The Social Life of Books: Uses of Text and Image Beyond Reading and Viewing, session at Bibliography Among the Disciplines Conference, Philadelphia, PA, October 12–15, 2017

Fish wrappers, cigarette rollers, toilet paper, the backing for embroidery, lining for baking pans, the raw material for papier mâché—these are but a few of the uses that the page was subjected to outside the normative economies of reading and viewing. But texts and images also often functioned in less pragmatic and more freighted ways: as numinously charged surfaces to be touched upon one's person, as personal possessions hidden inside mummy bundles for the enjoyment of the deceased, as symbols to be iconoclastically destroyed, or as divine conduits to be ceremonially ingested. Sometimes books and images, which by their nature inform, instruct, invite annotation, and implore users to follow their designs, incited such uses beyond mere reading or viewing. We seek interrogations of uses and reuses of the page that emphasize instances in which material necessity was charged with a semantic or symbolic dimension. When was the sheer need for paper or parchment complicated or compounded by the content of the page? Or when might repurposing have been prompted by alternative understandings of a book's materials, in their own right?

Session Organizers
Aaron Hyman (University of California, Berkeley)
Hannah Marcus (Harvard University)
Marissa Nicosia (Penn State University, Abington College)

Bibliography Among the Disciplines, a four-day international conference, will bring together scholarly professionals poised to address current problems pertaining to the study of textual artifacts that cross scholarly, pedagogical, professional, and curatorial domains. The conference will explore theories and methods common to the object-oriented disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology, but new to bibliography. The program aims to promote focused cross-disciplinary exchange and future scholarly collaborations. Bibliography Among the Disciplines is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and organized by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.