Bookshelves in the Age of the

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN BOOK HISTORY

Bookshelves in the Age of

the COVID-19 Pandemic
Edited by
Corinna Norrick-Rühl · Shafquat Towheed
New Directions in Book History

Series Editors
Shafquat Towheed
Faculty of Arts
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK

Jonathan Rose
Department of History
Drew University
Madison, NJ, USA
As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of
maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the
goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish
monographs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new
frontiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars.
Its scope is global, extending to the Western and non-Western worlds and
to all historical periods from antiquity to the twenty-first century, including
studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions in Book
History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the vanguard. It will
experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored archives,
debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected
subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic
fields. Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiography
of the book, and every one will point to new directions in book scholarship.
New Directions in Book History will be published in three formats: single-
author monographs; edited collections of essays in single or multiple
volumes; and shorter works produced through Palgrave’s e-book (EPUB2)
‘Pivot’ stream. Book proposals should emphasize the innovative aspects of
the work, and should be sent to either of the two series editors.

Editorial board
Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Brazil
Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, USA
Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia.
Corinna Norrick-Rühl • Shafquat Towheed
Editors

Bookshelves in the
Age of the COVID-19
Pandemic
Editors
Corinna Norrick-Rühl Shafquat Towheed
English Department / Book Studies Faculty of Arts and Social
University of Münster Sciences (FASS)
Münster, Germany The Open University
Milton Keynes, UK

ISSN 2634-6117     ISSN 2634-6125 (electronic)

New Directions in Book History
ISBN 978-3-031-05291-0    ISBN 978-3-031-05292-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05292-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Chapters 1, 2 and 10 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details
see licence information in the chapters.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
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Cover illustration: Shelf Isolation 2 by Phil Shaw. Courtesy of the Rebecca Hossack Gallery

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Dedicated to the memory of
Rosemary C. Norrick (1922–2015)
and
Syed S. Towheed (1966–2018)
 Foreword: The Bookshelf Endures

There isn’t a single aspect of life that the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t
touched.
To date, over 5 million people around the world have died. Countries
have locked down for quarantines again and again to try and stop the
spread of the disease. Back in March 2020, we wondered whether or not
to wipe down our groceries. Over the ensuing and months, we started
compulsively baking. We joined TikTok. We obsessed over COVID-
tracking dashboards. And people read books.
Specifically, while we were so very much stuck at home and trying to
make sense of the world on fire around us, people read books like Albert
Camus’s The Plague, José Saramago’s Blindness, and Octavia Butler’s The
Parable of the Sower in droves—myself included. Leah Henrickson’s chap-
ter explores what, exactly, people read with their #PandemicReading—or
at what they were tweeting about reading, finishing with the iconic
“Ummm, guys? Don’t microwave your books” tweet that I remember
working its way through my own Twitter timeline. After people finished
reading their pandemic-inspired books, then what? Where did the
books go?
Presumably, the books went to a bookshelf. A physical IKEA shelf, a
digital shelf on a Kindle, but a bookshelf, nevertheless. Interestingly, our
relationship with bookshelves has bifurcated depending, in no small part,
on whether the bookshelf was in public or personal space. Some purged
their shelves of uncomfortable or unfortunate titles in the wake of social
justice movements that rocked the world partway through the pandemic,
a theme picked up by Chiara Bullen in “Your Bookshelf Is Problematic.”

vii
viii FOREWORD: THE BOOKSHELF ENDURES

Just as we are not the same readers that we were prior to COVID-19,
bookshelves are not the same as they were pre-pandemic.
On a cursory level, it’s easy to see how our personal bookshelves quickly
became a prop de rigueur in our Zoom-life of the pandemic. For millen-
nia, personal bookshelves—personal libraries, really—have often been
understood to be a bit of cultural shorthand for how a person projects
their education, socioeconomic status, and taste. Bookshelves and, of
course, the books on them are what twentieth-century philosopher Pierre
Bourdieu might call the stuff of habitus. Fast forward to the COVID-19
pandemic and personal bookshelves became profoundly performative
backdrops for virtual meetings and streamed interviews and, as Claire
Battershill notes in her chapter, helped facilitate a then-emerging pan-
demic aesthetic. Be honest. Who among us hasn’t paused a video clip of
someone famous talking in front of a bookshelf to have themselves a good
gander at what titles are lined up on the shelves behind them? Many of the
volume’s authors—Amanda Lastoria, Paizha Stoothoff, Emily Baulch, and
Jennifer Burek Pierce—found a plethora of ways to engage with the com-
plicated question of presentation, performance, and self of the private-­
turned-­public bookshelves in our virtual backgrounds, reminding us that
bookshelves constantly navigate a complicated sociocultural space. When
we sat ourselves in front of our bookshelves, we invited those watching to
judge us by our books and our bookshelves.
But what about the bookshelves that we can’t see? The bookshelves
that aren’t on display behind us in Zoom or in our own personal spaces?
What has happened to public bookshelves—the shelves in libraries, schools,
universities, and a plethora of places that were inaccessible during the
COVID-19 pandemic? What will the future of bookshelves in public
spaces look like as we begin to think about bookshelves in a post-­
pandemic world?
In short, it depends on the shelf and the space, a point that Kenna
MacTavish picks up with the analysis of how bookstores in Melbourne
connected with readers during the pandemic. Libraries are typically cham-
pioned as necessary civic spaces, as institutions that are bastions to their
patrons in a world disinformation. Closures of libraries—or at least a lack
of access to public shelves—disproportionately affect those who do not
have the resources and funds to recreate public spaces in a private. During
the pandemic, the loss of public bookshelves was the loss of public life in
a microcosm for many people.
 FOREWORD: THE BOOKSHELF ENDURES ix

Public institutions scrambled to come up with clever workarounds for

finding ways to keep readers connected to the physical books on institu-
tions’ shelves. Here, in Austin, Texas, for example, the Austin Public
Library offered surprise “book bundles” for young readers who could not
peruse the shelves and pick out books for themselves. Readers received
physical, tangible books, but distanced from the physical, tangible shelves
they would have interacted with pre-pandemic. Corinna Norrick-Rühl’s
chapter on pandemic parenting and book accessibility explores if and
where pandemic bookshelves for very young readers have formed. In
Queen Creek, Arizona, the Queen Creek Public Library had pre-recorded
Story Line where readers could call in to hear a different story read over
the phone each week. Many public libraries leaned into having patrons
request books online and then picking them up in person. As communities
have tentatively relaxed social distancing guidelines, patrons have returned
in person to visit tangible, public bookshelves at community libraries.
And, of course, many patrons explored libraries’ eBooks when in-­
person perusal of library shelves was impossible. All types of libraries
expanded their digital bookshelves—from university and research libraries
using HathiTrust to community public libraries that encouraged options
like Hoopla for checking out digital books from digital shelves. The result
of this now-18-month-long experiment? Not all digital bookshelves are
the same. This theme is picked up with Nelleke Moser’s reflections about
university students’ bookshelves for coursework.
Like their physical counterparts, how well digital bookshelves put digi-
tal books in the hands of their readers is a function of the institution that
facilitates them. Reading the latest Susanna Gregory murder mystery on a
Kindle via Hoopla, for example, is very different than trying use an eBook
from a university for reference or background material. Chandni Ananth,
Ellen Barth, Laura Ntoumanis, and Natalia Tolstopyat’s chapter explores
how bookshelf insecurity profoundly shapes students’ online learning
experience. Although rehashing the “digital or physical books” debate
feels very tired, especially considering the necessity of social distancing
during the pandemic, it’s worth noting that the current pivot toward digi-
tal bookshelves has highlighted that how digital books currently sit on
their respective shelves is still, and always will be, a question of permissions
and access—the presence of non-physical books doesn’t change that.
eBooks tethered to their digital shelves have always been reminiscent of
medieval books chained to their medieval shelves; the pandemic has simply
highlighted this sort of relationship.
x FOREWORD: THE BOOKSHELF ENDURES

Although the pandemic has forced us to think about public book-

shelves—particularly in library settings—this isn’t the first time that ques-
tions about “public” bookshelves have been raised. It’s worth noting, too,
that the pandemic isn’t the first time that “public” libraries have not been
available to everyone in communities. Historically, many marginalized
communities have not been allowed to participate in public spaces, par-
ticularly library spaces. “Even as we celebrate the library as a public com-
mons, we should recognize that not everyone participates in that space, or
not in the same way,” anthropologist Shannon Mattern points out. “By
choice or by necessity, many marginalized communities have established
their own independent, itinerant, fugitive libraries, which respond to con-
ditions of exclusion and oppression” (2019).
What does this mean, then, for the future of post-pandemic book-
shelves? For public and private shelves? As Shafquat Towheed explores in
his chapter, bookshelves have always offered a liminal cultural space; the
pandemic has forced a specific temporal element to our bookshelves, the
effects of which we’ll see in decades to come. Perhaps the pandemic has or
will inspire the speciation of new, fugitive, subtle, slightly out-of-view
physical bookshelves when the traditional public shelves have been inac-
cessible. Perhaps we might imagine more inclusive, more accessible public
bookshelves in a post-pandemic world.
Bookshelves are one of the most malleable, adaptable objects in human
history—made, unmade, and remade over millennia. While the COVID-19
pandemic has undoubtably left its mark in how we access books on shelves,
it certainly has not perpetrated any sort of mass extinction event. The
bookshelf, as always, endures.

Institute of Historical Studies Lydia Pyne

University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX, USA
November 2021

References
Mattern, Sharon. 2019. Fugitive Libraries. In Places Journal (October).
Accessed October 25, 2021. https://doi.org/10.22269/191022.
 Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we are grateful to two colleagues at The Open

University, Sally Blackburn-Daniels and Edmund G.C. King, for co-­
convening with us the online conference “Bookshelves in the Age of the
COVID-19 Pandemic,” 3–4 November 2020. We would like to thank
SHARP (the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and
Publishing) and the wider SHARP community for their encouragement
and support of the conference and its outcomes. We are also grateful to
our contributors for their willingness to commit to conference papers and
book chapters in a time of insecurity and unforeseen—and unforesee-
able—limitations on research space and time. We will always remember
the November 2020 conference as a moment of special, cross-national,
and interdisciplinary conviviality and academic exchange, as many of us
entered another lockdown in the fall of 2020 and many watched Election
Day unfold in the United States. Special thanks are also due to Lydia
Pyne, who generously agreed to write a foreword for our volume. We
could not have wished for a better person to take on this task. We would
also like to thank Phil Shaw and the Rebecca Hossack Gallery for very
generously granting us permission to use his digital print “Shelf Isolation
2” (2020) as the cover image for this volume; no more appropriate image
is conceivable. We are also grateful to Jessica Pressman, DeNel Rehberg
Sedo, Anamik Saha, and Vernon R. Totanes for their generous endorse-
ments of the book from three different disciplinary and national contexts.
The introduction to this book (Chap. 1) as well as the chapters by
Shafquat Towheed (Chap. 2) and Corinna Norrick-Rühl (Chap. 10) are
fully open access. This was made possible by the support of the Reading

xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Europe—Advanced Data Investigation Tool (READ-IT, 2018–2021)

project, funded by the JPI Cultural Heritage project under the European
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agree-
ment No 699523). Shafquat Towheed was UK principal investigator and
Corinna Norrick-Rühl an associate member of the READ-IT project.
We have incurred numerous professional and personal debts along the
way, as we organized the conference and made this volume a reality. We
would like to express our thanks to (in alphabetical order): Chandni
Ananth (editorial assistance, University of Münster, Germany), Birgit
Hötker-Bolte (administrative support, University of Münster, Germany),
Madelon Nanninga-Franssen (Exter Indexing, The Netherlands), and Lee
Simmonds (administrative support, The Open University, UK). Finally,
we would like to thank those involved in the publication process. Jonathan
Rose, co-editor of the ‘New Directions in Book History’ series in which
this volume appears, offered helpful advice for the project at an early stage,
and at Palgrave, Brian Halm, Allie Troyanos, and Chandralekha Mahamel
Raja all contributed to the timely completion of the volume. Two anony-
mous reviewers gave us useful pointers for the structure and focus of the
volume, and we can only express our gratitude for their generous engage-
ment with our proposal and hope they will be happy with the final result.
While editing this volume, we spoke about our own relationships not
only to our bookshelves, but those of the people we love and have been
privileged to know. As a reminder of the relationships we forge and sustain
through books and bookshelves, we have chosen to dedicate this volume
to the memory of two people that have shaped our bookshelves and lives.
Shafquat Towheed would like to dedicate this volume to the memory of
his late brother, Syed S. Towheed (1966–2018), and the many pleasant
days Shafquat spent in conversation with his brother, helping to organize
and arrange the books in his library room in Virginia, USA. Corinna
Norrick-Rühl would like to dedicate this volume to the memory of her
paternal grandmother, Rosemary C. Norrick, a voracious reader who
spent hours reading with her grandchildren, always glad to share her books
and bookshelves with us, especially her volumes of poetry. Her love of
books lives on in our family. These material bookshelves and the books
they housed have now been dispersed, but the emotional bonds of loving
memory remain as strong as ever.
In closing, let us express our hope that we will see this book on some
of our readers’ Zoom bookshelves in the near future, but also the hope
that these and similar bookish discussions can soon be held in person again.
 About the Book

Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic provides the first detailed
scholarly investigation of the cultural phenomenon of bookshelves (and
the social practices around them) since the start of the pandemic in March
2020. With a foreword by Lydia Pyne, author of Bookshelf (Bloomsbury
2016), the volume brings together 17 scholars from 6 countries (Australia,
Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, the USA) with expertise in
literary studies, book history, publishing, visual arts, and pedagogy to crit-
ically examine the role of bookshelves during the current pandemic. This
volume interrogates the complex relationship between the material book
and its digital manifestation via online platforms, a relationship brought to
widespread public and scholarly attention by the global shift to working
from home and the rise of online pedagogy. It also goes beyond the (digi-
tal) bookshelf to consider bookselling, book accessibility, and pandemic
reading habits.

xiii
 Praise for Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19
Pandemic

“This timely collection turns our attention to something we feel in our bones to
be important but have not critically considered: the role of bookshelves in our
contemporary, Covid-inflected lives. Approaching this topic from multiple angles
and methods—data on book sales, the blurring of private and public spheres,
screen aesthetics for viewing zoom backgrounds, analysis of Twitter handles and
hashtags, and more—this book provides a snapshot and critical examination of our
unique cultural moment, even as we continue (sigh!) to live through it.”
—Jessica Pressman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego
State University, USA. Author of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital
Age (2020)

“The Covid pandemic has changed book culture in profound ways. This rich,
interdisciplinary edited collection covers the social, cultural, political and digital
lives of our bookshelves during Covid times. Extremely readable chapters will
make it valuable for researchers of book culture, and general readers interested in
the capacity of books for personal and social transformation during time of crisis.”
—Anamik Saha, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication, Goldsmiths,
University of London, UK

“This delightful collection of essays is not quite about physical bookshelves them-
selves, but the people who displayed and/or admired books on bookshelves
through digital means during the pandemic. It highlights innovations, inequalities,
and ironies observed by their authors using non-traditional methods during an
extraordinary period when bookshelves were ‘constructed’ or ‘read’ as a reflection
of their owners’ personalities.”
—Vernon R. Totanes, Director, Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila University,
Philippines

“Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic collects responsive and continu-
ing research at an historical moment. With ‘bookshelves’ as its focal point, we learn
about lived experiences during the ongoing pandemic from a variety of academic—
but widely accessible—viewpoints. Through online ethnographies to surveys, and
various other methods, the contributors use bookshelves to examine how authors,
publishers, libraries, booksellers and readers interact and influence one another in
private spaces that have become public. The many established and emerging schol-
ars in this timely collection attend to individual, institutional and cultural issues
during a period of profound upheaval. The array of essays delve into what our
bookshelves tell us about ourselves, each other, contemporary print and digital
culture, and some everyday ordinary lives lived at an extraordinary time.”
—DeNel Rehberg Sedo, Professor of Communication Studies, Mount Saint
Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Corinna Norrick-Rühl and Shafquat Towheed

Part I Private and Public Reading Spaces  29

2 An
 Examination of Bookshelves in the Age of the
COVID-19 Pandemic as a “Liminal Space” 31
Shafquat Towheed

3 Crisis
 Book Browsing: Restructuring the Retail Shelf Life
of Books 49
Kenna MacTavish

4 “Your
 Bookshelf Is Problematic”: Progressive and
Problematic Publishing in the Age of COVID-19 69
Chiara Bullen

5 Old
 Books and New Media: Reader Response to The
Thorn Birds and Late Night with Seth Meyers 93
Jennifer Burek Pierce

xvii
xviii CONTENTS

Part II Material Culture on Screen 113

6 Videoconferencing
 as a Digital Medium: Bookshelves in
Backgrounds Throughout History115
Paizha Stoothoff

7 Digital
 Masks of Printed Books: On-Screen
Representations of the Materiality of the Codex133
Amanda Lastoria

8 Bookish
 Objects on the Bookshelf155
Emily Baulch

9 Writing
 with Spines: Bookshelf Art, Found Poetry, and
the Practice of Assemblage175
Claire Battershill

Part III Libraries, Pedagogy and Reading During the

Pandemic 193

10 Elmer the Elephant in the Zoom Room? Reflections on

Parenting, Book Accessibility, and Screen Time in a
Pandemic195
Corinna Norrick-Rühl

11 A
 Bookshelf of the World: Bringing Students’ Books
Inside the Classroom—A Means for Epistemic Equality?215
Nelleke Moser

12 Online
 Learning, Library Access, and Bookcase
Insecurity: A German Case Study237
Chandni Ananth, Ellen Barth, Laura Ntoumanis,
and Natalia Tolstopyat
 CONTENTS xix

13 “Ummmmm,
 guys? Don’t microwave your books”:
Readers, Authors, and Institutions in #PandemicReading
Tweets259
Leah Henrickson

Index281
 Notes on Contributors

Chandni Ananth is an MA student specializing in Book Studies in the

National and Transnational Studies program at the University of Münster.
She is a student assistant in the DFG-funded collaborative research center
SFB 1385 Law and Literature.
Ellen Barth is a research associate in the Chair of Book Studies at the
University of Münster and Executive Assistant for The Society for the
History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). She is writing
her dissertation on women’s production of American community cook-
books from the 1950s to 1990s.
Claire Battershill is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information
and the Department of English at the University of Toronto.
Emily Baulch is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland. Her
research focuses on everyday engagements with book culture, using the
home bookshelf as a nexus of cultural, material, and industrial conditions
swirling around contemporary book culture. She explores the values
that keep vivacious bookishness alive in the transforming publishing world.
Chiara Bullen is a third-year PhD researcher at the University of Stirling.
Her research is situated across the disciplines of Publishing Studies,
Literature and Law, and investigates the social responsibilities of book
publishers in the twenty-first century. Chiara is a freelance writer and
before her PhD she worked in publicity and marketing for independent
publishers and arts organizations in Scotland. She is on the committee for

xxi
xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

the University of Glasgow’s Transatlantic Literary Women series and vol-

unteers as a mentor for the Society of Young Publishers.
Leah Henrickson is a lecturer in Digital Media at the University of
Leeds. Her research projects use theoretical frameworks and empirical
methods to investigate the social and literary implications of textual tech-
nologies, commercial and community applications of digital storytelling,
and social perceptions of artificial intelligence. Her book about Reading
Computer-Generated Texts was published by Cambridge University Press
in 2021.
Amanda Lastoria holds North America’s first PhD in Publishing. Her
work documents, historicizes, and interrogates how book design and pro-
duction values variously entrench and diversify the markets for and the
meanings of the text. Amanda has over a decade of professional expe-
rience in the publishing industry. She teaches histories of publishing
with an emphasis on materiality at Simon Fraser University in
Vancouver, Canada.
Kenna MacTavish is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the
University of Melbourne. Her research explores the post-digital affor-
dances of platforms, books, and genre systems within contemporary book
culture.
Nelleke Moser is a senior lecturer in literature and director of the
Graduate School Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the
Netherlands). Her research focuses on the circulation of (literary) texts in
manuscript after the invention of the printing press. She has written on
handwritten pamphlets (Brill), miscellanies (Huntington Library
Quarterly), and trompe l’oeil books (printnotprint.blogspot.com).
Corinna Norrick-Rühl is Professor of Book Studies at the University of
Münster, Germany. In her research and teaching, she focuses on twenti-
eth- and twenty-first-century book culture and publishing, with a special
interest in mass reading culture. She is Director of Publications of the
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP).
She recently wrote Book Clubs and Book Commerce (2020) and co-­
edited The Novel as Network. Forms, Ideas, Commodities (2020) in this
book series (New Directions in Book History).
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxiii

Laura Ntoumanis is an MA student in the National and Transnational

Studies program at the University of Münster. She is writing her thesis on
the intersection of EuroAmerican and Indigenous American book history
as examined through the agents in the production of the Cherokee
Phoenix newspaper of 1828.
Jennifer Burek Pierce is an associate professor in the School of Library
and Information Science at the University of Iowa, with a joint appoint-
ment with the University’s Center for the Book. Her most recent book is
Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media, and her 2021 essay, “More
Than a Room with Books: The Development of Author Visits for Young
People in Mid-Century U.S. Public Libraries,” won the Justin Winsor
Library History Award from the American Library Association’s Library
History Round Table.
Paizha Stoothoff achieved a Master of Arts in English Literature from
San Francisco State University, where she studied seventeenth-century
political prose as it relates to censorship, public literacy, and book history.
Her interest in social anxieties over public access to literature grew in her
studies at San Jose State University, where she received her Masters
in Library and Information Science, and through working in aca-
demic libraries and writing classrooms throughout California. She works
as a Senior Grant Writer at HealthRIGHT 360, where she uses her writing
and information literacy backgrounds to help people in need.
Natalia Tolstopyat has an MA degree in British, American and
Postcolonial Studies from the University of Münster. After working with a
digital publisher in Stuttgart she returned to Münster, where she is work-
ing as a language trainer, translator, and co-chief editor of the English
Department’s student journal. Her interests include digital reading com-
munities, podcasting, publishing, and literature.
Shafquat Towheed is Senior Lecturer in English in the Faculty of Arts
and Social Sciences (FASS) at The Open University (UK). He has written
extensively on the history of reading practices. He is Director of The Open
University’s History of Books and Reading (HOBAR) research col-
laboration and was the UK Principal Investigator for the Reading
Europe Advanced Data Investigation Tool (READ-IT) project
(2018–2021). With Jonathan Rose, he is co-editor of Palgrave’s New
Directions in Book History series.
 List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 The Great Picture, attributed to Jan van Belcamp, 1646. Lady
Clifford’s family prior to her birth (center); Lady Clifford at
age 15 in 1605 (left); Lady Clifford at age 56 in 1646 (right) 118
Fig. 6.2 Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke with His Family 121
Fig. 6.3 “Cartomania” collection. Aberdeen Archives, Galleries, and
Museums (Cartomania 2020). https://emuseum.
aberdeencity.gov.uk/exhibitions/247/cartomania/objects123
Fig. 6.4 Image from Daily Mail125
Fig. 6.5 Penguin Random House Canada digital bookshelf 127
Fig. 6.6 A study space in front of the stacks at the Cal State LA Library
(Brown 2021) 128
Fig. 6.7 Digitized image from the Mesoamerica and Colonial Mexico
Rare Book Collection 128
Fig. 7.1 Cycle of online consumption of printed books through stages
of discovering, acquiring and sharing 137
Fig. 7.2 Scholastic flyer, front page (May/June 2021) 139
Fig. 7.3 Scholastic flyer, interior (May/June 2021) 140
Fig. 8.1 Photograph of home bookshelf with Harry Potter funko pops.
Baulch 2021, participant 145 157
Fig. 8.2 Harry Potter home bookshelf photo, featuring multiple copies
of the books, funko pops, mugs, and other toys. Baulch 2021,
participant 133 161
Fig. 9.1 “What Did I Do?” (2014) from the series “Kansas Cut-Up”
(the Sorted Books project, 1993 and ongoing). Image courtesy
of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Pace Gallery 185
Fig. 11.1 The students’ selection of books to study for the course “The
Material Book” 227

xxv
xxvi LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 11.2 Students’ bookshelves shared in Zoom for the assignment

