The rumor is true! I used the publishing history of Grove Press’s 1960s French translations to think about the history of midcentury gay male sexuality and the idioms it created, and how those shaped queer theory in the 1990s

The special issue I co-edited on "Melville's Queer Afterlives" is here and it's queer. This issue has EVERYTHING: gay pirates, dirty pictures, racist internet fanfic, Gilbert Gottfried, original poetry, and just so many French people. Available at your library, but LMK if you're paywalled...

"A miniature book published by St. Onge was the only book taken on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, and was thus the first book on the moon"

For many of the years that Raymond Weaver taught at Columbia University, he lived at 200 W 108th Street, and maybe, just maybe, this now defunct mailbox in the building’s lobby was the one at which he posted his first letters to Elizabeth Melville Metcalf

Take your watermark questions to The Grolier Club, they said. (They were totally right!)

Dictionnaire de bibliographie Haitienne (1951) by Max Bissainthe is the first modern and still most comprehensive bibliography of Haiti printing. His typescript drafts at NYPL reveal his process, with note cards, paperclips, and typewriter errors corrected with scissors and now very yellowed tape

Honestly thought I was just doing some due diligence at the American Antiquarian Society, but found truly amazing unique and under-cataloged Haiti items, plus some surprising interactions between print and manuscript

There comes a time in every man’s life where he must face up to how little he knows about the stamps on French Revolutionary documents. (No, but seriously, please recommend some readings.)

It becomes clear that this item’s excellent catalog record must have been a bit hard won.

I’m an English professor in the US in 1967. I bought a house in town my first year on the job and earned tenure with two articles. My wife cooks my meals and my secretary does my typing. I have to read all the books published this year about the one author I study. There were two of them.

"i asked grok" "i asked chagpt" yeah well I asked a rare books librarian and they found things I didn’t even know I was looking for, while answering questions about provenance

Hello from the archives!

Another good book day!

Good book day

Little known fact: Mary, the character played by Parker Posey in the 1995 indie film "Party Girl," was actually based on me in college

If astrology isn’t real, why does Sarah Michelle Gellar share a birthday with Frederic Jameson?

Big ups to @jordanstein.bsky.social for stopping by my class to talk about Nina Simone! He's got a whole ass book about her: www.dukeupress.edu/fantasies-of...

The British Library’s incredibly rare and totally pristine copy of the complete 1875 French translation of Marx’s Capital in quarto was personally donated by the author, and while I am not 100% sure what I mean by it, I feel compelled to say: it could always be like this

Happy 82nd birthday, Nina Simone!

Short essay adapted from "Fantasies of Nina Simone" is up at The American Psychoanalyst tapmagazine.org/all-articles...

Contrary to popular supposition, Deleuze and Guattari were not a couple. It was more of a schizuationship

Happy birthday, Harriet Jacobs! Wow did you call it or what

When we were in grad school, I recall that he in all sincerity wrote a seminar paper whose argument turned the "fact" that gay men cannot look at each other's faces when they have sex

Please keep the “How could we have known!” crowd in your thoughts today

This June at the American Antiquarian Society: “Sex, Gender, and Print”: The 2025 Summer Seminar in the History of the Book, taught by Greta LaFleur and Jordan Alexander Stein. Apply by April 4, 2025. Scholarships available for grad students and other early career scholars. Link in comments.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878)

“How did your first day back go?”

Do you even lift up the downtrodden masses, bro?

E.M. Forster, new year resolutions, 31 December 1904

It's a Wreathra

College bestie (lesbian) had crush on hot professor (lesbian) & cajoled me (not lesbian) to take professor’s class with her, effectively as a kind of aspirational wingman. Class completely changed the direction of my intellectual life & 20 years later I published a book on things I first read there

Why bother calling it “end of semester” if it doesn’t end?

The long Santa con

This one goes out to all people who asked me in college when studying queer theory and Marxism would be useful in the real world

🚨NEW EPISODE🚨 We're joined by author and scholar @jordanstein.bsky.social to unpack one of the most crucial yet enigmatic concepts in psychoanalysis: fantasy. How does fantasy relate to reality, to desire, to our projects of self-fashioning, and to popular figures whom we can never personally know?

spotted! in the wild @jordanstein.bsky.social

Pinned tweet.

So about how long does it usually take for the old world to die away, and the new world to struggle to come forth? Asking for a friend.

It’s exciting to connect here with so many people! But if this is going to replace Twitter, we also need to reconnect with some reply guys, a troll to tell you what you really mean, someone to escalate by comparing things to Hitler, and definitely someone to declare that reading is ableist

Not my usual #c18th #c18 material (but hey, I love Brutalism too). Very much looking forward to reading this, @jordanstein.bsky.social

today in books received! congrats @jordanstein.bsky.social

Re-enjoy this. "Though Woody Allen-esque in theme, the plot of Maisie is ultimately more like Eat, Pray, Love as long as you replace each of the three steps with child neglect."

In "Fantasies of Nina Simone," Jordan Alexander Stein examines Simone’s performances, images, and writings to examine the space between our fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Read a sample for free now! ow.ly/E2GE50SzA4Z

Asked to review two gay books that had nothing to do with one another, I came up with a state of the field essay. Come for the fun citations, stay for the typos! urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt...

Working for a university in 2024, but not as a trustee

Teaching prep, once again

Happy 10th birthday to the best thing I ever wrote, which now seems like a bizarre time capsule www.theawl.com/2013/12/the-...

"Though a classroom is not exactly a workplace, one thing the two spaces have in common is that they need to be accessible to all kinds of people who come into them–they need to be, in a word, non-toxic." @jordanstein.bsky.social #c18th #AcademicSky