8.8/The Lived Worlds/Fashion and Material Culture

The Bookshelf as Biography

The Shelf Before the Sentence

A senior profile writer on the floor performed the mechanism without registering that he was performing it. Before a new editorial assistant had said a complete sentence to him, he believed he knew what kind of reader she was. He had not asked her a single question about books. He had looked, once, at the shelf behind her desk while waiting for her phone call to end, and the look had been enough. The spines sorted themselves for him before the titles did — a run of matte black paperback spines with a colored band low on each one, a cluster of jacketed hardcovers a size taller than the rest, a slim run of gray covers with no images on them at all — and each cluster told him which publishing houses had marketed to her, which meant, in his reading, which rooms she had already been let into. He had drawn a conclusion about her education, her means, and her seriousness from four feet away, without opening a single book, because the imprint sorted the room before the author did.

This was a different operation from reading an apartment’s shelves as furniture — the weight a run of foreign-language spines or a poet’s collected works gave a room, apart from any argument the books made. What the profile writer performed at the office was narrower and more mechanical: a sort by publishing house, run automatically, that produced a verdict about the sorter’s colleague before either of them had spoken.

The Imprint Ladder

The hierarchy had rungs, and each rung had a founding date and a house behind it. At the bottom of the ladder in prestige but the widest in circulation sat Penguin Classics, the black-spined series Penguin had launched in 1946 with E. V. Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey, aimed explicitly at a general reader rather than a specialist one.² A black Penguin spine on a shelf signaled, to a floor that had gone through college syllabi built on the series, “read in school, and kept” — the least expensive rung, but not the least legitimate one; it meant the owner had actually done the assigned reading rather than skimmed a summary.

One rung up sat Vintage Contemporaries, the trade-paperback line the editor Gary Fisketjon had launched at Random House’s Vintage imprint in September 1984, distinguished by a uniform, brightly abstract cover design — checked color bands, dot-matrix accents, a recurring visual grammar across wildly different books — conceived by the designer Lorraine Louie under the line’s founding art director, Judy Loeser.³ The series’ flagship title, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, had defined the look for a whole cohort of readers who had come up in the 1980s on exactly these spines; owning a run of them on a shelf signaled a reader who had been paying attention to American fiction as it was being made, not only as it had already been canonized.

Above that sat hardcover, and hardcover split by house. A Knopf hardcover carried the Borzoi — the running Russian wolfhound Alfred A. Knopf had trademarked in 1922 as the company’s mark, printed near the colophon page with the words “This is a Borzoi Book” — and a shelf with several Borzoi spines on it signaled either disposable income or a job that generated review copies, since new hardcover fiction from a house like Knopf ran well past what an editorial assistant’s salary comfortably absorbed.⁴ A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover carried the three fish, a mark FSG had inherited in 1960 when it absorbed Noonday Press, whose own founder had borrowed the image from a German literary magazine’s cover;⁵ a shelf built around the three fish signaled a reader chasing the house understood, across the period, to publish the writers other serious writers wanted to be published by. Further up and to the side sat New Directions, whose plain gray-and-black paperback covers signaled poetry, translation, and the kind of reading done by people who taught for a living rather than earned from it in any other way. And running underneath all of it, cutting across genre and even across the century, sat the Library of America — the black-jacketed, red-white-and-blue-striped uniform edition series that had begun publishing in 1982 — whose presence on a shelf signaled a reader assembling a canon on purpose, one author at a time, at a price per volume steep enough that the set itself became a small biography of its owner’s discretionary income.⁶

The hierarchy did not require its readers to hold an opinion about it; it required only that they had absorbed it early enough not to remember learning it. A senior editor could not have explained, if pressed, why a shelf of Vintage Contemporaries read as more current than a shelf of Penguin Classics and less serious than a shelf of Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcovers. He simply knew it the way he knew which fork to use first, and the knowledge functioned as a sorting mechanism precisely because it never announced itself as one.

Harlem University and the Counter-Canon

The reading a shelf invited from an editorial floor assumed a single, legible ladder — and it broke down completely against a shelf built by a different education. A Black woman on the same floor who had come through the City College of New York’s English department in the late 1980s had been trained inside a curriculum the ladder above did not register at all, because the ladder measured proximity to publishing houses, not depth of instruction.

