested to see how what that looks like Um, how they kind of utilize the work So I just wanted to get out there. Um, I'm very open to I mean, I love like handsets And letterpress that's personal for me. I want to sit and like set every character and if it's my own writing I'm trying not to do this, but I like want to edit it while I'm setting it because I'm crazy, but like that's amazing Um, but I know that's not for everyone that handling or interaction with like a handbound letterpress printed piece For a lot of people that's like all kinds of anxiety wrapped into one bundle So I'm open to digital or whatever it takes that you know, as many people as possible have access or ownership or can kind of Continue the relationship with that piece and so something like printing on fabric and you know, I kind of move very quickly through that but very much when um Harvest reimagined occurs there for me is this shift in the viewer reader Where there's the viewer reader who owns the piece who's Determining what information is accessible by how they're You know somehow combining and tying things and then there's the reader who Might not be able to read it because the person wearing it won't give them access And so there are other relationships that they have with With the book and then with this other wearer reader So and to some extent when I had a chance to actually have people try That work out and move around the space with that I was mainly interested in having black women wear that And because there's already a way that they are surveilled and observed So just because it's on a black woman everyone is going to know It's there right because they're already going to be primed to watch and observe that person But then what happens when you have something that they don't have that they've never seen that they can't quite access Are you going to approach that person? Are you going to be too scared? Are you going to have feelings about why can't I access what that says? And so for me that was the group that I was most focused in on and then once people heard I was sort of involved in this project a lot of different types of people Approach me to be involved and we had sort of Uncomfortable conversations because initially I didn't want them to be involved But I sort of included a range of people to see sort of what what the experiences would be So we have a question from our zoom participants Catherine de Hara asks how much you're setting up your students to think about their work Or maybe how do you invite them to explore and experiment? So I try to be very clear You know because I think a lot of times initially when students are Thinking about a project approaching me It's very tentative Part of it is they're trying to feel me out to see what I'm okay with And then as they get to know me it's pretty much everything as long as you're willing to Back up what your decisions are and what you're trying to do And that things are not just arbitrary because you just like it, right? But I try to be very open Just thinking about aspects of my own education where The projects that I was doing were I think they made certain professors uncomfortable Um, and so they sort of didn't shut things down I don't think that would have been possible in my case But they weren't as supportive as they should have been and what I what I needed And so I try to be explicit in My interest in what they're trying to do and I think particularly for students who are interested in working around identity culture Their experience as women in spaces that are not Open to their being there Particularly like around the sciences I want to be very clear that what they're wanting to explore I am all for it and want to see where that goes So hopefully that answers the question Yeah, one final question Thank you for the presentation that was really moving I'm wondering about the the students works and kind of what the timeline looks like for the students Because you can see that there's a lot of thought that's going into them in terms of the content But in some cases also multiple printing techniques So I'm curious kind of how long they're working on these projects So I'd say in most cases students are coming to these classes. They don't really have like letterpress printing Experience outside of maybe a sprinkling who taken a book arts class in high school rate And so all of this is new to them book finding letterpress printing Most students will probably from elementary school have some experience with like linoleum block carving And I'm finding increasingly that's they'll even say if that's not what we're going to do like how about we do some linoleum block carving because They are feeling kind of out of their depth and they want to have something they feel like Will be successful But so really it's the first half of the semester kind of getting them Used to type setting used to the Vander Cooks we have also sort of going through an understanding The precision that's required right And sort of thinking about and looking at how artists present their ideas Working on image making I know for me my background's in printmaking So like I want their printmaking that those relief prints to be phenomenal, right? I honestly have to say I'm more interested in content Than the execution of like the bindings Hopefully we reach kind of a middle ground But I prefer not to have pieces that are like stunningly well crafted and there's no they are there. There's nothing there, right? And I think for most students they come to these classes because it's going to give them an opportunity to express themselves many The first day of class pretty much know what they want to do, right? But many don't And it's kind of through smaller projects Spending time in special collections Looking at artists books that everyone kind of gets to a point of where they think at least They want to move forward but again many students I've had students the first day of class kind of like corner me because And they're like vibrating, right? I know what I want to do in this and they'll they can take me page by page through right And I think every student to some point gets to that moment of just vibrating with excitement With possibility that you have control. This is your Space to say whatever you want. You can express who you are and your experiences And I think with letterpress printing it gives you a way that It looks professional. It looks believable. It's the printed word. We're you know, we're gonna Accept to some extent what you're saying or at least you you'll have our attention in a way that maybe you've never had before And then so the last half of the semester is kind of Almost production I feel very strongly about students Additioning work Not just making a unique piece Additioning itself is an art form And can be kind of a slog, but once you've gone through it and you know that you can do it Then you can continue to do that Great. Thank you very much. Yeah And then if anyone's interested I have tons of student work and they are lots of fun to Check out. So I'll pull some stuff out in a minute So for our online viewers I'd just like to thank you for joining us unfortunately Because of my personal curse We have are dealing with issues nationally But hopefully in a few weeks we'll have Video footage of each of the talks online with closed captions So they'll be fully accessible because I think those of us who made it in the room today We'll all agree that this was a very exciting set of papers and discussions and it's just a beginning of Rather a furthering of existing Conversations on feminist bibliographies So once again, thanks to all of the Speakers and thank you to the UCLA library for allowing us to hold this event All right. All right