“Mystery bookshelf of the day” 230
Fig. 11.3 The results of the student survey, questions 1–6 232
Fig. 11.4 The results of the student survey, questions 7–10 233
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Corinna Norrick-Rühl and Shafquat Towheed

During lockdown, academics’ worlds became smaller, we moved around

less, we baked banana bread and like so many white-collar workers around
the globe, started working from home, tuning into video calls from the
safety (and sometimes chaos) of kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms or even
pantries. The verb “to zoom” took on a new meaning. Depending on
where someone dialed into a call, we could see into their homes, thus
peering into spaces previously undisclosed to colleagues and work con-
tacts. For bookish observers, the ubiquity of bookshelves in the Zoom
room soon became obvious. Of course, other household items were often
on display as well, which sometimes led to reactions on the internet, as in
the case of a Welsh interviewee who had a sex toy on her shelf as she spoke
about job loss in the wake of the pandemic (Lewis 2021). But for scholars
in all areas of book studies (book history, publishing studies, and the

C. Norrick-Rühl (*)
English Department / Book Studies, University of Münster, Münster, Germany
e-mail: cnorrick@uni-muenster.de
S. Towheed
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
e-mail: shafquat.towheed@open.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
C. Norrick-Rühl, S. Towheed (eds.), Bookshelves in the Age of the
COVID-19 Pandemic, New Directions in Book History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05292-7_1
2 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

history of reading), the Zoom room became an interesting, though ethi-

cally questionable, space to conduct autoethnographic research into the
books that colleagues, co-workers and other work contacts, as well as peo-
ple interviewed on television, owned—and may or may not have read.
Home bookshelves, for obvious reasons of access, are not a well-researched
area. While there is ample research on prolific collectors and their collec-
tions, the average home bookshelf (and its performativity) has not come
under scrutiny so far, with the exception perhaps of Lydia Pyne’s 2016
consideration thereof in the series Bloomsbury Object Lessons, and of
Ute Schneider’s analysis of bookshelves within a Bourdieusian framework.
As Schneider posits, the book-as-object is read as a cultural signifier across
society (and many societies), and is also understood as such by people who
themselves may not own many books, or books at all (Schneider 2018,
113). Jessica Pressman has recently added another layer of analysis to these
questions with her concept of “bookishness,” elaborated in Bookishness:
Loving Books in a Digital Age (Pressman 2020). Of course, book histori-
ans were not the only ones to notice the books in the Zoom, and cultural
journalists as well as a dedicated Twitter account were among the follow-­
ups considering bookcases as markers of credibility (Hess 2020, @
BCredibility).
Mid-lockdown, we exchanged thoughts about this newly developed
public focus on private bookshelves and their owners, and soon decided to
bring two of Shafquat Towheed’s colleagues from The Open University
on board to convene the first-ever online international conference dedi-
cated to the topic of “Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19
Pandemic.” Together with our co-organizers Sally Blackburn-Daniels and
Edmund G.C. King, we asked conference speakers to respond to some of
the following questions in their research presentations, with particular ref-
erence to the contingencies caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which at
that point, was in its eighth month:

• What do our bookshelves (and books) on display say about our cul-
tural capital, or material wealth?
• As our domestic spaces have been repurposed, where do we draw the
lines between the public and private spheres? Do our bookshelves
blur this distinction, or attempt to reinforce it? Can the books on our
shelves cause public embarrassment or ridicule?
• Do our bookshelves on display represent individual talent or collec-
tive effort?
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

• How can we interpret the aesthetics and logistics of the virtual book-
shelf background, including default and bespoke settings on Skype,
Zoom, Teams, etc.?
• Does the physical or virtual display of books on a shelf or in a case
display cultural adaptation or cultural appropriation?
• Is the physical bookshelf at its apogee (peak IKEA Billy bookshelf)—
might it be eclipsed by a digital equivalent, such as the bespoke or
fake digital bookish background?
• What does having a bookshelf to display in this age of the pandemic
actually mean, who is invited in, and who is kept out?
• What assumptions of reading based on possession are we casually
making, and what might this cultural interference in a private act
constitute?

The conference featured 28 speakers and attracted over 200 attendees

from more than 30 countries; we were thrilled by the broad range of ideas
and contributions that emerged. We are delighted to now publish this
volume, which contains more fully developed chapters based on over half
of the conference papers, as well as some additional content produced
expressly for this volume. Our edited volume can (and we think should)
be read alongside a special issue of the journal English Studies (103:1;
2022), “Bookshelves, Social Media and Gaming” co-edited by Blackburn-­
Daniels and King, which features extended research based on other papers
from the conference; these have a strong focus on social media and the
digital (literary) sphere, bookshelves and gaming. These two publications
showcase some of the most relevant recent research in this area; while they
do not answer all the questions we initially asked, they do offer substantial,
evidence-based and critically informed responses to many of them, while
also raising new and unanticipated follow-up questions of their own.
Our delight at the thematic spread of the conference was tempered by
the recognition that we were able to observe and think about books in
online meeting spaces from a place of physical safety and socioeconomic
privilege. Compared to front-line workers, confronted with and battling
the pandemic in their workspaces and on their commutes, we were at a
relative remove from the dangers of COVID-19. Nonetheless, the the-
matic spread of papers held at the conference hinted at other forms of
engagement with (and without) books in the pandemic. Obvious exam-
ples included bookstores and libraries, shuttered and struggling to fulfill
their economic and societal role. To hint at the economic fallout for
4 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

booksellers, for instance, in Wuhan, China, considered by many to be the

original epicenter of the pandemic, news outlets estimated that 1000
bookstores were shuttered for hundreds of days (Fan 2020).
This introduction will first attempt to sketch out theoretical frame-
works and considerations that find application in the volume, but also
gesture at areas of theoretical inquiry that are relevant to the question of
bookshelves in the pandemic moment, but were not able to be included
here. These theoretical observations will be followed by a brief overview
of the volume, before gesturing to future research possibilities.

Theoretical Frameworks and Contexts

Perhaps the most obvious theoretical framework when peering at book-
shelves and deciphering writing on spines is that of Gérard Genette and
paratexts. The books we see and comment on are only identifiable through
their “thresholds of interpretation,” as Genette circumscribes his term
paratext (Genette 1997). Arguably, even their visibility on the screen
could be understood as a type of epitext, removed from the author and
publisher, but hinting at the reception of the text.
Two scholars who have contributed significantly to our understanding
of the intersections between the digital and the physical book are Simone
Murray and Matt Kirschenbaum. Murray’s concept of the digital literary
sphere lends itself to application here, especially her understanding of the
“digital paratext” (Murray 2018). Kirschenbaum’s concept of the “bit-
stream” and its relationship to books-as-texts and books-as-objects also
offers a productive perspective. As Kirschenbaum writes in his very recent
book Bitstreams, “Books […] have emerged from the other side of the
digital’s disruption with their material forms intact, but also irrevocably
changed” (Kirschenbaum 2021, 83). Here, Kirschenbaum also points
toward ideas about a “post-digital” moment, elaborated for instance by
the media theorist Florian Cramer (Cramer 2014). In the Zoom room,
physical books as three-dimensional objects become flat—but given the
knowledge base viewers have of the book-as-object, there is a consensus
about what the codex might look, feel (and smell!) like if one were able to
reach through the screen and take the book off the shelf. Jack Self’s con-
siderations of “The Big Flat Now” can also offer insights for our contexts.
Self uses “flatness” as a “contemporary metaphor [to describe] how the
invention of the Internet has restructured global society” (Self 2018).
Through videoconferencing, for instance, we can see the same book(s) in
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

different bookshelves, geographically at a distance but brought together

on one flat screen in a particular instant in time.
The focus on physical books-as-objects in digital Zoom rooms is argu-
ably a post-digital manifestation, in a particularly screen-heavy period.
This angle converges with research during the pandemic which showed
that book buyers were inclined toward print books to give them respite
from the screen after a long day in video meetings. In the UK, for instance,
industry figures indicated the largest rise in volume for the printed books
market since 2007 (Stuart-Turner 2021).

Pandemic Reading and the Bibliotherapy Bookshelf

In the space of a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic turned our lives
upside down and many of our most natural instincts were suppressed.
Pandemic social distancing rules cut us off from participatory culture,
sport and social life, and this contributed to a surging mental health crisis.
Never has reading matter, specifically, having books at home, been of
greater importance. Non-essential workers were confined to their homes
for long periods at a time, during which many turned to the printed books
on their shelves and the e-books on their digital devices for reassurance,
reflection or escape.
While reading during the pandemic is not the primary focus of our
volume, it is worthwhile to mention that the pandemic also saw readers
trying to alleviate the stress and boredom of lockdown through reading.
Tastes diverged, but there was a visible trend toward classics. For instance,
Penguin Random House UK sold 69% more copies of War and Peace
from January to October 2020 than overall in 2019; for Anna Karenina,
the sales increase was 52%, and for Don Quixote, the increase was 53%
(Vincent 2020). The trend toward classic, doorstopper novels indicates
that readers were searching for an immersive reading experience. Granted,
some of these sales were certainly merely aspirational: as is often the case
with sales numbers, we don’t know how many readers actually worked
their way through the doorstoppers. Some reading during the pandemic
has been predictably immersive: readers have looked to earlier accounts of
quarantine to make sense of an inherently disorientating experience. Sales
of pestilence classics like Albert Camus’ La Peste (The Plague, 1947) and
Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) have been at an all-
time high, with Marcel Theroux commenting that the books had “gone
the way of dried pasta and toilet roll” (Theroux 2020) despite the fact that
6 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

the latter is out of copyright and free online. In April 2020, sales of The
Plague by Albert Camus had already tripled in comparison to 2019 in
France as well as in Italy (Self 2020). Both books have been virtual book
club and reading group favorites since the outbreak, with Camus being
promoted by the French Embassy’s Albertine Club (2020), Seattle’s The
Stranger (which runs a “silent reading party” quarantine club, Frizzelle
2020), and the YouTube Vlogger “Better than Food” (over 49,000 views
since April 17, 2020). Defoe’s factual-fictional “novel” was picked by The
Guardian (it was their reading group choice for May 2020 [Jordison
2020]), the Silent Book Club (Achilles 2020), and even by the futurist,
Bryan Alexander (2020). What this clearly demonstrates is our inherent
need (as humans and readers) for shared, collective experiences, mediated
via text, to make sense of extreme upheaval. We look to books that have
narrated or fictionalized the experience of past pandemics, to make sense
of this current one. Online book clubs such as #TolstoyTogether, founded
by author Yiyun Li, generated widespread interest and motivated readers
to fulfill their lofty reading goals: “What may have begun as a highbrow
way to munch through an expanse of time swiftly turned into something
far more meaningful, and less perfunctory” (Vincent 2020). In short,
reading is a worthwhile pastime, and its impact was and has been profound
in the pandemic as well.
Reading a book in a time of upheaval can contribute to our mental
wellbeing through positive emotional affect; many of us have habitually
turned to our favorite books at times of illness, solitude, or mental upset,
because reading can provide both a means to temporarily escape our cur-
rent circumstances, and also a way of understanding them—and our-
selves—better. While bibliotherapy, or the practice of reading books to
promote mental wellbeing, was well-established before the pandemic, the
intervention of a global traumatic event has propelled it into the spotlight.
Since March 2020, there has been an explosion in bibliotherapy provision,
both formally in the health and social care sector, and informally, through
social media, self-help groups and book clubs. Bibliotherapist Bijal Shah
who runs Book Therapy, offers a personalized book prescription service,
with an initial seven to ten books recommended after a detailed question-
naire; the books are designed to start filling a bibliotherapy bookshelf,
with a regular subscription in the form of a “personalised book prescrip-
tion” tailor-made to your individual needs: this is effectively structured
reading leading to structured bookshelf curation (Shah 2021). The oppo-
site approach is taken by the “Birštono viešoji bibolioteka” in Birštonas,
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Latvia, which has been offering pre-curated bibliotherapy bookshelves for

