Harvard University Press Blog

A New Chapter for Harvard Book Store

Starting in the summer of 2023, for the first time in almost thirty years, Harvard Book Store will have two locations: their flagship store in Harvard Square, and a large new store in the Prudential Center in Boston.  For University Press Week, we wanted to show some bookseller love, so we reached out to Rachel Cass, General Manager of the Harvard Book Store to see what's planned for their exciting new location.  

Among the many challenges of opening a second location, a central question has been identifying what exactly makes us Harvard Book Store. In Cambridge, we sit directly across the street from Harvard’s Widener Library, with Harvard students and faculty walking by on their way to and from classes and tourists wandering in as part of their visit to one of the world’s most prestigious universities. While we are a general-interest, independent bookstore, unaffiliated with Harvard, the university is central to our neighborhood, our customer base, and our identity as booksellers.

In Boston, we will sit at the edge of the Prudential Center mall, at the base of one of the city’s most recognizable buildings and just up the escalator from the Prudential Center stop on the Green Line. It will see a different customer base than we have in Harvard Square. The readers who visit us in Boston will no doubt love books just as much, but from a perspective that is less directly academic: residents and office tenants of the Prudential Center Tower, tourists awaiting their scheduled Duck Boat tours, and shoppers exploring the mall and the surrounding Back Bay neighborhood. So what does it mean to be Harvard Book Store in that space?

What I have always loved about independent bookselling, and bookselling at Harvard Book Store in particular, is that it is the ultimate liberal arts profession, if we consider liberal arts to mean a commitment to well-roundedness and the pursuit of ideas. A bookseller gets to be interested in anything and everything, regularly giving recommendations for history books to one customer and romance novels to the next. It reminds me of my freshman year, when I took courses in mathematics, English, sociology, political science, French, and art history and danced at 80s Night to unwind. While trade publishers encompass much of that range, it is university presses that add the variety and rigor to truly capture the ideals of the liberal arts and run with them.

At Harvard Book Store, university presses are an important part of how we set ourselves apart and add depth to our shelves. We feature scholarly titles in our New Releases email each week, we have a display of Academic New Arrivals near the front of the store, our Publisher Focus window often features academic presses, and it’s not uncommon to find stacks of important Harvard, MIT, and Princeton University Press books on our featured displays. To be sure, the scope of our university press selection reflects the academic community around us, but it also speaks to the ways we strive to make our inventory well-rounded. Our Romance section, which has expanded significantly in recent years, sits in the same room as our large Philosophy and Cultural & Critical Theory sections. It is this juxtaposition that I keep coming back to when I think about what makes us Harvard Book Store.

In addition to the ways that university press books are featured in our store, they add nuance to nearly every section. For example, in our U.S. History section, we carry a wide selection of titles across all aspects of American history, but it is local university presses that bring us books on the history of innovation in Cambridge or a topographical history of the city of Boston. Beyond local interest, university presses are not afraid to explore the tiniest corners of a subject, or the big ideas that can change a person’s thinking. They unearth obscure history, ask about the implications of the latest technology, analyze political movements, and follow the threads of the most challenging questions. Even in our genre fiction sections, university presses add variety with once-forgotten backlist titles and works in translation.

In many ways, university presses embody what it means to be independent. Committed to intellectual freedom, they are also as varied as the universities that sponsor them. Much like independent bookstores, each university press has its own voice and perspective. That combination—booksellers and customers curating a selection from among highly refined and idiosyncratic catalogues—can be magic. You will not walk into any other bookstore and see the exact inventory of books that you will see at Harvard Book Store. And the books that we carry in Boston will not be identical to those we carry in Cambridge. But the method and philosophy and ideals that put them there will be the same.

Of course, a bookstore is much more than just the books within it. It is the booksellers and the customers and the conversations that happen over books and awards and current events. But the selection of books does tell a big part of our story, and this year’s University Press Week theme, #NextUP, is a fitting one for us, as we look toward the next chapter in Harvard Book Store’s story. It is my hope that, with the help of our university press partners, we will be able to find ways to continue our commitment to ideas and a spirit of constant learning, and make a home for Harvard Book Store and for readers at the Pru. 

Marking the 75th Anniversary of Independence from British Rule

August 14 and August 15 mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of independence from British rule for Pakistan and India, respectively. Inextricably linked to the birth of these two South Asian nations is the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent that tragically accompanied the end of British colonialism.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, described the moment of independence as a tryst with destiny. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance…” he said in his famous speech on August 15, 1947.

The world-renowned Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote in “Subh-e-Azadi” (“Dawn of Freedom”):

These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light —
This is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom,
we had set out in sheer longing.
(Translated from Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)

The volumes below illuminate the lives of individuals, the politics, and the literary traditions that shape the rich histories of both nations. They are in the spirit of Nehru’s midnight and Faiz’s dawn alike.

