Harvard University Press Blog

"Can you have work and love in a damaged world?"

The duo behind the Thinking Aloud video archive recently interviewed George Kateb about the possibilities of living a good life in our damaged world. Kateb, one of the most respected and influential political theorists of the past several decades, is the author, most recently, of Human Dignity, a secular defense of a concept that has received little true scrutiny.

We encourage you to watch the full video of his interview, available at The Stone. Here, though, is a bit of what Kateb had to say about how to live:

The point is to live one’s life, whether or not you think the world is damaged. To live a life. But, never, never to think that you can lead a good life. Never, never to think that you can lead the good life.

I think of two things that help to define a tolerable life that people need and are right to need and want. And they are the two that Freud comes up with: work and love.

Can you have work and love in a damaged world? Yes, you can, but not with an easy conscience. Why not an easy conscience? Because it’s never justified. There’s always too much damage in the world for you to think that the world exists for your work and your love.

We are oblivious, and can’t help but be to some extent oblivious. We would die from the impact of true knowledge of the amount of suffering existing just around us at any given moment in time. This is a lesson taught powerfully by George Eliot in Middlemarch. We’d die if we could hear the heartbeat of a squirrel. We would die from the roar at the other end of silence.

So how does one live against a backdrop of nothingness? What does one do about the pathologies that seem to make life less worth living, rather than more worth living?

Once you’re determined to do something, the obligation is to do your best. Should you assume an obligation to do something? I think one should. It’s not the same thing for everybody, though. But, to sort of struggle against pathology on the one hand, and the temptation of destructive nihilism, on the other hand, it’s enough to keep you going… fill up a life.

Two Takes on Two Migrations

Earlier this fall we published The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, by William J. Stuntz. The book is a deeply researched examination of the legal machinations that have left the United States with a criminal justice system that seems no longer to be ruled by law. Writing in the New York Review of Books, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens praised Stuntz for accurately describing “the twin problems that pervade American criminal justice today—its overall severity and its disparate treatment of African-Americans,” and described the book as containing “a wealth of overlooked or forgotten historical data, perceptive commentary on the changes in our administration of criminal justice over the years, and suggestions for improvement.”

Stuntz opens the book with a chapter titled “Two Migrations,” in which he considers the massive influx of European immigrants to the United States in the seventy years after World War I together with the northern migration of African Americans in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. The two migrations had many structural similarities, and both triggered urban crime waves, which Stuntz notes is mostly to be expected: “Millions of mostly poor young men uprooted from their homes and moving into crowded slums sounds like a recipe for violence and lawlessness.” But, despite their similarities, Stunts shows that the crime waves actually differed enormously; the first was “short-lived and mild,” the second “long-lasting and severe.”

Comparing these two situations is an incredibly complicated exercise, and Stuntz’s willingness and ability to accept the challenge of such complexity is central to the accomplishment of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Of the many factors he points to in his consideration of the differing outcomes of these two migrations, one to which he gives great weight is the discrepancy between the political accomplishments of European immigrants and African American migrants: “By the late nineteenth century—when crime in immigrant-dominated cities was mostly falling, not rising—working-class immigrants and their offspring largely governed the justice system that governed them. Even today, African Americans have no such power.”

Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, newly available in paperback, also addresses the differing outcomes of these two migrations. The book chronicles the emergence of a now-deeply embedded cultural notion of African American criminality, one that Muhammad shows to have grown from a dangerously misguided reliance on statistical “evidence.” He contrasts the treatment of African Americans in the urban North to that of working-class whites and European immigrants, and, like Stuntz, helps us to understand how those historical episodes continue to shape our society. 

Stuntz’s book, while wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, is based in his work as a legal scholar; Muhammad’s reflects his training as a historian, and his deep interest in the social sciences. Where Stuntz gives a focus on legal developments and statistical comparison, Muhammad sifts through the cultural and scholarly discourse surrounding those developments and statistics. And for Muhammad, a key to understanding the differing criminal patterns of these two migrations is the fact that the sociological establishment mobilized itself to argue for the integration of European immigrants, but left African Americans out of that effort, believing as they did that black people committing crimes were merely reflecting either their cultural or racial inferiority, and that sociological resources shouldn’t be wasted on them. As Muhammad explained it to us in a recent conversation:

By and large, the entire edifice of sociology (was) deploying its resources against eugenics and Social Darwinism to say that immigrants are not infecting American society with their degenerate blood… “They’re providing real energy and effort to our labor pool, they’re helping us build America. And that some of them should fall into a life of crime is more our fault than theirs, because we haven’t given them a fair opportunity. We stigmatize them, and our nativist proclivities make it very difficult for immigrants to live the lives that they came here to pursue.” And basically they never put black people into that equation. They left black people out of that kind of very structuralist, environmental critique of the origins of white European or white ethnic criminality.