patrons to browse freely since 2008; in the words of the library, users are
encouraged to “look at the bibliotherapy bookshelf prepared by the
library, also browse through our list of bibliotherapy books made together
with specialists and choose the healing book for your troublesome prob-
lem” (n.d.). With the arrival of the pandemic, the bibliotherapy bookshelf
has been adopted in many different physical and virtual guises. For the
newly launched Seattle bookstore Oh Hello Again, the approach has been
to organize all the books on their shelves not by author, title, format or
subject, but by their emotional affect (Constant 2021), an idea inspired by
British bibliotherapists Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin in their book
The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies (2017). What all these
approaches suggest is not just the healing power of books, but also the
holistic appeal of the shelves that host them: good bibliotherapeutic prac-
tice encourages the curation of a shelf of books that can address a range of
different emotional problems. The recently launched Shelf Healing pod-
cast project at University College London literalizes this metaphor, with
their Twitter account (@Shelf_Healing) encouraging visitors to share
images of their bibliotherapy bookshelves. The bibliotherapy bookshelf,
whether in physical or virtual form, is another cultural phenomenon that
has come of age during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Blurring Boundaries, Heightening Inequalities

While the pandemic clearly blurred boundaries between the private and
the public spheres, unwittingly granting people we normally would not
have invited into our own home views of our homes, our pets, our chil-
dren—and our books, it also underscored inequalities in a hitherto
unimagined way. A meeting in an office space is a more neutral space, in
which participants are clearly in the role of co-worker, colleague, employee
or work contact. Fashion items or technical devices can certainly be read
as markers of prestige even in a workplace environment. However, mark-
ers such as cars, houses with or without curb appeal, and the space and
furnishings in your home do not become visible in the office environment
and thus do not influence the dynamics and hierarchies. Arguably, in vid-
eoconferencing from home, lifestyle, affluence and status mix into the
work environment to a greater degree than ever before. If the bookshelf
exudes credibility, the lack thereof must be compensated by something
else. In homes where more than one occupant was working from home
8 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

during periods of lockdown, the issue of visually demonstrating profes-

sional credibility became even more acute: who would get the work desk
with a backdrop of books, and who would have to work from the kitchen
table, bedroom or sofa, potentially having to deploy a background filter to
mask their less-than-perfect home office arrangements? In some cases, the
lack of a bookcase was rectified (almost) by bookish backgrounds. As
Jessica Pressman discusses in her essay on “Fake Books and Fake News,”
Erin Elmore, former Trump spokesperson, was called out on social media
for her use of a bookcase backdrop—a visible crease in the cloth backdrop
was a dead giveaway, and her deception went viral (Pressman 2021).
Elmore’s case is well-known but far from unusual. The fact remains that
online meetings are mediated and made visible via a screen, and yet, the
very word “screen” carries a dual meaning: it is both a clear surface to
display visual information, and an opaque barrier to hide people or objects
from unwanted external scrutiny. The screen can reveal, but it can also
occlude.
We do judge people by their bookshelves, as indicated in a tongue-in-­
cheek way by cartoonist Grant Snider’s recent book I Will Judge You By
Your Bookshelf (2020). But the online treatment of Erin Elmore and oth-
ers calls into question the ethics of this type of research and perhaps the
stereotypes that are reinforced by a playful Twitter account such as @
BCredibility, which highlighted Elmore in a post. Granted, Elmore also
worked for Trump, and there could be other reasons for questioning her
authority as a public speaker. However, these new insights into people’s
private sphere also increase the danger of harassment and trolling. For the
first time since the start of the digital revolution, hundreds of millions of
domestic spaces and their occupants were open for public scrutiny, before
any culturally agreed protocols or permissions had been put in place, and
before the organic development of any shared practices had evolved.
“Netizens” of the 2020s were learning on the hoof, and the results were
not always pleasant: judging people by their interiors in general and their
displayed books in particular became a key element of Twitter trolling
(and sometimes vitriolic abuse) during the pandemic.
Research conducted on social media also needs to be aware of the ethi-
cal implications. Social media users may have published their images,
words and thoughts on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram or Twitter,
but that does not imply consent that these posts be used as research
objects. In addition, when using these platforms, researchers are feeding
into the neoliberal structures and algorithmic logic of big tech
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

corporations, which are known to be exploitative of personal data and

problematic in terms of access and consent (cf. Murray 2021). There are
reasons to abstain from research conducted on social media, but the draw
of this particular data deluge is unmistakable, for it is both quantitative
and qualitative, standardized as well as individually self-curated. And
beyond the data, researchers themselves use social media professionally, as
a follow-up space for networking and debate during and after conferences
and to disseminate their research; tweeting about an article, for instance,
has been shown to positively correlate with citation rates (Klar et al. 2020).
Thankfully, recent interventions on ethics and social media research are
available to guide researchers through the social media jungle (e.g.
Kozinets 2019). Leah Henrickson goes into this in more detail in her
chapter (Chap. 13), before analyzing tweets with the hashtag
#PandemicReading.
Similarly, ethical reservations can apply to autoethnographic research,
which has mushroomed in the pandemic as archives, campuses and librar-
ies closed. The editors of the recently founded Journal of Autoethnography
explained that they founded an additional forum for autoethnographic
research on and during the pandemic, because “[r]esearchers can use
autoethnography to demonstrate how abstract, abrupt, and vast changes
affect particular lives: specific and contextual experiences of stress and
survival, grief and loss, loneliness and connection, desires for structure and
normalcy” (Herrmann and Adams 2020). For instance, the chapters by
Nelleke Moser (Chap. 11) and Kenna MacTavish (Chap. 3) in this volume
use autoethnography as both a research methodology and as a means of
qualitative analysis. As Shafquat Towheed points out (Chap. 2), in this
respect, the pandemic has collapsed the distance between participants and
observers. Researchers trying to understand the phenomenon of book-
shelves in the pandemic as a cultural practice are themselves occupying the
same space as the people they study, for they too have bookshelves of their
own, and these are also often visible in the public sphere. As the pandemic
wears on, it will be interesting to see how the methods and approaches
adapt to what we can only assume will be the “new normal” in academia
and beyond.
10 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

The Bookshelf and Socio-economic Inequality

Within days of the first national lockdown in the UK, Sky News journalist
Adam Boulton declared in no uncertain terms that while interviewing, his
eyes were “tempted to stray towards the background,” the background
which almost always consisted of bookshelves brimming with books
(Boulton 2020). “I’ve been struck most by the books,” Boulton observed,
adding that all of his interview subjects have “shelves and shelves full of
them and nearly all of them in ‘working libraries’ of ill-matched and
thumbed volumes rather than interior decoration bought by the yard”
(ibid.). Boulton acknowledges that book ownership (and therefore by
necessity, book display) is uneven, citing the 2017 Aviva survey for World
Book Day that in the UK, “10% of homes contain no books, those you see
on your screen evidently belong to the 7% of us who have more than 500
volumes” (ibid.). While acknowledging the uneven distribution of books
in British households, Boulton (like so many of us) is so captivated by the
sheer spectacle of the accumulated intellectual capital of his interview sub-
jects, that he fails to see this phenomenon for what it is: the pandemic has
cruelly exposed books on display as a visible marker of socioeconomic
privilege, constructed by neoliberalism and delivered by profit driven
global conglomerates in an increasingly consolidated publishing industry.
Book poverty is every bit as real as child malnutrition, and often it is just
as easily ignored; as Lea Shaver’s work has shown, 40% of American chil-
dren cannot afford to buy books and despite rising literacy rates in the
Global South, ending book hunger remains an immense challenge
(Shaver 2020).
The blunt fact—which academic scholarship has hitherto largely failed
to register—is that a significant proportion of the world’s population does
not possess adequate space or enough owned books to convey any sense
of personal or professional empowerment through their domestic book-
shelves. Exposed by the pandemic, never has book ownership—now
increasingly denominated by carefully crafted and sometimes ostentatious
book displays—been a clearer measure of socioeconomic inequality than it
is now; Amanda Hess’ Vuittonesque turn of phrase of the “quarantine’s
hottest accessory” (Hess 2020) has come back to haunt us, for the poor
have neither books nor shelves, any more than they have Louis Vuitton
handbags or any other LVMH luxury products.
IKEA’s famous Billy bookshelf has become a marker of globalization
having now sold more than 110 million units since it was launched in
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

1979, and it is still selling at the rate of one every five seconds; in the UK
alone, around 530,000 Billy bookcases are sold annually, which is cumula-
tive theoretical shelf space for over 100 million standard format paperback
books (Brzezinski 2019). Bookshelves are of course also used to store and
display things other than books, as research by Jessica Pressman, Nicola
Rodger and Emily Baulch (in Chap. 8 of this volume) has demonstrated
(Pressman 2020; Rodger 2019; Baulch 2022). Indeed, IKEA deepened
the shelves of its iconic product in 2011, specifically so it could store non-­
book items (ornaments, trinkets, etc.) with as much ease as books. But
while IKEA readily adjusted to the changing nature of consumer culture
and bookshelf display in its key markets of Europe, North America and
East Asia, it has been far less successful at making bookshelves available to
citizens of the Global South in general, and Africa in particular. Despite
the Swedish firm’s seeming global ubiquity, which the BBC’s Tim Harford
glibly described as the process by which “IKEA’s Billy bookshelf took over
the world” (Harford 2017), it is worth remembering that IKEA’s bestsell-
ing product is only available for sale in two African countries, Egypt and
Morocco, out of a total of 54 countries on the African continent; IKEA
does not serve Africa’s two biggest economies, Nigeria and South Africa.
Africa has a total population of 1.38 billion people, roughly the same as
China, and 67% of the African population over the age of 15 is literate;
with 40% of the continent’s population aged 15 or under, the African
continent has more school age children than either India or China. Africa
has a youthful population pyramid; the median age across the continent as
a whole is 20 years. It has a massive number of children and young people
in formal education who are required to read books, and an emerging
middle class with increasing purchasing power, who may choose to read
and own books for themselves. The fact that the world’s foremost book
furniture brand, IKEA, famous for its ability to deliver high-quality mass-­
produced home furnishing at a low cost, has effectively refused to serve
nearly an entire continent, speaks volumes about how bookshelves can
reinforce structural inequality, rather than challenge it. Much has been
made of the rhetoric of book hunger in relation to Africa, with African
publishing studies experts such as Elizabeth Le Roux contesting many of
the received truisms about the perceived lack of books on the continent.
This “narrative of scarcity and famine has become widespread through
frequent repetition, employing emotive language and images of children,
anecdotal evidence rather than broader data and the exclusion of compet-
ing narratives that could complicate the picture” (Le Roux 2020). While
12 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

