 Hi, my name is Kathleen, I use she, her pronouns, and I'm one of the librarians at Burns Library, which is the special collections library here on campus. So today I'm going to be doing a demo for you about how to look at a book as an archival object and how to assess the audience and biases in my path without necessarily having read the entire thing. Let's start with this book I pulled from the Burns Library shelves and see what we can learn about it. It's pretty hard to tell the size of a book when looking at it online. The size of the book is a clue about intended audiences and uses. So this book is about seven inches tall and about four and a half inches wide. So take a moment and go find an actual print book somewhere near you. We'll wait. Got it? Great. Now compare the size of this book to the book you found. Is this one the size of a textbook, a paperback novel? Next let's check what is this book, when and where was it published? Titles pages contain a lot of helpful information. Opening this up to the title page. This is from London in 1793 and it's called the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olada Equiano or Gustavus Vasa the African. This book includes a detailed portrait of the author, which is clearly a sign of money and care. It also emphasizes the identity of the author. The book was written by a black man, which in 1793 was not very common. The portrait reinforces the identity given by the title of the book. This is written by Olada Equiano, who also has a European sounding name, Gustavus Vasa the African. So that going any further, I already know this book was meant to be taken seriously and wants to emphasize the fact that the author's African clearly has some European content. Fright matter can provide a lot of information banged for not a lot of time investment. Does your book have a table of contents, lists of illustrations, or anything else that could orient you into how the book is organized, or what the author or editors think are the most important parts of the book? This book has a lot of front matter. These are series of letters which can tell you a lot by the editorial stance of the book. The dedication steepled with money and influence and attempt to win favor and financial support. Either responding to other political arguments or critiques to the book. We also have a very lengthy list of subscribers who are crowdfunding and supporting the book. I might come back to this later and begin googling some of these names. Who's supporting this book? Are they politicians, journalists, religious figures? This can also give us a lot of context for this book. But then it has a table of contents. So just from reading the chapter descriptions, I know this is an autobiography of an Nigerian man who was kidnapped, enslaved, but tied both on a plantation as well as saving, sailing around other parts of the Caribbean with various enslavers for eventually buying his own freedom and moving to England. Are there other illustrations throughout your book? That is itself an expense which would raise the price of the book. And I hint that the publisher thought the audience would be able to spend more on this book. What is illustrated? What scenes or people were deemed important enough to be illustrated? For example, this book has an engraving of a shipwreck, which is an interesting choice. I would have guessed they would have illustrated the terrible conditions of slavery and not the ship. Why do you think they made this choice? Now spend some time reading the text itself. Think about what you've already figured out about and apply that as you read. What perspectives and biases does the author have? What are they trying to convince or educate their readers about? What voices are missing from the text? I have to spend me about 20 minutes paging through this book and reading. I know that Equiano's work is both an autobiography, an effort to convince the largely white British public about the evils of slavery and the need to end the slave trade. It's popular reading, hence the six editions and straightforward narrative, more than academic reading. But the illustrations indicate that this is meant for a wealthier, more educated audience as opposed to selling simple pamphlets that more people could afford. So this narrative is being constructed to both speak about his life, but also emphasize the conditions of slavery he, an enslaved man, both experienced and observed. If right into a native Nigerian audience, for example, or with a less physical end in mind, he has spent more time on his own personal life and background on the details of the horrors he witnessed and experienced. And with that in mind, you are now ready to look at books both as archival objects and historical texts on your own.