You can hear Muhammad make that point and others in the video below.

 

So in the comparison of these two migrations, where Stuntz shows us political advancement for European immigrants and subsequent demographic shifts that largely prevented African Americans from making similar gains, Muhammad highlights a formidable social apparatus undergirding the rise of one group and helping to maintain the lower status of the other.

These two books, covering similar ground in different ways, help to remind us how important it is to reach across disciplinary lines in our attempts to understand the world in which we live. 

A Portal into a Vanished Jewish World

At the turn of the twentieth century, Russia’s Pale of Settlement was home to 40% of the world’s Jews—and so foreign to the rest of the country that Russian Jewish intellectuals called it “our own kind of dark continent.” How to capture this rich, mysterious land, its people and traditions? For peripatetic playwright and journalist S. An-sky, the answer was the 2,087-question Jewish Ethnographic Program, a survey now translated into English for the first time in The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement. While world war and revolution prevented the survey from ever being distributed, in Nathaniel Deutsch’s hands the unanswered questions (a selection of which can be found below) and the story behind their assembly disclose a riveting account of a lost world.

Beginning with a query about a person’s soul before it enters the body, and ending with the question “What kind of life will there be after the resurrection of the dead?,” An-sky’s survey covers all aspects of Jewish life, from birth to childhood to education to marriage to aging and death.

In an introductory section, Deutsch sites The Jewish Ethnographic Program in its intellectual, historical, and cultural contexts, and in the context of An-sky’s life and work. He describes his own history with the translation project, including ultimately quixotic attempts to elicit responses to the questions from subjects ranging from elderly people who had once lived in shtetls, to rabbinical students, to observant Jews. As he was translating the questions, Deutsch also lost himself in the project of their annotation:

Initially I planned on providing explanatory notes to only those questions that seemed especially obscure. After all, one of the things that I had always found most compelling about The Jewish Ethnographic Program was the very fact that it was a book of questions without answers and, therefore, a kind of stripped-down, elemental version of a classical Jewish text. And yet as I went through The Program looking for questions that needed clarification or commentary, I soon found myself creating more and more notes. Before I knew it, I had completed notes to one hundred questions, and then two hundred, and then three hundred, and so on.

By this point, practically every countertop in the house—and not a few floors—were covered with books: memoirs about growing up in the Pale of Settlement, yizker bikher (memorial books) for Eastern European Jewish communities, scholarly works on Russian Jewish history and culture, and traditional sforim, or books on Halakhah and minhag. In one sense I was reverse-engineering the creative process that had led to the composition of The Jewish Ethnographic Program in the first place, with of course the critically important difference being that I was a single individual living in twenty-first-century America, whereas The Program had been created by a team of people born and raised in the Pale of Settlement. In another sense, and despite my best—at least conscious—efforts not to do so, I was also attempting to answer all of the questions myself.

Rising Isolationism, A Renewed Danger?

In the piece below, excerpted from the blog of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Christopher Nichols draws on his recently published book Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age to help make sense of what he describes as the “unsettling transition toward a more inward-looking perspective in American foreign and domestic politics today.”

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Wherever the public’s attention roams these days, looming in the background is a renewed danger: Americans, and especially elected officials on the right, are becoming more isolationist. National polls and the statements of GOP presidential candidates reveal a widespread insistence for the U.S. to pull back from its global commitments. Even apparent successes, such as the limited multilateral intervention in Libya, do not restore, much less rebuild, confidence about the positive payoffs from U.S. engagement. What is worse, today’s isolationists are both different from and in some ways more dangerous than those of the so-called “heyday” of isolationist politics, the 1920s and 1930s.