City College’s own recent history had produced that curriculum. In April 1969, Black and Puerto Rican students occupied the campus’s South Campus for two weeks, renaming the institution Harlem University for the duration of the occupation and forcing the resignation of the college’s president; the settlement that followed established open admissions at the City University of New York the following year.⁷ The occupation’s more durable effect ran through a smaller, older program: Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge, established at CUNY in 1965 to bring underprepared students into four-year study with academic and financial support attached. In the years around the occupation, SEEK’s faculty included, teaching simultaneously, the writers Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich — a concentration of literary talent training students in close reading, argument, and publication that few university English departments anywhere in the country could have assembled on purpose.⁸ The critic Addison Gayle, hired as a City College SEEK lecturer in 1966 and an architect of the era’s Black Aesthetic argument, taught in the same program, and the critic Barbara Christian lectured for SEEK from 1965 until she left for Berkeley in 1971, carrying into her later work the Black feminist criticism she began building there — so that a student moving through the department a generation later inherited not one critical position on the Black literary tradition but a running argument between several.⁹¹⁰ The syllabus that student read had been built, in part, by writers who had been engaged, at the time they taught it, in inventing the literature it was teaching.

The shelf that resulted did not sort by imprint at all. It sorted by argument — Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider next to Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf next to Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey and the older canon of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son that it re-read — which writer had answered which other writer, which essay had corrected which novel’s reception, which edition of a canonical text had restored a foreword the more famous edition had dropped. It was a shelf built for use rather than display, and a colleague reading it by the imprint ladder alone would misread nearly everything on it.

Two Editions of One Novel

The clearest case of that misreading concerned a single book that existed, in the years around 1989, in two different editions carrying two different arguments. Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God had gone out of print for decades before the University of Illinois Press reissued it in 1978 in a trade paperback carrying a foreword by the poet and novelist Sherley Anne Williams, occupying pages v through xv of the edition — a critical framing, written by a Black woman writer, that placed Hurston inside a tradition rather than treating her as a rediscovered curiosity.¹¹ A different book entirely, Robert Hemenway’s 1977 critical biography of Hurston, carried a foreword by Alice Walker, whose 1975 Ms. magazine essay “Looking for Zora” — an account of Walker’s search for Hurston’s unmarked Florida grave, later collected in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens — was widely credited with driving the novel’s rediscovery in the first place.¹² The two forewords, on two different books about the same writer, were easy to collapse into one, and on a Meridian floor unfamiliar with either volume directly, easy to get backward. A reader who owned the 1978 University of Illinois Press paperback, its spine already softened by seven or eleven years of handling depending on when it had reached her, had not encountered the novel as a gift arriving from outside the tradition. She had studied it inside a department built, in part, by the writers who had done the work of restoring it.

The same years produced a second, more public argument about literary standing, one the floor had followed at a distance rather than lived through a classroom. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, published by Knopf in 1987, lost the 1987 National Book Award for Fiction; in response, forty-eight Black writers and critics — among them Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Henry Louis Gates Jr., June Jordan, and Paule Marshall — signed an open letter, published in The New York Times on January 24, 1988, stating that “despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve.”¹³ Ten weeks later, on March 31, 1988, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.¹⁴ The sequence — public protest, followed by the prize the protest had argued for — was itself now part of what the novel’s Knopf hardcover meant on a shelf: not simply a prizewinning book, but the visible record of a campaign a community of writers had waged in print to have a body of work seen correctly. A copy of Beloved in its 1987 Knopf edition, shelved beside the earlier Morrison novels in the same Borzoi format, carried that campaign’s outcome on its jacket, whether or not the reader who owned it had followed the argument in the Times at the time.

The Gift That Assumed a Lack

The imprint ladder’s blind spot produced its own small transactions on the floor. A senior figure who wished to signal welcome to a junior colleague sometimes reached for a book as the gesture, and the choice of book revealed which ladder he was reading from. Handing a Black woman colleague a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God — meant, plainly, as recognition — assumed a gap in her reading the gesture itself did nothing to verify; it assumed that a novel restored to print by Black women’s critical labor still needed introducing to a Black woman reader, rather than assuming she might already own a better copy than the one in his hand. Of the books such a gesture might have chosen — a favorite novel of the giver’s own, a study of the trade he worked in, a writer who had shaped his own sentences — the volume he reached for instead was the one that returned her, unasked, to the category he had already placed her in.

The miscalculation was rarely announced. A colleague who already owned the book, in a better edition, with her own pencil marks in the margin, generally said thank you and set the new copy down without explaining why the gesture had landed wrong. What she withheld was information the giver had no way to solicit, because the questions that would have surfaced it — what have you already read, in what edition, at whose direction — were not questions a floor accustomed to reading shelves from across a room thought it needed to ask out loud.