Pakistan

Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan
Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea
Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics
Ammara Maqsood, The New Pakistani Middle Class
Bullhe Shah, translated by Christopher Shackle, Sufi Lyrics: Selections from a World Classic

India

Manan Ahmed Asif, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India
Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire
Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
William Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Andy Rotman, Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation
Edited by Ramachandra Guha, Makers of Modern India 
Ruth Harris, Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
Ramin Jahanbegloo, The Gandhian Moment
Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History
Madhav Khosla, India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy
Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India
Dinyar Patel, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism
Mircea Raianu, Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism
Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, The Essential Tagore
Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India
Steven I. Wilkinson, Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence

Publishing (and Promoting) a Book during a Pandemic

This year challenged the way people do many things. For Justin Reich that meant rethinking how to promote his new book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, published in September. With bookstore tours and readings out of the question, Reich came up with an idea to get the word out about his book.

On March 24, I submitted the final copyedits for my new book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education. Schools across the country had begun to shut down, and many parts of the country would follow into lockdown soon after. The book release was planned for September, right in the midst of back-to-school season, and over the course of the spring it became very clear that I wouldn’t be doing any kind of traditional academic book tour.

While planes were grounded, I came up with the alternative of conducting an online book club. We would meet for one hour every Monday afternoon for ten weeks of discussion, one session for every chapter in the book. The goal was to create a format where interested readers could have some structure for reading the book with a community, get some expert commentary, and have a place for discussion and reflection. Each session had a one hour live conversation that we edited down and then released as a podcast episode.

I hired my dear colleague Audrey Watters to serve as a co-host for the series, alternatively joining as subject matter expert or co-host for the discussions. Each session had one or two guests, sometimes joining as experts on the topics and sometimes joining as subjects from the chapter of the book. I encouraged guests to bring a sense of “friendly pugilism” to the discussion; I was worried that folks might be too friendly as guests, so I actively encouraged them to find points of disagreement that could make for lively discussion.

Each episode had a basic run of show, at least to give us something to deviate from. We did introductions by asking guests to tell their “edtech story,” a memorable experience from their teacher or student days encounter with education technology. Then either a guest or Audrey would give a short rundown of the main idea of the chapter, both to help orient people who didn’t read the book in time and to provoke some thinking among listeners. The next section was “Stump the Chump,” borrowed from the great Car Talk segment, where I asked guests to reflect on what I missed or got wrong in the book. Usually by this point, some good questions or lively dialogue would have gotten underway in the chat, and so at some point we could often continue the conversation using questions from the audience. Typically, that plan was enough to fill an hour of conversation.

I was grateful for the terrific group of participants that came together. We had about 600 people sign up for the book club, and the early chapters got 100+ live attendees, dwindling to about 50 or so by the end (there is a MOOC attrition joke in here somewhere). The participants were educators, education researchers, and technology designers; I was particularly pleased that we recruited several folks with titles like “Director of Learning Science and Research” from some prominent edtech companies. The group included many of the kinds of people from industry who I hoped the book would be in dialogue with. I suspect that I would have spoken with more people on a ten city/university book tour, but I had a much deeper engagement in this format.

Most of the mechanics of hosting and recording the book club were handled through Zoom. I used the Zoom webinar feature to create a recurring 10-session series, and then participants could just sign up once for every session.

Other than Zoom, we had two websites for the project. A book website (failuretodisrupt.com) advertised the book club, and we set up a simple Discourse discussion forum site where people could discuss the book in advance of the sessions.

In my lab at MIT, the Teaching Systems Lab, we conduct design research on online learning, so we have a talented production team on call, who remixed all of the episodes and are in the process of publishing the refined versions on our podcast, TeachLab.

Throughout the fall, I settled into a familiar routine for communicating with all of the stakeholders. On Friday, I emailed a run of show to the following weeks guests and added them as panelists to the Zoom webinar. On Sunday, Zoom sent an automated reminder to registrants. On Monday, myself, guests, and Audrey showed up about 30 minutes early for some chitchat and a soundcheck, and then we chatted with everyone for an hour. On Tuesday, I sent an email to registrants with a Zoom link to the recorded webinar and a preview of the next week’s discussion.

When everyone gets vaccinated, I still hope I have a chance to travel around and discuss ideas from the book with colleagues in person. But in the future, if you have to release a book in the midst of a global pandemic, I can recommend online book clubs as an enjoyable way to generate interest, connect with readers, and build community.

Why You Should Participate in an (Online) Book Club

Online book clubs can be a rewarding way to connect with readers, Lindsay Chervinsky discovered, when she was invited to join one to discuss her book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution.