Traditionally, Americans who opposed the restrictions on national sovereignty imposed by entering into global institutions and agreements advocated loudly for political isolationism. In the 1920s and 1930s—at the peak of such arguments—isolationist advocates such as the so-called “irreconcilable” Republican Senator William Borah and his colleague Senator Gerald Nye heralded a Washington-Jeffersonian freedom from “permanent alliances” and foreign “entanglements.” But, we must be mindful that even as they rejected most forms of international organizations and binding treaties, Borah and Nye did not call for cultural or commercial separation from the world. They hardly conformed to the caricatured version of a walled-and-bounded “isolationist.” Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in January 1934, Borah put his position succinctly:

In matters of trade and commerce we have never been isolationist and never will be. In matters of finance, unfortunately, we have not been isolationist and never will be. When earthquake and famine, or whatever brings human suffering, visit any part of the human race, we have not been isolationists, and never will be. … [I]n all matters political, in all commitments of any nature or kind, which encroach in the slightest upon the free and unembarrassed action of our people, or which circumscribe their discretion and judgment, we have been free, we have been independent, we have been isolationist.

Later, leading up to the 1952 presidential campaign, Democrat Adlai Stevenson famously warned of the “challenge of a new isolationism.” Stevenson found allies among Democrats and Republicans in the wake of WWII to help defeat isolationist calls, such as from Republican Senator and GOP presidential candidate Robert Taft, who advocated the doctrine of the “free hand” (a la Borah) and urged the nation to spurn NATO and strictly limit its commitments to Western Europe and the world.

Today, America is confronted by a similar challenge. Yet it is failing to take account of the lessons of history or the benefits of an engaged U.S. presence in the world. Moreover, when a bloc of “Kucinich Republicans” emerged in June in the House of Representatives to de-fund U.S. activities in Libya, they went further—pushing hard for trimming or even eliminating many traditional U.S. military, diplomatic, and economic commitments. In addition to opposing “further military” action in Libya, Republican Speaker John Boehner argued that the U.S. can and should strategically withhold funding from the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.

Praise Be to Copying

Last week’s sensational book news was the revelation that Q. R. Markham’s Assassin of Secrets, the first in a new series of spy novels, contains dozens of chunks lifted from other books without credit. The scandal prompted Markham’s publisher, Little, Brown, to recall all 6,500 copies in print. They seem unlikely either to issue revised editions or to continue with the rest of the series.

Those who follow the book world are by now fairly accustomed to such developments. Whether it’s another memoir taking liberties with the truth, or a talking head’s new “history” book playing it loose with the facts, people in the trade are all too familiar with books not being what they claim.

But Markham’s is a particularly interesting case. The New Yorker Book Bench blog ran a post titled “Q. R. Markham’s Plagiarism Puzzle” that explores the possibility that Markham had intended his book as a collage, rather than a novel:

In the hundreds of newspaper articles and blog posts that have been published on the subject of Markhamgate in the past twenty-four hours, one question appears over and over: How did Rowan think he’d get away with this, especially in the era of Google? It’s the natural question, but in the spirit of playing detective I must ask: Is it the right one? We do not yet have all of the facts—Rowan and his agent have been silent since the scandal broke, and much of the book has yet to be mapped—but those we do have point to something much stranger and more richly textured than your run-of-the-mill plagiarism case.

Allow us to add a piece to the puzzle. Markham is a part owner of the NYC bookstore Spoonbill & Sugartown, which hosted an event for our author Marcus Boon last year, to celebrate the release of his latest book, In Praise of Copying. The event was billed as a “Borgesian Book Launch”:

Instead of reading from his book, as is traditionally done at a launch, Boon will read from books selected at random from the copious and wide-ranging shelves of Spoonbill, revealing the secret Borgesian omnipresence of copying in even the most obscure or popular places, recreating the argument of In Praise of Copying using materials found in the store.

Surely a coincidence. But, either way, hats off to the synergy.

On our website, you can read more about Boon’s book, and even download a free PDF. 

Long live copying.

Through Europe’s Shattered Spaces: A Guide to Jewish Berlin and Warsaw

Michael Meng’s Shattered Spaces is a study of the physical legacy of destruction left in many German and Polish cities that were once rich with the sights and sounds of Jewish life. It’s also a study of remembering, an examination of how memories of the war have shaped encounters with Jewish ruins. In the piece below, Meng takes us through a series of sites that reflect the past in different ways.

