On Bibliography
I’m a huge fan of cookbooks, a huge collector of Nigerian, West African, and Afro-diasporic cookbooks, food books, writing, and more and I’m beginning a journey as a rare book seller.
I collect multiple editions of the same book in a hope to learn more about the history and evolution of many aspects of printing and publishing in Nigeria.
I recently came across a fantastic essay that I’d like to share. It’s centered on Black book bibliography, collectors, archivists and those documenting life, lived experience, culture, and more. It’s inspired me in many ways. In What is “Black” about Black Bibliography? (linked online), published in Volume 116, Number 2 of The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith L. McGill explore the long, varied history of Black Bibliophiles and their bibliographical work. (You can also access a pdf here).
The authors share that “Over the last fifty years, the study of African American literature has grown rapidly in scope and importance. It is now a vital field of specialization in any US English department of merit. And yet scholars of African American literature still lack thorough bibliographic knowledge of many of the texts at the heart of the field. Why has bibliographic study been marginalized within the field’s development, and what has been the intellectual impact of this inattention?”
So many things stand out for me beyond the marginalization of Black Voices in the field, and support for Black work:
Community effort as a strategy to building knowledge
Remarkably, early Black bibliophiles pioneered the strategy of pooling resources to collect works communally; this was the strategy of the 1915 American Negro Collectors Exchange, a practice with its roots in the early nineteenth-century Black reading rooms and literary societies.
Black collectors opened up their collections for study. See 1.
It makes me think of Tosin Adeosun work as part of her African Style Archive. She hosts study days and other work sharing fashion history. It makes me think of myself, putting together the Feast Afrique Digital Library and the atlas of connected foodways, along with the public history work I do engaging the public and new audiences through collaborative storytelling that explores all the ways we’re similar in spite of our differences.
And a lot more. more than I’ve fully digested.
Because of Jacqueline and Meredith’s work I learned the deeper/ meanings of the following
It has also given me method/ process/ direction for my bibliographical work on authors of Nigerian and West African Food and Cookbooks from 1910 to date.
To this end, I’ve compiled resources I find inspiring, reference and foundational texts, and more. I’ll continue to add to this as I grow my knowledge and understanding of the field.
If you have suggestions, questions, thoughts, let me know.
