"I recently ended up spending cumulative hours on the phone with several revered scholars of Russian literature, trying to pin them down on what Tolstoy is getting at in War and Peace when he has a woman attend the Moscow opera with her breasts totally exposed." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Hey guys, remember when Henry James came back from Europe to visit New York in 1904 and there was a big spaceship?

my first peonies from the garden plot!

the godfather of one world-altering technology contemplates the product of another: Geoffrey Hinton and the Gutenberg Bible. Harvard College Library, May 28, 2026

sentences I have tried out this week with success "I will volunteer my time to write a first draft if it helps get us started without the use of A.I." "I am happy to volunteer to write this summary, but as long as I still meet my deadline, I hope it's okay if I don't use A.I. [as you suggested]"

for those of you in the Boston area, we are celebrating Helen Vendler's birthday tomorrow with some music, poetry, and remembrances! libcal.library.harvard.edu/event/167386....

So happy to get a copy of the amazing ‘Thanks for Typing’ exhibition at @harvard.edu, with brilliant research into women’s type labour by @cejacobson.bsky.social and colleagues! 📖🎉

I am just starting out, but the system I’m putting in place at the outset is: - archival reference photos in Tropy - research notes and chapter drafts in OneNotebook (free access through employer) - secondary research in zotero - reserved library carrel to keep physical books

what are people using these days to organize research? photos from archives, notes, interviews and transcriptions, etc.

this piece by Becca Rothfeld in @thepointmag.bsky.social knocked me down to the ground "Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity." thepointmag.com/criticism/li...

Yes, I'm a week late and people probably already know this, but I'm doing my best! Anyway, the late Barbara Hall was thanked at the Oscars by her nephew Andy Jurgensen, so let's look at that! www.pop-archives.com/post/archive... #archives #archivists #GLAMS 📜

The Grolier Club has digitized the meeting minutes of the Hroswitha Club! The Hroswithians were a group of women collectors not allowed in the Grolier Club. These minutes are a treasure trove, and Im thrilled to see them digitized and not in my phone anymore! www.grolierclub.org/Default.aspx...

if you were unable to attend Erin McGuirl's Winship Lecture, "No Modern Publishing Without Women" at Houghton Library, the recording is now live! 📜 www.youtube.com/watch?v=arCs...

I know I am in many ways fairly insulated from AI due to the nature of my work, but increasingly I am having to learn to fix my face in meetings when people refer to using it for things we used to turn to expert colleagues or own brains for. As someone with an expressive face, it's a challenge!

Niche but cool. I mentioned in class that there was little evidence that #18thc readers had ever responded to the invitation tendered by the blank page in Tristram Shandy & drawn the Widow Wadman. & then a student revealed the portrait of Slawkenbergius she found inscribed into her copy of our novel

I can't really believe the HFA let me partner with them on a film series about women and the typewriter, but here it is. Catch MEET JOHN DOE (1941) , HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940), and THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994) this women's history month! harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/the...

Today, thanks to the Houghton Library, I got to introduce students to an #18thcentury German peepshow showing the interior of a printing house. Take a peek! (It was hard to photograph & the photo fails to include the cat who joins the dog in the foreground as 1 of the spectators.) #BookHistory

we are so lucky that the great Erin McGuirl will give the spring 2026 George Parker Winship Lecture at Houghton library tomorrow, March 4 at Houghton Library. please come and share widely! 📜 libcal.library.harvard.edu/event/162329....

thanks to @hyperallergic.com for the shout out in the latest Required Reading: "As with too many art forms, several now-classic books by male authors would not have been possible without the women who typed and often edited them." hyperallergic.com/required-rea...

if you've ever been curious what Fran Lebowitz would chat about with a rare book librarian, I'll be in conversation with her next Thursday evening at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in Boston. us.atgtickets.com/events/an-ev... 📜 GLAMS

Sharing the re-cat'd + previously unreported 1855 1st ed of Whitman's Leaves of Grass at Spencer @kulibraries.bsky.social ! We've had this copy for decades, but in the card cat - not in our online catalog: 📜 #bookhistory #booksky #libsky #rarebooks : kuprimo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/...

Only British Vogue has the courage to publish true science as it was practiced in the 18th century Transactions of the Royal Society

many thanks to Mark Feeney for covering Thanks for Typing in @bostonglobe.com. grateful for his keen eye for details (which every curator hopes visitors will notice) and for so thoroughly understanding the thesis of the show: www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/05/a...