the issue of an African book famine has arguably been rhetorically overin-
flated and is based on unreliable and incomplete data, the failure of the
world’s leading producer of bookshelves to adequately serve the world’s
second largest continent by population is incontrovertible. The history of
the African bookshelf and its material and oral cognates, both in the pre-­
pandemic period and today, is yet to be written.
Just like the McDonald’s BigMac index, the price of IKEA’s bestselling
product is now used as a comparative economic metric. Bloomberg’s Billy
Bookcase Index compares prices (and therefore real-world exchange rates)
in 38 countries and confirms the structural inequality of access to this
most iconic of bookshelves. The most expensive country in the world to
buy the seemingly standardized Billy bookshelf is an African country,
Egypt, where it sells for US$100, which is two and a half times as expen-
sive as it is in the cheapest country, Slovakia, where it costs just US$40
(O’Brien and Siedenburg 2015). When purchasing power parity is fac-
tored in, the price difference is even more pronounced, with the Billy
bookcase nearly 13 times more expensive in Egypt than in Slovakia. Just
to put this in context, the monthly minimum wage in Egypt is currently
set at US$125, while in Slovakia, it is US$665. This corporate complicit
inequality is all the more jarring when Egypt has given the booklovers of
the world both the ancient Library of Alexandria (the Mouseion), and the
Christian monastic tradition which led indirectly to the development of
both chained books and the evolution of library bookshelves in most
of Europe.
The stark inequality made visible by bookshelves is not just global,
between the rich north and the poor Global South, but is just as clearly
evident within nation states. Research undertaken by the National Literacy
Trust in the UK before the pandemic (January to March 2019) shows that
book poverty is a real and persistent problem. Based on their survey sam-
ple, they estimated that some 383,000 children aged 9 to 18 in the UK—
the world’s fifth biggest economy at the time of the survey—did not own
a single book, representing 9.3% of children from economically deprived
backgrounds (National Literacy Trust 2019). People living in temporary
accommodation, those on short-term tenancies, and itinerant workers and
communities are less likely to buy and accrue books, for the very reasons
of their materiality: books and bookshelves are heavy and not easily por-
table. At the same time, it is worth considering the fact that book poverty
is more than just a matter of economic or material deprivation; paucity of
aspiration, insufficient literacy skills and deep-rooted familial resistance to
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

engaging with printed books as a source of entertainment are also factors.

In the UK, 96% of households have broadband internet, and 94% of the
population own mobile phones, both of which are higher household pen-
etration percentages than for printed books. It might be the case that
some households without domestic bookshelves of their own have access
to digital texts instead; this is something that anyone researching in this
area must contend with.
Unabashed celebrations of bookishness as morally, emotionally, and
ideologically positive have accelerated since the start of the pandemic, with
the widespread online display of books on shelves and people standing or
sitting in front of them feeding into a wider discourse around reading for
well-being and mental health. It is certainly the case that prolonged peri-
ods of pandemic lockdown and the closure of physical bookshops in many
countries led to changes to both book buying and reading habits. In the
UK, where physical bookshops were classified as non-essential and in store
browsing banished, sales moved online; the launch of the online indepen-
dent bookstore retailer Bookshop.org in November 2020 proved particu-
larly timely. In contrast, in France, bookstores were considered to be
essential businesses and were allowed to operate, albeit with capacity con-
trols and sanitary measures. The equivalent French innovation in books
sales in this period saw the supermarket chain Intermarché launch a similar
initiative, “Solidarity Alley,” on its e-shopping platform. In both countries
(as in many other OECD nations), book sales held up remarkably well,
with hardback fiction (in particular) showing strong sales. Despite the
challenges of lockdown, consumers with sufficient purchasing power
found it easier than ever to top up their bookshelves and acquire the books
they needed. The same could not be said for economically disadvantaged
groups or communities—those with limited access to e-commerce, online
access, or those who for reasons of money or habit, preferred to borrow
books from public libraries rather than purchase their own.
Ironically, all of this reification of the physical book mediated digitally
has happened at a time when free to the public e-book lending has
increased markedly (albeit from a small base), in large measure due to the
pandemic. In the UK in the first three months of the first national lock-
down (April 1 to June 30, 2020), library members accessing digital
resources increased by 27%, while e-book checkouts increased by 146%—
all this at the time when public libraries could not host in-person access
and physical book borrowing was curtailed, in no small part due to largely
unsubstantiated fears around contact transmission of the virus via
14 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

contaminated surfaces (Libraries Connected 2020), echoing exactly the

same fears that resulted in library closures a century earlier during the
1918–1920 H1N1 influenza pandemic. Despite the massive increase in
the visibility of books on shelves mediated in the digital public sphere, for
some readers, the actual bookshelf of importance during periods of lock-
down was the virtual array of titles on their e-readers, apps or digital
devices, a practice which is both difficult to share effectively (despite tools
such as Kobo Reading Life or websites such as GoodReads) and invisible
in terms of bookshelf display. The culture of virtual book display is an
evolving one, and it remains to be seen how the pandemic-induced tem-
porary changes in buying, reading and display choices might have caused
a change in shared or collective social practice.
Digital e-readers internally mimic the analog organizational structure
of the bookshelf, usually taking their cue from the front-facing practice of
bookselling, but they cannot be used as external markers of intellectual or
cultural credibility. While the absence of books or bookshelves on display
are usually markers of poverty or inequality and therefore rarely seen on
screen, it can sometimes be a much more deliberate, and indeed, much
more sinister signifier. Of the 492 images of humans in front of their
bookshelves analyzed by the now famous Twitter account Bookcase
Credibility in the 18 months since it was launched in April 2020, perhaps
the most striking and certainly the most disturbing is that of the Trump
administration’s Secretary of State for Education, Betsy DeVos, in front of
a bookcase with no books on it (@BCredibility, July 9, 2020). This is the
ritualistic enactment of privilege and power through the repudiation of
the very knowledge production that enabled that privilege in the first place.
Of course, all of these inequalities existed prior to the pandemic, but
white-collar homeworking and the explosion of bookshelf backgrounds in
broadcast media have made the disparities around book ownership and
display impossible to ignore. In the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, the
digitally mediated bookshelf has become a socioeconomic liminal space, a
repeatedly staged social ritual, one where economic privilege has been
asserted, reinforced and displayed in an allegedly egalitarian virtual
domain, through the systematic deployment of books as markers of
authority and professionalism. Far from ushering in a democratic, open
and accessible era, online meeting software, broadcast media and social
media platforms have directed an unflattering light on global inequality,
visualized through the presence or absence of books.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Structure of the Volume

Lydia Pyne’s foreword reminds us that bookshelves remain “one of the
most malleable, adaptable objects in human history—made, unmade, and
remade over millennia” (Pyne 2022, x) and the introduction to this vol-
ume draws on that theme, illustrating some of the many ways in which
bookshelves and the social practices that they stage and narrate have been
transformed by the intervention of the COVID-19 pandemic—a process
of radical evolutionary transformation which is ongoing. The 12 chapters
that follow this introduction are separated into three thematically informed
sections. Section 1, “private and public reading spaces,” concentrates on
considerations of private and public reading spaces. It opens with a chap-
ter by Shafquat Towheed on bookshelves in the pandemic as both a physi-
cal and a temporal “liminal space” (Chap. 2), a multifunctional space
poised uncomfortably between the private and public spheres. Drawing
upon a range of theoretical concepts from disciplines including anthropol-
ogy, the digital humanities, social sciences and critical theory, Towheed
examines bookshelves in the COVID-19 pandemic as a site of liminality, a
material and visual reminder of our current limbo-like existence between
a pre-pandemic world that has gone forever, and a post-pandemic world
that is yet to emerge. He considers the way in which online videoconfer-
encing has granted unprecedented access (sometimes unwittingly) into
people’s homes and especially their bookshelves, and suggests that this
offers a window of opportunity for researchers to investigate a unique
moment in human culture and meaning-making. “The phenomenon of
hundreds of millions of domestic bookshelves, replete with the as yet
unnarrated life stories of their owners, suddenly made visible for all to see
and read,” Towheed argues, offers a momentary “window of visibility”
offering a kind of mass observation of the lived experience of readers’ lives,
one which might not outlast the pandemic.
The nature of lived experience through the pandemic mediated by
bookshelves, both real and virtual, is explored by Kenna MacTavish (Chap.
3), who offers a detailed microhistory of bookstore activities during lock-
down in the Australian city of Melbourne, a designated UNESCO City of
Literature with the second highest concentrations of bookstores in rela-
tion to its population anywhere in the world. As of November 2021,
Melbourne residents had experienced six successive lockdowns amounting
to 262 days in total, the longest period of social restriction anywhere in
the world; during this time, residents could only travel within a 5 km
16 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

radius for essential purposes only. Framed autoethnographically,

McTavish’s chapter, “Crisis Book Browsing: Restructuring the Retail Shelf
Life of Books,” uses Instagram as a source for book studies research. She
focuses on how book retailers responded to the prolonged periods of clo-
sure through canny Instagram campaigns, transforming physical features
such as bargain tables into a visually appealing Instagram feed. She also
examines how readers transformed their own browsing habits from physi-
cal to online spaces, a practice she terms “crisis book browsing.”
The next two chapters investigate the tensions between private and
public spaces as well as wider debates in an increasingly polarized digital
space as negotiated via bookshelves. Ever since national lockdowns forced
millions of people to work from home, the presence of potentially prob-
lematic or controversial books on people’s shelves has exploded on social
media, especially on Twitter. Some of the complexities of “problematic”
bookshelves are analyzed by Chiara Bullen in Chap. 4. In an age typified
by culture wars and political polarization weaponized via social media, and
in the light of the #MeToo movement, what are the repercussions of pre-
senting the “wrong” types of books on your shelves—purposefully or
inadvertently? An example is the changing status of books by J. K. Rowling
on people’s bookshelves, after comments the author made on social media
and in interviews in June 2020 which were widely considered to be trans-­
exclusionary and transphobic. In her chapter, Bullen asks whether in
“today’s progressive reader era and the so-called ‘culture wars’, ownership
of such titles may encourage assumptions from other readers about one’s
ethical values.” She demonstrates that while publishers benefit from
deploying sensitivity readers, they often send mixed messages about prob-
lematic books and authors. Examining the presence of these books on
people’s shelves, Bullen reminds us that the pandemic has exacerbated
these tensions: “the discourse surrounding problematic books, authors
and publishers today gives us something else to keep in mind if presenting
our bookshelves for scrutiny—digitally or otherwise.”
While Bullen focuses on social media interaction, Jennifer Burek
Pierce’s chapter “Old Books on New Media: Reader Responses to The
Thorn Birds and Late Night with Seth Meyers” (Chap. 5), reminds us of the
continued relevance of linear broadcast television in increasing the visibil-
ity and cultural relevance of books and bookshelves during the COVID-19
pandemic. The explicit presentation of books on shelves on TV studio sets
is the focus of Burek Pierce’s chapter; she demonstrates the ways in which
changes in late night TV formats during the pandemic were visualized
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

