"Success on a shoestring:" a center for a diverse Print Culture History in Modern America

ABSTRACT

In 1992 James Danky, Wayne Wiegand, and Carl Kaestle founded the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The study of print culture was then a new field represented by scholars from many disciplines, including American studies, history, library and information studies, and literary studies. Stimulated by initiatives of the American Antiquarian Society and the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, most research covered the northeast of the United States in the period before 1876, but Wisconsin's new center aimed to encourage research into more recent time periods, and broader areas, a well as into the print culture of marginalized groups whose gender, race, class, creed, occupation, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have historically placed them on the periphery of power. Under the directorship of Danky and Wiegand, the center hosted conferences, sponsored lectures and colloquia, and introduced a new publishing series titled "Print Culture History." Over its fifteen-year history, the center has influenced a general shift in print culture studies from texts to readers of all walks of life, and has help move the field, as Danky argues, from "questions of aesthetics and technique" into social history.

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In the late 1980s James Danky, Wayne Wiegand, and Carl Kaestle were holding conversations at the University' of Wisconsin-Madison about print culture history, a relatively new area that each found attractive. (1) Despite their common interest, the three were coming to the subject from somewhat different perspectives. Carl Kaestle, William E Vilas Research Professor in the departments of History and Educational Policy Studies, had arrived on campus in 1970, and by the late 1980s enjoyed an international reputation as a historian of the American education system, and of literacy. Author of several books and many articles, he was working with a group of graduate students on an edited volume, Literacy in the United States (Kaestle, Damon-Moore, Stedman, Tinsley, Trollinger, 1991)

Wayne Wiegand had been a professor in the School of Library and Information Studies since 1987. He came to Madison from the University of Kentucky already well known as a library historian. But Wiegand brought more to Madison than an interest in library history, long a marginalized field within library and information studies, and largely ignored by historians. He read widely outside the narrow boundaries of LIS research, and could see that finding ways to interest librarians in print culture studies and print culture scholars in libraries might breathe new life into the historical perspectives on libraries. He also took an unconventional approach to standard LIS courses. In the late 1980s, his course on collection development, for instance, included a unit on reader response and reception theories, in which he introduced graduate students pursuing professional studies in librarianship to the theories of German scholars Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss. Looking around for inspiration from outside the field of LIS, he was finding cultural studies to be full of possibilities.

Like Kaestle, Jim Danky had been a long time on campus. He had worked at the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) as a librarian since 1973, and had made a considerable name for himself in the area of what was in the 1970s becoming known as the "alternative" press. At the WHS he had been building research collections of books, newspapers, periodicals, and "ephemera" that represented the print culture of the African American press, marginalized ethnic groups, feminist and other women's publishing, the gay and lesbian press, left- and right-wing political groups, and the literary "underground." In 1982, with Elliott Shore (at that time librarian at Temple University), Danky had published a guide that introduced librarians to the concept of alternative materials (Danky & Shore, 1982). In the years that followed, he became especially well known for his work on successive projects that provide bibliographic control and access to important but neglected newspaper and periodical resources. (2)

Interest in print culture and the history of the book had been building steadily since the 1950s, with the publication in England of Richard Altick's The English Common Reader in 1957 and in France of L'Apparition du Livre by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in 1958 (Febvre & Martin, 1976). Yet, in the late 1980s, this was still a new field in which many elements of the usual scholarly infrastructure were still developing. An early instance of institutional support occurred in 1977, when Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin asked John Y. Cole to become the founding director of the new Center for the Book in the Library of Congress (LC). In this way, Boorstin hoped, the Library of Congress would both stimulate public interest in reading and at the same time foster study in the history of books and print culture. Over the next three decades, Cole encouraged states to establish their own Centers for the Book that would stimulate local reading and literacy programs. At the same time, the LC Center for the Book also gave an impetus to scholarship in April 1978, when librarians, scholars, publishers, collectors, and editors met to discuss contributions the new center might make to the history of books, printing, and libraries, and to print culture studies. Lectures, conferences, and publications began almost immediately, and in 1979 historian Elizabeth Eisenstein became the center's first resident scholar. In 1994, the center won an award for its contribution to book and printing history from the American Printing History Association (Cole, 2003).