Since my book was published in April 2020, I’ve discovered that my work appeals to three main audiences. First, the general readers who are enthusiastic about history, attend virtual events, and tend to support local historic sites. Second, readers who are curious about our government institutions and the current political climate and are looking for answers about its origins. And third, history, social studies, and government teachers.

I love speaking to all of these audiences, but talking with teachers is especially meaningful. I had a couple of really wonderful history teachers, and while I don’t have the skills or patience to teach middle and high schoolers, working with teachers allows me to feel like I’m giving back in some small way. Additionally, teachers approach the history differently than my peers in academia or general readers. They are particularly interested in themes that will resonate and interest their students. By revisiting my work through their eyes, I often reach new conclusions and better hone my own arguments.

So when I was invited to participate in an online book club chat (#sschatreads), I jumped at the opportunity. Because of the burdens of online teaching and the holidays, we decided to split the chat up into two sessions, December 12 and January 16. Here’s how it worked. The hosts, Dr. Dennis Urban, Kathryn Kennedy, and Isabel Morales, announced the chats several weeks ahead of time and regularly publicized it on Twitter. A few days before the chat, Dr. Urban sent me a few questions that he planned to post. Some of the questions were general discussion questions and some were directly for me.

Once the chat began, Dr. Urban posted a new question roughly every 5-10 minutes. The participants responded to the questions, discussed with each other, and asked me additional questions. I answered as many questions as I could find, amplified other answers, and voiced my agreement with insightful points. The spontaneous questions largely focused on what lessons we can learn today from Washington and his cabinet, contemporary politics and government, and the role of military experience in the presidency (which had a lot to do with the current news and a recent thread I wrote on the subject).

The hour absolutely flew by and I had such a great time tweeting with the participants! The Twitter chat forum was a great way to interact with a lot of new readers in a relatively low-stakes environment. I was in pajamas on my couch, safely tucked away from the threat of COVID-19, and teachers didn’t have to spend yet another hour on Zoom. I would enthusiastically welcome the opportunity to participate in additional online book clubs, both during the pandemic and after it finally ends. I would also encourage other scholars to seek out similar opportunities. I think they will find sharing their work with teachers incredibly rewarding and a valuable use of an hour.

I’m really looking forward to part two of the discussion. We are planning to discuss the rest of the book and also President-elect Biden’s cabinet nominees, which should make for an interesting and robust conversation! If you’d like to join us, follow me on Twitter @lmchervinsky, as well as @DRUrbanTeacher and @maineteacher for updates and questions. You can also catch up on the first chat session and their past book club conversations. If you purchased the book, you can submit your information for a personalized book plate (an offer I extended to the teachers as well). Hope to see you there!

Benjamin’s Arcades at 20 Years

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the English translation of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at HUP, reflects on its publication history.

I was asked to join with Howard Eiland, David Rodowick, and Bill Brown at events at Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago and at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge last month to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the HUP publication of the translation of the book by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Here, now, it might seem easy to imagine the decision to publish not just The Arcades Project but also the Selected Writings was an easy decision. It was not. HUP has by now published 3,000 pages of the writings of Benjamin. He has become very famous in certain households, a secular saint, the most venerated literary critic in the Western world. But let’s not get carried away. Perhaps you saw Carrie Brownstein try to talk up Benjamin to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show recently, and she drew a blank from him. Benjamin is not a household name yet. People still keep using the Sprockets accent to pronounce his name: Valter Benyamin. But I still have a job, although I can easily imagine that my effort to publish Benjamin, the four volumes of the Selected Writings and The Arcades Project, might have turned out to be Lindsay’s Folly. People might have said: Waters seemed to have a promising career publishing books in economics, philosophy, and literary theory at the University of Minnesota Press. With almost no resources at his disposal, Waters, at his Little House on the Prairie, in a cinder block building hard by the wellspring of the Mississippi River, beside the bleachers where the Golden Gophers played football, did well enough. And then he came to Harvard where there were serious resources for publishing. He wasted them trying to revive a forgotten schlemihl who’d failed his PhD qualifying exams. Lindsay’s Folly and his ending, RIP.

Didn’t turn out that way. The twentieth anniversary of the publication of this huge tome might be a moment to stop and catch a breath. There is still more of his work that needs translating and editing. The hunger for his writing has only grown and grown, as Eric Banks’s essay “Walter Benjamin’s Afterlife” in the Chronicle of Higher Education of March 21, 2014, lays out how Benjamin’s name has grown since the time he died until today—grown from nearly no references for forty years to a high of 775 references in 2007. His close friends, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, had worked hard to keep his name alive after his death in 1940. Adorno had arranged for the publication in 1950 of perhaps his most appealing work, his masterpiece in fact, his Berlin Childhood around 1900, in a deluxe slipcase edition with the case covered with a watercolor of the River Spree coursing through Berlin in the early twentieth century. It did not sell.