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Multiple histories and layers of time interact in Berlin and Warsaw, two capitals with deep traditions of Jewish history, culture, and religion. Before the Holocaust, few other cities in the world had such dynamic Jewish populations as Berlin and Warsaw. In 1945, little more than Jewish ruins—silent synagogues, empty homes, deserted streets—marked what was left of Jewish life in both cities. Some Jews did rebuild their lives in Warsaw and Berlin, but absence dominated the early postwar decades. In East Berlin and Warsaw, this absence was made all the more palpable with the emigration of Jews in the wake of two major antisemitic campaigns in 1951-53 in East Germany and 1967-68 in Poland.

Today, antisemitism exists among segments of German and Polish society, but things have changed dramatically in both countries over the past four decades. Since the 1970s, a profound interest in Jewish culture, history, and religion has emerged among many non-Jewish Germans and Poles. At the same time, the Jewish communities of both countries have grown, especially after the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989.

This complex, multilayered history unfolds today along the streets of Berlin and Warsaw. The knotted threads of past, present, and future run through the built environment as with few other objects of human experience. Time oozes through physical sites, saturating them with meanings, contexts, and stories, whether spaces are new or old, preserved or neglected, occupied or vacant, present or absent, fragmented or whole. Indeed, Jewish spaces uncover Europe’s myriad histories of renewal and ruination—its histories of acculturation, emancipation, tolerance, genocide, forgetting, remembering, and rebuilding. While the Holocaust runs wide and deep in our imaginations of Jewishness in Germany, Poland, and Europe, it exists among many other histories and temporalities, including the contemporary revival of Jewish life.

Experiencing Jewishness in Berlin and Warsaw involves, then, reflecting upon the webs of past, present, and future. Below are a few sites that reflect the intricacies of time.

Berlin

Unveiled in 1866, the New Synagogue (Oranienburger Str. 28/30) stands today as one of Berlin’s most distinct Jewish sites. Christian architect Eduard Knoblauch designed the synagogue in Moorish style, topping the building with a magnificent golden dome. Located in the district of Mitte, the synagogue existed among other Jewish institutions, bakeries, and bookstores in an area that was the closest thing Berlin had to a Jewish neighborhood. While the synagogue survived the Nazi attack against Jewish property in 1938, it was severely damaged by allied bombs. From 1945 to 1989, the facade stood as a ruin in East Berlin. In 1995, the surviving shell was restored, but the rest of the building was not. The bombed-out sanctuary remains, integrating the ruination of genocide, war, and postwar neglect into the building’s structure. The synagogue serves as a small prayer house for Berlin’s Jewish community, an archive for historical research, and a museum that narrates the building’s history.

"So Overcome By Such a Trifle"

In a round-up of recent “sex novels and novellas” in last week’s New Yorker, Joan Acocella refers to a moment in Jane Austen’s Persuasion as “one of the most erotic episodes in Western literature.” In that scene, Anne Elliot is tending to an ill nephew in the presence of Captain Wentworth (a former suitor, returned), and Charles Hayter (who sees the valiant Wentworth as a threat to his station), when another nephew enters the room, bent on attention:

There being nothing to be eat, he could only have some play; and as his aunt would not let him teaze his sick brother, he began to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in such a way that, busy as she was about Charles, she could not shake him off. She spoke to him—ordered, intreated, and insisted in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly.

“Walter,” said she, “get down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you.”

“Walter,” cried Charles Hayter, “why do you not do as you are bid? Do not you hear your aunt speak? Come to me, Walter, come to cousin Charles.”

But not a bit did Walter stir.

In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.

Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with most disordered feelings. His kindness in stepping forward to her relief—the manner—the silence in which it had passed—the little particulars of the circumstance—with the conviction soon forced on her by the noise he was studiously making with the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks, and rather sought to testify that her conversation was the last of his wants, produced such a confusion of varying, but very painful agitation, as she could not recover from, till enabled by the entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over her little patient to their cares, and leave the room. She could not stay. It might have been an opportunity of watching the loves and jealousies of the four; they were now all together, but she could stay for none of it. It was evident that Charles Hayter was not well inclined towards Captain Wentworth. She had a strong impression of his having said, in a vext tone of voice, after Captain Wentworth’s interference, “You ought to have minded me, Walter; I told you not to teaze your aunt;” and could comprehend his regretting that Captain Wentworth should do what he ought to have done himself. But neither Charles Hayter’s feelings, nor any body’s feelings, could interest her, till she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was; and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.

To modern readers, versed in the Nicholson Bakers and Helen DeWitts that are Acocella’s real subject, it’s an exceptionally subtle scene. Which, of course, is her point in praising it.

Robert Morrison’s new annotated edition of Persuasion—from which the above passage is excerpted—presents this moment along with Charles Edmond Brock’s illustration of it, dated 1898:

Hardt and Negri on "The Problem of Transition"

Now in its seventh week, the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to expand and evolve. Notable events this week include the successful effort by Occupy Oakland protesters to shut down the city’s port, the fifth busiest in the nation, and tomorrow’s coordinated “Bank Transfer Day,” when those opposing our banking system plan to move their money from large corporate banks to local institutions. Throughout the movement’s duration, much attention has been focused on its governance structure and on its “demands.” For the protesters themselves, these things are deeply intertwined: the decision-making process is just as critical as the decisions. The dynamic puts us in mind of the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, co-authors of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. In the following excerpt from Commonwealth, the authors discuss how the governance structure of a movement can itself help to prepare its participants for what comes next. Or, in terms of Occupy, how the work of deciding on “demands” can itself create the conditions for their achievement.

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Too much of revolutionary thought does not even pose the problem of transition, paying attention only to the overture and neglecting all the acts of the drama that must follow. Defeating the ruling powers, destroying the ancien régime, smashing the state machine—even overthrowing capital, patriarchy, and white supremacy—is not enough. That might be sufficient, perhaps, if one were to believe that the formation of the multitude was already achieved, that we were all already somehow not only purified of the hierarchies and corruptions of contemporary society but also capable of managing the multiplicity of the common and cooperating with one another freely and equally—in short, that democratic society was already complete. If that were the case, then, yes, maybe the insurrectional event destroying the structures of power would be sufficient and the perfect human society already existing beneath the yoke of oppression would spontaneously flourish. But human nature as it is now is far from perfect. We are all entangled and complicit in the identities, hierarchies, and corruptions of the current forms of power. Revolution requires not merely emancipation, as we said earlier, but liberation; not just an event of destruction but also a long and sustained process of transformation, creating a new humanity. This is the problem of transition: how to extend the event of insurrection in a process of liberation and transformation.

Condorcet proclaims, and Hannah Arendt echoes him almost two hundred years later, that “the word ‘revolutionary’ applies only to revolutions that have freedom as their object.” We would extend this to say that revolutions must have democracy as their object and thus that the direction and content of revolutionary transition must be defined by the increase of the capacities for democracy of the multitude. People are not spontaneously, by nature, capable of cooperating with one another freely and together governing the common. W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, studying the promises, betrayals, and failures of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War, is keenly aware that emancipation alone is not sufficient. In addition to all the traps and subterfuges of the U.S. government and dispossessed Southern slaveholders, in addition to the color and class hierarchies created by Northern carpetbagger capitalists, Du Bois also focuses on the problem that even after the abolition of slavery the vast majority of the population, white and black alike, remains poor and ignorant, lacking the capacities for democracy. Emancipation is only the beginning.

In the annals of modern revolutionary thought Lenin provides the locus classicus for understanding the revolutionary transition. Lenin recognizes, as we noted earlier, that human nature as it is now is not capable of democracy. In their habits, routines, mentalities, and in the million capillary practices of everyday life, people are wedded to hierarchy, identity, segregation, and in general corrupt forms of the common. They are not yet able to rule themselves democratically without masters, leaders, and representatives. Lenin thus proposes a dialectical transition composed of two negations. First, a period of dictatorship must negate democracy in order to lead society and transform the population. Once a new humanity has been created, capable of ruling itself, then dictatorship will be negated and a new democracy achieved. Lenin has the great merit of posing the problem clearly, but his dialectical solution is today widely and rightly discredited, not only because “transitional” dictatorships so stubbornly hold on to power, resisting the dialectical inversion in democracy, but more important because the social structures of dictatorship do not foster the training in democracy necessary to make the multitude. On the contrary! Dictatorship teaches subservience. Democracy can be learned only by doing.