through the lens of bookshelves and books presented on screen. As many

television hosts moved to homeworking, she shows how Seth Meyersʼ
home studio espousal of Colleen McCullough’s romance bestseller The
Thorn Birds, a “book that was nearly fifty years old” turned it into a “fea-
ture of Meyers’ show” and ended up dominating the “social media dis-
course surrounding it.” Burek Pierce also notes how the #BlackLivesMatter
movement caused a shift in the types of visible books presented on screen,
suggesting direct links between politics and curation, not only of a shelf,
but also of an on-screen (celebrity) personality. In this respect, the visibil-
ity of books broadcast on screen during the pandemic publicly exposes
particular cultural practices or preferences that might otherwise have
remained private.
Section 2 of Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic focuses
on material culture on screen, scrutinizing the extent to which the media-
tion of books as three-dimensional material artifacts via flat digital screens
has changed as a result of the pandemic. In “Videoconferencing as a
Digital Medium: Bookshelves in Backgrounds Throughout History”
(Chap. 6), Paizha Stoothoff offers an art historical overview of book-
shelves in backgrounds from the Renaissance to the present. As Stoothoff
shows, portraiture throughout history, whether painted or photographed,
has often included books as markers of status and authority. Stoothoff
compares this historical practice with pandemic era videoconferencing as a
digital medium, and teases out the ways in which contemporary online
meeting platforms and their users draw upon the visual grammar, assump-
tions and aspirations of their pre-digital ancestors. Her approach suggests
continuity rather than radical disjuncture: she argues that by “comparing
the significance of bookshelves in backgrounds in print and digital media
over time, we can uncover similarities and differences about how books
have been used and judged.” Again, this is a cultural practice made visible
as a result of quarantine-enforced remote working.
While Stoothoff focuses on the mise-en-scène of books as material
objects bolstering the status of their owners, Amanda Lastoria analyzes the
materiality of books via the representation of the codex on screens. She
identifies the role of books as “masks” on screens within a cycle of book
presentation, discovery and acquisition (Chap. 7). As Lastoria shows,
book design and recognizability on screen have become increasingly
important. From the Amazon thumbnail to the “look inside” feature, she
argues that “the materiality of printed books is remediated online,” and
demonstrates how it impacts our consumption of books during the
18 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

pandemic. Lastoria observes that we “discover on Twitter, acquire on

Amazon and share it—that is, sell the book along with ourselves—on
Zoom, where other consumers discover the book, and so on, over
and over.”
Two further chapters explore specific material cultural phenomena that
existed before the pandemic, but whose importance and relevance have
been exacerbated by it. In “Bookish objects on the Bookshelf” (Chap. 8),
Emily Baulch scrutinizes the non-book but evidently bookish objects
found on people’s bookshelves, and demonstrates the different roles that
they play. Bookish merchandise such as the popular Penguin Books para-
phernalia, enters into a visual conversation with the books on the shelves.
Examples of bookish objects are mugs, candles, but also so-called Funko
Pops (Chap. 8). Baulch cogently observes that the “affective appeal of
bookish objects reveals that we do more with books than simply read
them. And we do more with bookshelves than simply stocking them with
books.” If the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and the burgeoning cul-
ture of working from home has revealed domestic bookshelves to the
wider world, it has exposed not just printed books, but a whole world of
bookish objects and bookshelf ephemera, from mugs to artwork and from
toys to lucky charms.
In contrast, Claire Battershill in “Writing with Spines: Bookshelf Art,
Found Poetry, and the Practice of Assemblage” (Chap. 9) introduces the
concept of bookshelf art in relation to found poetry and assemblage, a
practice which she terms “writing with spines.” In her chapter Battershill
discusses the now-famous piece “Shelf Isolation” (2020) by British artist
Phil Shaw, which can be seen on the cover of our volume, as a perfect
example of such assemblage in practice. Battershill notes that aesthetic
arrangements of books on shelves can have innate cultural value, but even
more importantly, can constitute an artistic practice in itself. Interviewing
Phil Shaw for this chapter, the artist reveals that the physical presence of
books on shelves acts as artistic inspiration: “Who hasn’t entered a room
to find its walls crammed from floor to ceiling with books, and not felt a
sense of joyful amazement?” Shaw as quoted in the interview with
Battershill argues for the narrative, story-telling element of spines as both
paratext and metanarrative: “seen together on a shelf, particularly in a
private home they can tell a story quite separate from their individual
content.”
The final section looks at libraries, pedagogy and reading during the
pandemic; all four chapters are concerned with the social, pedagogical and
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

societal implications of the pandemic as demonstrated via bookshelves,

focusing on book access and accessibility, real world implications for peda-
gogy and methodologies for researching reading during the pandemic. As
befits a volume that brings together research about bookshelves in the
pandemic that was researched and written during the pandemic itself, the
first three of these four chapters are informed by the personal experiences
of their authors. Section 3 opens with Corinna Norrick-Rühl’s chapter,
“Elmer the Elephant in the Zoom Room? Reflections on Parenting, Book
Accessibility and Screen Time in a Pandemic” (Chap. 10); she explores
how already substantial existing inequalities of book access for families in
the pre-pandemic era were exacerbated by the lockdown closure of schools,
libraries and daycare centers. Norrick-Rühl comments on the near invisi-
bility of children’s books in the wider cultural discourse on bookshelves in
the pandemic, noting that despite their lack of perceived authority or
bookshelf credibility, children’s books “were, in many households with
kids, the books most often handled and read in 2020.” The invisibility of
children’s books and reading in online platforms and academic discourse
strongly indicates how research can sometimes fail to address systemic
issues of inequality around books and reading, inequalities which have
sharpened markedly since the start of the pandemic.
Bringing these questions closer to higher education contexts, Nelleke
Moser offers an autoethnographic case study of her own pandemic teach-
ing at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Chap. 11). The pandemic triggered
a number of panel discussions and interventions on teaching material cul-
ture online, at remove from the physical objects which usually bring our
disciplines such as history or book studies to life. Teaching students who
suddenly found themselves unable to access the university library, and in
particular, its rare books and manuscript collections, Moser embarked on
a pedagogical experiment: she encouraged her students to pick a book
from the ones they owned and had with them, as their exemplary text for
research in the history of the book. Moser’s aims were clear: she wanted
to “increase epistemic equality, diversify the curriculum, and make stu-
dents feel in charge of their own learning.” Moser’s experiment with grad-
uate students in the Netherlands offers intriguing perspectives on how the
pandemic changed pedagogical practice, while also refocusing scholarly
attention on the books students actually possess, rather than on institu-
tional collections. While Moser demonstrates the challenges faced by
instructors, the next chapter, “Online Learning, Library Access and
Bookcase Insecurity: A German Case Study” by Ananth, Barth, Ntoumanis
20 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

and Tolstopyat (Chap. 12) offers a student-led perspective. This chapter

centers on the students themselves and other users of university libraries
such as independent scholars to highlight some of the many challenges
they have faced in terms of online learning during the pandemic. This
contribution was the result of a roundtable discussion at our conference,
and while the students involved are all based in Germany, many of their
observations will resonate with students across the globe and the limita-
tions and challenges they experienced as learners and readers in the pan-
demic. Ananth et al. movingly discuss the idea of “Bookcase Insecurity,”
caused by the conflation of public and private spaces. With universities,
public libraries and cafes closed, students lost their main shared spaces for
study; instead, they were often forced to learn from cramped and poorly
equipped shared student housing, with few if any books to hand, and
without any of the “Bookcase Credibility” so effortlessly flaunted by aca-
demics and media experts. This chapter reminds us once again of the role
of the bookshelf as a contested and complex cultural space during the
pandemic.
The final chapter in this section and the volume moves away from the
personal to the collective experience of reading in the pandemic with Leah
Henrickson’s remarkably timely Twitter-based study (Chap. 13). Using
the Netlytic data scraping tool, Henrickson carefully amasses and inter-
prets 65 tweets all gathered during one week in September 2020 (another
50+ additional tweets were scraped in October 2020 and January 2021).
Her analysis of tweets marked with the hashtags #PandemicReading and
#PandemicBookshelves grants readers a wide and deep impression of pan-
demic reading habits, challenges and chances. She identifies three distinct
user groups via their responses: reactive readers; resilient authors; and
digitally engaged institutions. Henrickson observes that books on people’s
shelves have a remarkable ability to connect readers otherwise physically
separated by the lockdown: “We are alone in own homes, but we are alone
together—reading, tweeting, and persevering.” It is an apt way to close
the volume, gesturing toward the central role that social media has taken
on as a replacement space for exchange and conviviality, and how that has
been catalyzed through the pandemic and lockdowns. And it reminds us
once again, that private bookshelves, whether on display or not, have
served a number of important roles through the lived experience of the
COVID-19 pandemic.
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

Beyond the Pandemic Bookshelf

While we have tried to cover a broad range of themes, readers of this vol-
ume will certainly find some topics overly represented while others are
not. Additional perspectives are offered in a special issue of English Studies
titled “Bookshelves, Social Media, and Gaming” (vol. 103 [2022]).
Edmund G.C. King opens the special issue with his article titled
“Unpacking the ‘Red Flagʼ Bookshelf: Negotiating Literary Value on
Twitter.” He examines the idea of the “bookshelf red flag” or “warning
sign”—the book or author that might give pause if seen on a potential
date’s bookshelf—and how this specific type of “book talk” is carried out
on Twitter. Stevie Marsden’s article, “‘I take it you’ve read every book on
the shelves?’ Demonstrating Taste and Class Through Bookshelves in the
Time of COVID” in that volume raises important questions about clas-
sism and demonstrations of taste and value through owning and display-
ing books. She demonstrates how the bookshelf space can sometimes
reinforce inherent socioeconomic inequalities through processes of cul-
tural exclusion; rather than being a democratizing space, bookshelf culture
can serve to validate social stratification. It is followed by Laura Dietz’s
article, “Projection or Reflection? The Pandemic Bookshelf as a Mirror for
Self-Image and Personal Identity” which specifically argues that the con-
tingencies created by the pandemic (such as periods of lockdown, book-
shop closure and social distancing) have turned private bookshelves into
arenas for the self-assertion and expression of individual identity. Sally
Blackburn-Daniels takes the relationship between bookshelves and their
human custodians one step further in her article “‘Book Birthing’ and
Conspicuous Literary Consumption,” where she explores natal symbols
and the idea of literary consumption as a generative act. To round off the
special issue, Simon Rosenberg analyzes representations of physical books
and bookish spaces in the video game “The Last of Us Part II.” Books and
bookshelves abound in the world of gaming, and Rosenberg shows how
they have a particular currency in a video game set in an imaginary post-­
apocalyptic, post-pandemic future. As indicated, we hope that these two
outputs can be read alongside one another and inform each other.
As broad as the scope then is, this volume does not and cannot claim to
be fully representative of the phenomenon around bookshelves in the pan-
demic; we would like to acknowledge some of the topics and approaches
not covered in this volume, in an effort to open up the field for future
researchers. Our volume brings together research conducted in (and from
22 C. NORRICK-RÜHL AND S. TOWHEED

researchers based in) six OECD countries: Australia, Canada, Germany,

the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. All of these nations are among the
most developed and privileged in the world, while the COVID-19 pan-
demic has of course, been a global phenomenon. Individual chapters and
the volume introduction have tried to address issues of inequality within
nation states, but it has largely been beyond the scope of this volume to
address some of the huge and increasing inequalities between nation states.
How for example, did the prolonged period of school closure impact on
access to books in the Global South, given that school textbooks and exer-
cise books are often the only books owned by children in vast swathes of
the world? How might the closure of in-person bookselling in Global
South countries (some with limited or no online book sale platforms),
have been different from the impact felt in the West? How might the con-
cept of “Bookcase Insecurity” (Ananth et al.) be usefully extended (or
not) to tens of millions of people working from home in the Global South
who have no book lined shelves to project authority or credibility? While
Indian novelist Chetan Bhagat has written compelling call center novels
such as One Night @ the Call Centre (2005), the call center bookshelf (if
indeed there is such a thing) has so far evaded critical scrutiny, despite the
fact that the call center industry pioneered open plan working and home
working long before the pandemic. And even more pertinently, how might
the new generations of digital native readers, most of whom are in the
Global South, have responded to acquiring and reading texts differently to
their analog ancestors?
Where chapters in this volume discuss questions of access to books and
accessibility, these issues are considered in relation to the settings and con-
ditions specific to these six countries. While books are indeed recognized
as cultural signifiers in a wide range of cultural settings, the practice of
examining bookshelves filled with codices inherently privileges Eurocentric
ideas of what constitutes the normative material for research. This
Eurocentric approach was often found in the histories of book collecting
and bibliophilia which preceded this volume, which skew heavily toward
white male collectors and collections based in the Global North (e.g.
Basbanes 1995). Only recently has the predominantly male history of
book collecting been challenged by ideas and approaches of a burgeoning
feminist book history, as evidenced by Kate Ozment’s wonderful
“Rationale for Feminist Bibliography” (Ozment 2020). The racial inequal-
ities perpetuated by a focus on Eurocentric and middle-class ideals of the
home bookshelf filled with printed (often hardcover books) also need to
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 German

J. Hermann Schein (1586–1630)

Jan Adam Reinken (1623–1722)
Nikolaus Hasse (1630–1706)
Johann P. Krieger (1649–1725)
Johann Pezel (1669–1686)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
Johann Schenck (Before 1685)
Johann Graun (1698–1771)
Ignaz Holzbauer (1711–1783)
Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1783)
Johann W. A. Stamitz (1717–1757)
Johann Schobert (1720?–1767)
Carlo Giuseppe Toeschi (Italian) (1724–1788)
Johann T. Goldberg (1730–1760?)

