Library records provide a particularly fruitful avenue into the history of print culture. For millions of Americans from mid-nineteenth century on, institutional libraries have constituted a major path of access to texts, and in recent years, print culture scholars have begun to exploit libraries as a rich--and widely available--source of data. In addition to providing an important link between individual readers and the texts that they read, libraries can help occupy the middle ground between specific texts and readers and the macro or meta-theories that have come to dominate literary criticism. Indeed, libraries provide print culture scholars with an arena in which to exercise the historical and sociological imagination, linking micro analysis of the study of this text, these readers, here and now with the dimensions of macro analysis—such as class, race and gender, that they recognize need to be included. Libraries are both a site and a source of regulating processes. The interactions of multitudes of authors and readers are shaped in part by the meta-texts of the library’s operations: its classification and cataloging practices, its shelving system and the principles on which it bases reader access to those shelves; its circulation rules, its spatial and temporal arrangements for in-house reading; its provision of printed signs and guides to the collection, its use of web pages and personnel to steer readers along pre-defined and recognizable paths. Yet just as individual readers engage in ruses which allow them to appropriate individual texts, so those who read in the library read the library itself—becoming in the process, potentially resistant readers of the library.

We especially encourage the submission of proposals that make use of library records as primary sources, that focus on libraries as sites of textual encounter, or that locate libraries in the broader print culture of specific places and at specific times. Proposals for individual papers or complete sessions (up to three papers) should include a 250-word abstract and a one-page c.v. for each presenter. Submissions should be made via email to printculture@slis.wisc.edu. The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2010. Notifications of acceptance will be made by early March.

Keynote speakers will be Professor Janice A. Radway of Northwestern University (author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, and A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire) and Professor Wayne A. Wiegand of Florida State University (author of many books on library and print culture history, including Books on Trial: Red Scare in the Heartland [with Shirley A. Wiegand] and Irrepressible Reformer : A Biography of Melvil Dewey.

Welcome to the website of the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America. For over fifteen years the Center has been fostering the interdisciplinary study of print culture in the United States during the period since 1876. Through lectures and colloquia, biennial conferences, and the University of Wisconsin Press series "Print Culture History in Modern America," we encourage scholarly work on the authorship, reading, publication and distribution of print materials of all kinds, produced by those at both the center and the periphery of power in the United States from the late nineteenth century on.