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Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to public libraries.
Contributors explore libraries at particular moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes Alberto Manguel’s account of the Library of Alexandria as well as chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson, Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration, dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and public spaces.
Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical poetics of the personal library within its extended social, aesthetic and cultural contexts.
“For archive rats, librarians, and deep-dive historical lit nerds, Unpacking the Personal Library offers a prismatic lens on how libraries speak.”—Emily Raine, Montreal Review of Books
Jason Camlot is Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University. Recent books include Phonopoetics (Stanford, 2019), CanLit Across Media (MQUP, 2019) and Vlarf (MQUP 2021). He is director of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb research partnership that focuses on literary audio collections.
J.A. Weingarten is a Professor in the School of Language and Liberal Studies at Fanshawe College. He is also the author of Sharing the Past (UTP, 2019), the editor of The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003 (WLUP, 2025)as well as more than three dozen articles, book reviews, and papers on Canadian arts and culture.
Introduction - Private, Public and Personal Libraries In Situ and In Circulation – Jason Camlot
Part I: Private Libraries Made Public
1. In Memory of Alexandria – Alberto Manguel
2. William Osler and the Collecting of the Middle Ages – Anna Dysert
3. A Gift to the Nation Worth While”: The Library of William Lyon Mackenzie King – Meaghan Scanlon
4. Personal Libraries of the State – Bart Vautour
5. Remaindering the Difference: Book Collections of Radical Protest Libraries – Sherrin Frances
6. Serious House: On the Future of Library Print Collections – Andrew Stauffer
Part II: The Personal Library as a Field of Interpretation
7. Virginia Woolf’s Poetry Library – Emily Kopley
8. Unpacking Duncan’s Books: Remarks on the Personal Library of Robert Duncan – James Maynard
9. “Her Books Filed for Divorce”: Embeddedness and the Question of Belonging in Relation to Sheila and Wilfred Watson’s Personal Library – Linda Morra
10. Al Purdy’s Lives and Libraries: A Bibliographical Essay – Nicholas Bradley
11. jwcurry’s Room 3o2 Books: The Small Press Bookstore as Library and Archive – Cameron Anstee
Conclusion: "In My End Is My Beginning": The Library as Heraclitean Archive – J. A. Weingarten