French

Henri Desmarets (1662–1741)

François Couperin (1668–1733)
Jean Marie Leclair (1697–1764)

(HAYDN AND LATER)

German and Austrian

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)

Johann G. Albrechtsberger (1736–1809)
Michael Haydn (1737–1806)
Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739–1799)
Wenzel Pichel (1741–1805)
Johann Wenzelstich (1746–1803)
Abt Vogler (1749–1814)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Paul Wranitsky (1756–1808)
Ignaz J. Pleyel (1757–1831)
Daniel Steibelt (1765–1823)
Rudolph Kreutzer (1766–1831)
Anton Reicha (1770–1836)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Johann Hummel (1778–1837)
Ferdinand Ries (1784–1838)
Ludwig Spohr (1784–1859)
Friedrich Kuhlau (1786–1832)
Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826)
Heinrich Marschner (1795–1861)
Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
Franz Lachner (1803–1890)
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847)
Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Otto Nicolai (1810–1849)
Ferdinand Hiller (1811–1885)
Robert Volkmann (1815–1883)
Fritz Spindler (1817–1905)
Cornelius Gurlitt (1820–1901)
Friedrich Kiel (1821–1885)
J. Joachim Raff (Swiss) (1822–1882)
Theodore Kirchner (1823–1903)
Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Carl Reinecke (1824–1910)
Woldemar Bargiel (1828–1897)
S. Jadassohn (1831–1902)
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Karl Navratil (1836–1914)
Max Bruch (1838–1920)
Joseph Rheinberger (1839–1901)
Hermann Goetz (1840–1876)
August Klughardt (1847–1902)
Robert Fuchs (1847)
Julius Roentgen (1855)
Hugo Wolf (1860–1903)
Ludwig Thuille (1861–1907)
Richard Strauss (1864)
Robert Kahn (1865)
Paul Ertel (1865)
Georg Schumann (1866)
Alexander Zemlinsky (1872)
Max Reger (1873–1916)
Arnold Schoenberg (Austrian) (1874)
Anton von Webern (Austrian) (1883)
Karl Horovitz (Austrian) (1884–1925)
Egon Wellesz (Austrian) (1885)
Alban Berg (Austrian) (1885)
Heinz Tiessen (Austrian) (1887)
Ernst Toch (Austrian) (1887)
Hermann Scherchen (1891)
Egon Kornauth (1891)
Paul Pisk (Austrian) (1893)
Alois Haba (Austrian) (1893)
Paul Hindemith (1895)
Ernst Krenek (1900)
Heinrich Kaminsky (20th Century)
Otto Siegl (20th Century)

Czecho-Slovakian

Johann Ladislaus Dussek (1761–1812)

Bedrich Smetana (1824–1884)
Franz Bendel (1832–1874)
Antonin Dvorak (1841–1904)
Zdenko Fibich (1850–1900)
Josef Bohuslav Foerster (1859)
Vitezslav Novak (1870)
Josef Suk (1874)
Otakar Ostrcil (1879)
Rudolf Karel (1881)
Vaclar Stepan (1889)
Fidelio Finke (1891)
Erwin Schulhoff (1894)
Hans Krasa (1899)
Emil Axman (20th Century)

Hungarian
Julius Major (1859)
Emanuel Moor (1862)
Ottokar Novacek (1866–1900)
Ernst von Dohnanyi (1877)
Béla Bártok (1881)
Zoltan Kodaly (1882)
Leo Weiner (1885)

French

François Joseph Gossec (1734–1829)

André Ernest Modeste Grétry (1741–1813)
Marie Alexandre Guenin (1744–1814)
Hyacinthe Jadin (1769–1800)
Jacques F. Mazas (1782–1849)
Chrétien Urhan (1790–1845)
Napoleon Henri Reber (1807–1880)
Félicien David (1810–1873)
Ambroise Thomas (1811–1896)
César Franck (1822–1890)
Edouard Lalo (1823–1892)
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)
Theodore Dubois (1835–1924)
Alexis de Castillon (1838–1873)
Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)
Charles Marie Widor (1845)
Vincent d’Indy (1851)
Ernest Chausson (1855–1899)
André Gédalge (1856–1926)
Sylvio Lazzari (Tyrolese) (1858)
Auguste Chapuis (1862)
Claude Achille Debussy (1862–1918)
Guy Ropartz (1864)
Alberic Magnard (1865–1914)
Charles Koechlin (1867)
Albert Roussel (1869)
Florent Schmitt (1870)
Henri Rabaud (1873)
Maurice Ravel (1875)
Jean Roger Ducasse (1875)
André Caplet (1878–1925)
Paul le Flem (1881)
Louis Durey (1888)
Jacques Ibert (1890)
Roland Manuel (1891)
Georges Migot (1891)
Arthur Honegger (1892)
Darius Milhaud (1892)
Germaine Tailleferre (1892)
Lili Boulanger (1893–1918)
Marcelle Soulage (1894)
Georges Auric (1899)
Francis Poulenc (1899)
Raymond Petit (20th Century)

Belgian

Chas. de Bériot (1802–1870)

Guillaume Lekeu (1870–1894)
Joseph Jongen (1873)
Victor Vreuls (1876)
Arthur Hoerée (20th Century)

Dutch

Richard Hol (1825–1904)

Julius Roentgen (1855)
Johan Wagenaar (1862)
Dirk Schaefer (1874)
Bernard van Dieren (1884)
James Zwart (1892)

Swiss

Jean Xavier Lefèvre (1763–1829)

Hans Huber (1852–1921)

Roumanian

Georges Enesco (1881)

Russian

Michail Ivanovitch Glinka (1804–1857)

César Cui (1835–1918)
Piotr (Peter) Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908)
Serge I. Taneiev (1856–1915)
Anton Arensky (1861–1906)
Georg L. Catoire (1861–1926)
Alexander Gretchaninov (1864)
Alexander Glazounov (1865)
Paul Juon (1872)
Serge Rachmaninov (1873)
Reinhold Glière (1875)
Nicolai Miaskovsky (1881)
Leonid Sabaneyef (1881)
Igor Stravinsky (1882)
Alexander Tcherepnin (1902)
Nicholas Roslavets (20th Century)

Polish

Ignaz Felix Dobrzynski (1807–1867)

Ladislas Selenski (1837–1921)
Philipp Scharwenka (1847–1917)
Franz Xaver Scharwenka (1850–1924)
Emil Mlynarski (1870)
Ludomir Rozycki (1883)
Karol Szymanowski (1883)
Alexandre Tansman (1892)
Tadeusz Iarecki (20th Century) (Living in U. S. A.)
 Finnish

Jan Sibelius (1865)

Oskar Merikanto (1868)
Armas E. Launis (1884)

Scandinavian

Johan P. E. Hartmann (Danish) (1805–1900)

Niels W. Gade (Danish) (1817–1890)
August Winding (Danish) (1835–1899)
Emil Hartmann (Danish) (1836–1898)
Johan Svendsen (Norwegian) (1840–1911)
Edvard Hagerup Grieg (Norwegian) (1843–1907)
Ole Olsen (Norwegian) (1850)
Peter Lange-Müller (Danish) (1850–1926)
Gerhard Schjelderup (Norwegian) (1859)
A. Carl Nielson (Danish) (1864)
Christian Sinding (Norwegian) (1856)
Wilhelm Stenhammar (Norwegian) (1871)
Sigurd Lie (Norwegian) (1871–1904)
Kurt Atterberg (Swedish) (1887)

Italian

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901)

Antonio Bazzini (1818–1897)
Giovanni Sgambati (1843–1914)
Giuseppe Martucci (1856–1909)
Enrico Bossi (1861–1925)
Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924)
Leone Sinigaglia (1868)
Mario Tarenghi (1870)
Alfredo d’Ambrosio (1871–1915)
Lorenzo Perosi (1872)
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876)
Ottorino Respighi (1879)
Vincenzo Tommasini (1880)
Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880)
G. Francesco Malipiero (1882)
Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli (1882)
Alfredo Casella (1883)
Vincenzo Davico (1889)
Guido Guerrini (1890)
Mario Labroca (1896)
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1896)
Vittorio Rieti (1898)

Spanish

Enrique Granados (1867–1916)

Joaquin Turina (1882)
Manuel de Falla (1876)
Oscar Esplà (1886)

English

George Onslow (1784–1852)

Michael Balfe (1808–1870)
George Alexander MacFarren (1813–1887)
William Sterndale Bennett (1816–1875)
Ebenezer Prout (1835–1909)
Alexander Campbell Mackenzie (1847)
Charles Hubert H. Parry (1848–1918)
Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924)
Frederick H. Cowen (1852)
Edward Elgar (1857)
Ethel M. Smyth (1858)
Algernon Ashton (1859)
William Henry Hadow (1859)
Marie Wurm (1860) (Living in Germany)
William Wallace (1860)
Eugene d’Albert (1864) (Living in Germany)
John Blackwood McEwen (1868)
Frederick Lamond (1868)
Granville Bantock (1868)
Walford Davies (1869)
Cecil Forsyth (1870)
Ralph Vaughn Williams (1872)
Gustav Holst (1874)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912)
Donald Francis Tovey (1875)
Norman O’Neill (1875)
H. Waldo Warner (1876)
William Yates Hurlstone (1876–1906)
Thomas Dunhill (1877)
H. Balfour Gardiner (1877)
Josef Holbrooke (1878)
Frank Bridge (1879)
Cyril Scott (1879)
Arnold Bax (1883)
York Bowen (1884)
Benjamin Dale (1885)
Gerrard Williams (1888)
Armstrong Gibbs (1889)
Arthur Bliss (1891)
Herbert Howells (Australian) (1892)
Eugene Goossens (1893)
Rebecca Clarke (20th Century)

Brazilian

Villa-Lobos (1892)

American

John K. Paine (1839–1906)

Frederick Grant Gleason (1848–1903)
Arthur Foote (1853)
Adolph M. Foerster (1854–1927)
George W. Chadwick (1854)
George Templeton Strong (1856)
Edgar Stillman Kelley (1857)
Henry Schoenefeld (1857)
Abraham W. Lillienthal (1859)
Arthur Whiting (1861)
Samuel Baldwin (1862)
Charles Martin Loeffler (1861)
Carl Busch (Danish) (1862)
Edmund Severn (1862)
Ernest R. Kroeger (1862)
Henry Holden Huss (1862)
Horatio Parker (1863–1919)
William H. Berwald (1864)
Mrs. H. H. A. Beach (1867)
Louis Adolphe Coerne (1870–1922)
Frederick Stock (German) (1871)
Henry K. Hadley (1871)
Arthur Nevin (1871)
Frederick Converse (1871)
Felix Borowsky (1872)
Rubin Goldmark (1872)
Frank E. Ward (1872)
Daniel Gregory Mason (1873)
Arne Oldberg (1874)
Camille Zeckwer (1875–1924)
Frederick Ayres (1876)
David Stanley Smith (1877)
Blair Fairchild (1877)
John Beach (1877)
Franz C. Bornschein (1879)
Heniot Lévy (Polish) (1879)
Eastwood Lane (?)
Ernest Bloch (Swiss) (1880)
Eric Delamarter (1880)
John Powell (1882)
Percy Grainger (Australian) (1882)
Ethel Leginska (English) (1883)
Mary Howe (?)
Louis Gruenberg (1884)
Charles Griffes (1884–1920)
James P. Dunn (1884)
Emerson Whithorne (1884)
Deems Taylor (1885)
Carlos Salzedo (French) (1885)
George F. Boyle (Australian) (1886)
Marion Bauer (1887)
Albert Spalding (1888)
Leslie Loth (1888)
Chalmers Clifton (1889)
Harold Morris (1889)
Frederick Jacobi (1891)
Charles Haubiel (1892)
Albert Stoessel (1894)
Sandor Harmati (Hungarian) (1894)
Leo Sowerby (1895)
Leo Ornstein (1895)
Howard Hanson (1896)
Richard Hammond (1896)
Aaron Copland (1898)
 Pianoforte Music
(Lyrical Pieces, Songs without Words, Nocturnes,
Impromptus, Ballads, Intermezzi, Preludes, and Program
Music.)

