Unpacking the Personal Library

Jason Camlot is Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University. Recent books include Phonopoetics (Stanford, 2019), CanLit Across Media (MQUP, 2019) and Vlarf (MQUP 2021). He is director of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb research partnership that focuses on literary audio collections. J.A. Weingarten is a Professor in the School of Language and Liberal Studies at Fanshawe College. He is also the author of Sharing the Past (UTP, 2019), as well as more than three dozen articles, book reviews, and papers on Canadian arts and culture.

Introduction - Private, Public and Personal Libraries In Situ and In Circulation - Jason Camlot Part I: Private Libraries Made Public 1. In Memory of Alexandria - Alberto Manguel 2. William Osler and the Collecting of the Middle Ages - Anna Dysert 3. A Gift to the Nation Worth While": The Library of William Lyon Mackenzie King - Meaghan Scanlon 4. Personal Libraries of the State - Bart Vautour 5. Remaindering the Difference: Book Collections of Radical Protest Libraries - Sherrin Frances 6. Serious House: On the Future of Library Print Collections - Andrew Stauffer Part II: The Personal Library as a Field of Interpretation 7. Virginia Woolf's Poetry Library - Emily Kopley 8. Unpacking Duncan's Books: Remarks on the Personal Library of Robert Duncan - James Maynard 9. "Her Books Filed for Divorce": Embeddedness and the Question of Belonging in Relation to Sheila and Wilfred Watson's Personal Library - Linda Morra 10. Al Purdy's Lives and Libraries: A Bibliographical Essay - Nicholas Bradley 11. jwcurry's Room 3o2 Books: The Small Press Bookstore as Library and Archive - Cameron Anstee Conclusion: "In My End Is My Beginning": The Library as Heraclitean Archive - J. A. Weingarten

"At a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the wholesale migration of the academic world online, and an urgent re-think of how teaching, learning and research are conducted, this book's enthusiastic interrogation of issues around the value and purpose of libraries, and of the nature of humanities research conducted within them, is timely. It is fitting in 2022 to be thinking about these things, and this book offers an interesting, stimulating and encouragingly positive answer to the question, "Why libraries?" - Alice Crawford, Digital Humanities Research Librarian, University of St Andrews "For archive rats, librarians, and deep-dive historical lit nerds, Unpacking the Personal Library offers a prismatic lens on how libraries speak." - Emily Raine, Montreal Review of Books