THIRD PRINTING ALERT: This is my first book and @wehere.bsky.social's first book. The response has been overwhelming (two small printing selling out in a matter of days), but also has meant a bit of lead time in-between. If you've read and enjoyed, please share this out so more folks can explore!

thank you for everything you did for we here and for the library and information science profession, fobazi. you were an incredible friend, thinker, writer, supporter. you’ll be dearly missed 🤍

The Wayback is now so load-bearing we should be protecting it with our actual lives

beyond thrilled to have an essay out in the @publicdomainrev.bsky.social about the women who profoundly impacted the works of Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and Lev Tolstoy, and the archival evidence they left behind: publicdomainreview.org/essay/typing...

NEW ESSAY — Christine Jacobson’s “Typing for Love or Money”, on the neglected efforts of women like Theodora Bosanquet, Véra Nabokov, and Valerie Eliot, who — through their work as typists and editors — had a profound impact on modern literature: publicdomainreview.org/essay/typing...

we have many fun programs lined up to dive deeper into secretaries, amanuenses, and even typists of the silver screen! Erin McGuirl will be with us on March 4th to share her discovery of the typist behind the first English translation of The Second Sex: libcal.library.harvard.edu/calendar/mai....

In March, come to the Harvard Film Archive to see our film series, The Lady & the Typewriter, movies that celebrate dames that type as fast as they talk: HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1941), MEET JOHN DOE (1940), and THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994). Dates, info, and tickets: harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/the...

next week on 2/12 I'll be offering a tour of the exhibition and inviting visitors to type valentines on our beautiful pink ca 1950s Olympia typewriter (complete with bespoke exhibition letterhead on thick dreamy paper)

telling myself that the typo in this post is an homage to the manual typewriter

It's hard to believe good things can still be happening, but if you are in the Boston area between now and May 1st, there is an free-to-the-public exhibition on women's type labor in literature and the arts (co-curated by me and the great Dale Stinchcomb). library.harvard.edu/exhibits/tha...

New Newberry Library $4m Grant Will Expand Access to Indigenous Studies Collections 📜 www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-n...

"To uphold our dedication to truth, we must do three related things: understand what is happening; speak about it plainly; and remain in honest dialogue with ourselves."

How fantastic!

extraordinary

The world feels so bleak and frightening right now. I am full of grief for people in Minneapolis and Lewiston and Kiev and (&c). But it is Burns Night, and we do have this recording of Jean Redpath singing his "Green Grow the Rashes, O'". Do take a moment to listen. www.youtube.com/watch?v=djTU...

Congratulations to @mayorwu.boston.gov for celebrating her second inaugural yesterday! We were honored to be a part of this historic moment, as she again chose the “Bible of the Revolution” from our Special Collections for her second swearing-in ceremony.

.@dorothyjberry on the bizarre and complex history of “Black America”, a theatrical show which saw a Brooklyn park, for the summer of 1895, transform into a replica of a Southern cotton plantation: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/black-america-1895 #BlackHistoryMonth

The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.

returning to Boston after a week visiting family in our native Florida and my husband I are ecstatic with gratitude, like George Bailey at the end of It's a Wonderful Life: "Merry Christmas sidewalks and bike lanes! Merry Christmas you old wonderful MBTA! Hey! Merry Christmas feral turkeys!"

so many thanks to @cejacobson.bsky.social! two little pieces of her annual Emily Dickinson black cake were waiting for me when I returned home from winter travels

delighted to see QLB's beautiful reprint of The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (with introduction and afterword by @mollybrrown.bsky.social and me + cover design by the great Anthony Russo) is on the @strandbookstore.bsky.social's Holiday Gift Guide: www.strandbooks.com/home-maker-9...

A #tinyjoy to take you into the weekend. I just learned that 13- year-old Charlotte Brontë's TINY book, A Book of Ryhmes [sic] (it measures 9.5 cm by 6 cm) contains a poem titled "A Thing OF fourteen Line's. commonly called a" (& her tiny handwriting made the next word illegible.) #BookHistory

". . .but I never despaired about my students, who, when our conditions allowed it, showed me again and again how close reading requires and multiplies both trust and strength." Thank you @johannawinant.bsky.social for this ♥️ www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

somehow never not thinking about Henry James—anyone else experience this

haven't posted here in a bit but here's an update: my fridge is full of leftovers, my sweet babe is asleep, and I'm in my pajamas writing about Henry James with a cup of coffee mixed with Berdick's cocoa. loose plans to take my daughter to the MFA Ruysch show this afternoon. I am contented!

longtime LRB reader and supporter, but this review made me see red. (so much so, considering writing my first letter to the editor.) why would LRB choose someone with so much clear disdain for his subject to review her biography?