German and Austrian

Johann N. Hummel (1778–1837)

Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826)
Friederich Kuhlau (1786–1832)
Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
Charles Mayer (1799–1862)
Joseph Kessler (1800–1872)
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847)
Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Ferdinand von Hiller (1811–1885)
Adolf von Henselt (1814–1889)
Robert Volkmann (1815–1883)
Fritz Spindler (1817–1905)
Theodor Kullak (1818–1882)
Albert Loeschorn (1819–1905)
Friedrich Kiel (1821–1885)
Joseph Joachim Raff (Swiss) (1822–1882)
Theodor Kirchner (1823–1903)
Carl Reinecke (1824–1910)
Ernst Pauer (1826–1905)
Gustav Merkel (1827–1885)
Woldemar Bargiel (1828–1897)
Gustav Lange (1830–1889)
Hans von Bülow (1830–1894)
Salomon Jadassohn (1831–1902)
Franz Bendel (1833–1874)
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Adolf Jensen (1837–1879)
Joseph Rheinberger (1839–1901)
Heinrich Hofmann (1842–1902)
Hugo Reinhold (Austrian) (1854)
Alexander von Fielitz (1860)
Hugo Kaun (1863)
Adele aus der Ohe (1864–1916)
Georg Schumann (1866)
Alexander Zemlinsky (1872)
Max Reger (1873–1916)
Arnold Schoenberg (1874)
Siegfried Karg-Elert (1879)
Walter Braunfels (1882)
Arthur Schnabel (1882)
Karl Horwitz (1884–1925)
Heinz Tiessen (1887)
Ernst Toch (1887)
Egon Kornauth (1891)
Hermann Scherchen (1891)
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897)
Philipp Jarnach (1892)
Otto Siegl (20th Century)

Czecho-Slovakia

Johann Ladislaus Dussek (1761–1812)

Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870)
Alexander Dreyschock (1818–1869)
Antonin Dvorak (1841–1904)
Josef Rebicek (1844–1904)
Zdenko Fibich (1850–1900)
J. B. Foerster (1859)
Vitezslav Novak (1870)
Josef Suk (1874)
Rudolf Karel (1881)

Hungarian

Franz Liszt (1811–1886)

Stephen Heller (1813–1888)
Karl Goldmark (1830–1915)
Emanuel Moor (1862)
Arpad Szendy (1863–1922)
Eduard Poldini (1869)
Ernst von Dohnanyi (1877)
Béla Bártok (1881)
Zoltan Kodaly (1882)

French

Napoleon Henri Reber (1807–1880)

Charles Alkan (1813–1888)
Ignace Leybach (Alsatian) (1817–1891)
Jean Henri Ravina (1818–1906)
César Franck (1822–1890)
Auguste Durand (1830–1909)
Eugene Ketterer (1831–1870)
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)
Théodore Dubois (1837–1924)
Louis Brassin (1840–1884)
Alexis Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894)
Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)
Théodore Lack (1846)
Benjamin Godard (1849–1895)
François Thomé (1850)
Vincent d’Indy (1851)
Raoul Pugno (1852–1914)
Sylvio Lazzari (Tyrolese) (1858)
Mme. Cécile Chaminade (1861)
Auguste Chapuis (1862)
Xavier Leroux (1863–1919)
Gabriel Pierné (1863)
Isidor Philipp (1863)
Erik Satie (1866–1925)
Charles Koechlin (1867)
Claude Achille Debussy (1867–1918)
Florent Schmitt (1870)
Louis Vierne (1870)
Henri Rabaud (1873)
Deodat de Sévérac (1873–1921)
Jean Roger Ducasse (1875)
Maurice Ravel (1875)
Louis Aubert (1877)
Gustave Samazeuilh (1877)
Rhené-Baton (1879)
Gabriel Grovlez (1879)
André Caplet (1878–1925)
Paul Le Flem (1881)
Georges Migot (1891)
Arthur Honegger (1892)
Darius Milhaud (1892)
Francis Poulenc (1899)
Louis Vuillemin (?)

Belgium

Théophile Ysaye (1865–1918)

Dutch

Richard Hol (1825–1904)

Johan Wagenaar (1862)
Dirk Schaefer (1874)

Swiss

Sigismund Thalberg (1812–1871)

Joseph Joachim Raff (1822–1882)
Hans Huber (1852–1921)
Emile Blanchet (1877)

Russian

Michail Ivanovitch Glinka (1804–1857)

Anton Rubinstein (1830–1894)
Alexander Borodin (1834–1887)
Nicolai von Wilm (1834–1911)
César Cui (1835–1918)
Nicolai Rubinstein (1835–1881)
Mili Balakirev (1836–1910)
Modest Moussorgsky (1839–1881)
Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908)
Nicolas de Stcherbatchev (1853)
Alexander Kopylov (1854)
Anatole Liadov (1855–1914)
Eduard Schütt (1856) (Living in Vienna)
Genari Karganov (1858–1890)
Alexander Ilyinsky (1859)
Serge M. Liapounov (1859)
Anton Arensky (1861–1906)
Joseph Wihtol (1863)
Alexander Glazounov (1865)
Vladimir Rebikov (1866)
Arseni Korestchenko (1870)
Paul Juon (1872)
Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915)
Serge Rachmaninov (1873)
Reinhold M. Glière (1875)
Ossip Gabrilovitch (1878)
Nikolaus Medtner (1879)
Gregory Krein (1880)
Leonid Sabaneyef (1881)
Alexander Krein (1883)
Samuel Feinberg (1890)
Serge Prokofiev (1891)
Alexander Tcherepnin (1902)

Polish

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849)

Theodore Leschetizky (1830–1915)
Alexander Zarzycki (1834–1895)
Philipp Scharwenka (1847–1917)
Xaver Scharwenka (1850–1924)
J. L. Nicodé (1853)
Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925)
Ignace Jan Paderewski (1860)
Emil Mlynarski (1870)
Sigismund Stojowski (1870) (Living in America)
Leopold Godowsky (1870) (Living in America)
Karol Szymanowski (1883)
Poldowski (Lady Dean Paul) (188 ?) (Living in London)
Alexandre Tansman (1898) (Living in Paris)

Finnish

Robert Kajanus (1856)

Jan Sibelius (1865)
Oskar Merikanto (1868)
Armas Järnefelt (1869)
Selim Palmgren (1878)
Armas E. Launis (1884)

Scandinavian

Halfdan Kjerulf (Norwegian) (1815–1868)

Niels Gade (Danish) (1817–1890)
August Winding (Danish) (1835–1899)
Edmund Neupert (Norwegian) (1842–1888)
Edvard Hagerup Grieg (Norwegian) (1843–1907)
Agathe Backer-Gröndahl (Norwegian) (1847–1907)
Ludwig T. Schytte (Danish) (1850–1909)
Emil Sjögren (Swedish) (1853–1918)
Cornelius Rybner (Danish) (1855–1929) (Lived in America)
Christian Sinding (Norwegian) (1856)
August Enna (Danish) (1860)
Johan Halvorsen (Norwegian) (1864)
A. Carl Nielson (Danish) (1864)
Olof Peterson-Berger (Swedish) (1867)
Sigurd Lie (Norwegian) (1871–1904)

Italian

Giovanni Sgambati (1843–1914)

M. Enrico Bossi (1861–1925)
Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924)
Mario Tarenghi (1870)
Franco Alfano (1877)
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876)
G. Francesco Malipiero (1882)
Alfredo Casella (1883)
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1896)
Victor da Sabata (1896)

Spanish

Pedro Albeniz (1795–1855)

Isaac Albeniz (1861–1909)
Enrique Granados (1867–1916)
Alberto Jonás (1868)
José Vianna di Motta (Portuguese) (1868)
Manuel de Falla (1876)
Frederic Mompou (20th Century)
Joaquin Turina (1882)

Brazil

Villa-Lobos (1892)

English

John Field (1782–1837)

William Sterndale Bennett (1816–1875)
Walter C. MacFarren (1826–1905)
Charles Hubert H. Parry (1848–1918)
Tobias Matthay (1858)
Algernon Ashton (1859)
Herbert F. Sharpe (1861)
Eugene d’Albert (1864)
Granville Bantock (1868)
Arthur Hinton (1869)
Percy Pitt (1870)
Ernest Austin (1874)
Norman O’Neill (1875)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912)
William Y. Hurlstone (1876–1906)
H. Balfour Gardiner (1877)
Roger Quilter (1877)
Josef Holbrooke (1878)
John Ireland (1879)
Frank Bridge (1879)
Cyril Scott (1879)
Arnold Bax (1883)
Lord Berners (1883)
York Bowen (1884)
John R. Heath (1887)
Gerrard Williams (1888)
Alec Rowley (1892)
Eugene Goossens (1893)
Norman Peterkin (?)

American

Hermann Adolf Wollenhaupt (German) (1827–1863)

L. M. Gottschalk (1829–1869)
William Mason (1829–1908)
Sebastian Bach Mills (1838–1898)
Homer N. Bartlett (1846–1920)
Emil Liebling (1851–1914)
Max Vogrich (Transylvania) (1822–1916)
Constantin Sternberg (1852–1924)
Rafael Joseffy (Hungarian) (1852–1915)
Percy Goetschius (1853)
Arthur Foote (1853)
William H. Sherwood (1854–1911)
Adolph M. Foerster (1854–1927)
George W. Chadwick (1854)
Wilson G. Smith (1855–1929)
Arthur Bird (1856–1923)
George Templeton Strong (1856)
Carl V. Lachmund (1857–192?)
Harry Rowe Shelley (1858)
Bruno Oscar Klein (German) (1858–1911)
Edward MacDowell (1861–1908)
Arthur Whiting (1861)
Ethelbert Nevin (1862–1901)
Henry Holden Huss (1862)
William H. Berwald (German) (1864)
Rosseter Gleason Cole (1866)
Mrs. H. H. A. Beach (1867)
Margaret Ruthven Lang (1867)
Florence N. Barbour (1867)
Louis Victor Saar (1868)
Henry F. Gilbert (1868–1928)
Paolo Gallico (Austrian) (1868)
Louis Adolph Coerne (1870–1922)
Howard Brockway (1870)
Samuel Bollinger (1871)
Arthur Nevin (1871)
Rubin Goldmark (1872)
Felix Borowsky (1872)
Arthur Farwell (1872)
Edward Burlingame Hill (1872)
Daniel Gregory Mason (1873)
Ernest Schelling (1876)
Mortimer Wilson (1876)
John Alden Carpenter (1876)
John Beach (1877)
Louis Campbell-Tipton (1877–1921)
Rudolph Ganz (Swiss) (1877)
Blair Fairchild (1877)