The problem of transition must be given a positive, nondialectical solution, leading toward democracy through democratic means. Our analysis in the previous section has already developed some elements for such a democratic transition. The insurrectional event, we explained, must be consolidated in an institutional process of transformation that develops the multitude’s capacities for democratic decision making. Making the multitude is thus a project of democratic organizing aimed at democracy. Rather than counting on the boomerang effect of the dialectic to thrust the process at the final moment to the opposite end of the spectrum, this notion of transition delineates an asymptotic approach such that even if the movement never reaches a conclusion, the distance between transition and goal, between means and end becomes so infinitesimal that it ceases to matter. This process should not be confused with old reformist illusions that insist on gradual change and constantly defer revolution into the indefinite future. No; rupture with contemporary society and its ruling powers must be radical: as much as insurrection is swept up in the process of transition, transition must constantly renew the force of insurrection. Often in evaluating the state of the present society, in other words, the point is not to haggle over whether the glass is half empty or half full but to break the glass!

Editing The Image of the Black in Western Art

This month marks the publication of the second and third parts of Volume III of The Image of the Black in Western Art. As the fifth and sixth of an eventual ten books, these new releases put us past the halfway point in our work to complete this fascinating series, and so offer a nice occasion to reflect on the challenges that it presents. To that end, we invited HUP Production Editor Adriana Kirilova, one of the many people who have been dedicated to this project over the decades since its conception, to tell us a bit about her experience working on the books. Her piece is below.

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When two years ago my manager told me that I would be the production editor for The Image of the Black in Western Art series, I was thrilled to be a part of this monumental project. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have very much to do. The first four books were scheduled to come out in the fall of 2010, and three of them had been previously published as part of the first incarnation of the series. There was little new text to edit, and a media research company in London had been contracted to deliver the images. We just had to flow it all into the new design and redo the index. Easy as pie.

How naïve I was!

When Dominique de Menil first conceived of the Image of the Black project in the 1960s, she had assumed it wouldn’t take very long to complete it. She had not anticipated the astonishing wealth of material or the complexity of the iconography of blacks in Western art. Fifty years later, we found ourselves in a similar situation. Everyone at the Du Bois Institute and HUP was excited to renew the efforts to complete this monumental undertaking, but few of us were fully aware of its intricacies.

First and foremost, we had to contend with the passage of time. The very title of the series reflects how much has changed since the conception of this project. The Image of the Black in Western Art: the meaning of nearly all of those words has grown more complicated in the years that have passed. And, as we started to work, it became clear how much else had changed. There were references in the text to East Germany and West Germany, St. Petersburg was still Leningrad, Sri Lanka was still Ceylon.

Ensuring that the text accurately and consistently reflects today’s geopolitical map has been only one of the challenges, and not the biggest one by far. The real Herculean task has been locating all the art. Since the publication of the first edition, museums have disbanded, galleries have changed their names, manuscripts have moved from one library to another. Vases have disappeared. Inscriptions on tombstones have faded. Broken statuettes have been restored. Research from the past thirty years has shed new light on the dates and titles of artworks. Paintings that were previously accepted as the work of X are now believed to be by Y.

Producing these books sequentially would have been demanding. No book that includes 200 illustrations could ever be easy. Producing them in batches, as efficiencies in publishing demand, has come dangerously close to insanity. There are so many details to keep track of, and nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems. Even the most inconsequential decision becomes paramount when multiplied by ten books. Changes in one book usually necessitate changes in another. Many of our conversations about IBWA (our shorthand for the series) include the phrase “Wait, which volume are we talking about?” The six books that make up volumes I through III have more than 1,500 images total. To date, I have received about 4,700 emails about IBWA and I’ve sent about 3,800.

It’s hard to explain what it is that I do for this series. I’ve done some copyediting, a little proofreading, a lot of fact-checking. I also nag, beg, and bully everyone else on the team when the deadlines loom large in front of us. It’s a miracle my colleagues still talk to me.