But a two-volume selection of his essays appeared in Frankfurt in 1955, the Schriften, and two volumes appeared in English from Harcourt Brace, and that led to a major essay by Hannah Arendt in the New Yorker, which won him additional readers. However, another essay by Arendt published in Der Merkur for January/February 1968, along with an essay by Helmut Heissenbüttel, reviewed the volumes Schriften and Briefe so critically that it caused Adorno to protest for himself and Scholem that “she would make us who alone kept him above water into his murderers.” But the two volumes of Schriften found readers in Europe, including Paul de Man, who was teaching at Zurich in the ’60s and who was the person from whom I learned decisively that people should begin to learn more about Benjamin’s writings. DeMan influenced me primarily by how much he changed his critical practice after he turned against Heidegger and Benjamin replaced him as his critical lodestar. I think primarily of the way de Man seized upon what Benjamin wrote about the facies hippocratica in The Origin of the German Trauerspiel. But then I explored more and realized there was much, much more to Benjamin.

He was a veritable critical Atlantis, a buried island, a buried civilization under water in need of recovery, which it became my job to resurrect with help. When we began to talk with Siegfried Unseld of Suhrkamp Verlag about seriously publishing Benjamin in English at Harvard, just after I moved to Harvard from Minnesota in 1984, he wrote me on September 20, 1984, and gave me a proposition for a plan. In that plan, he suggested almost as an afterthought that we publish “a selection of the Passagen-Werk, which reduces the text to less than half.”

When we took the plan of Unseld for the Selected Writings and developed it, we presented it to the Harvard University Press Board of Syndics with numerous letters of support. At the Syndics discussion, sociologist Daniel Bell became its champion and fended off objections about why we should publish the writings of a homeless man who’d never finished his dissertation and never wrote a proper book. The series of the Selected Writings began to appear in 1996. There were two critical issues to solve: should we publish the entire Passagen-Werk and how should we talk about it when we presented it to the world, as an unfinished and incomplete work or as a complete work?

Since we are celebrating The Arcades—Das Passagen-Werk in English—at twenty, let me recall its inception. I can see from the HUP records that the Press made a distinct decision to publish the PW in its entirety after we got the Selected Writings moving. I cannot remember exactly how this happened, but it makes sense that it did, because doing so meant going beyond what was suggested to the Press by Siegfried Unseld, and to do so was going to take a special effort. I presented the project to the Syndics in June 1988. We had presented to them in March 1985 the preliminary plans for an edition of the selected writings of Walter Benjamin. At that time Syndic Daniel Bell had “advocated a fuller selection, one that would give a better sense of the man and all the facets of his thought.”

The discussion of the PW translation with the Syndics led the Press to commit to translate the complete book as originally published in German in 1982, and the scholarly reports provided the guidance for how to talk about the book in publishing it. The then Harvard professor T.J. Clark argued that the Press should decide to publish the book, because this decision was on the same order as Penguin’s decision, “a decade or so ago, to do Marx’s Grundrisse in English.” He added, “The comparison is not frivolous, it’s very close. In both cases we have to do with a long, unfinished piece of writing, obviously in some sense ‘work in progress,’ and difficult to translate. In both cases it is the sheer stature of the writer, and the crucial place of the text in his work, that makes it essential that the text enter the English language. In one sense, the case is even stronger with Benjamin, since the Passagen-Werk is his Capital—for better or worse.”

Tim Clark’s advice to the Press was prescient. The book turned out to be not a white elephant, a possession which its owner cannot dispose of and whose cost is out of proportion to its usefulness. That this publication would not turn out to be Lindsay’s Folly was testified to by the appearance in the New York Times for January 16, 2000, of a front-page story in the “Arts & Leisure” section by Hubert Muschamp that began this way: “Some of us don’t read fiction. We live on history, biography, criticism, reporting and what used to be called belles-lettres. We will be feasting on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Projects for years to come.” Our book was on its way to being recognized as a modernist masterpiece, like Eliot’s The Wasteland, Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Dylan’s The Basement Tapes—all these “unfinished” works that were as finished as their composers could make them before they died.  The debate Mike Jennings, Howard Eiland, and I had among ourselves was how to handle the unfinished nature of The Arcades. Once we published our edition, Mike argued that we should republish the book in the order that some researchers had discovered, but we decided not to do that. Stanley Cavell seems to me to have captured the truth of the matter when he declared inArtforumof the book Suhrkamp and we published: its incompleteness “strikes me as constituting its aura of modernity.” In this book, Benjamin wrote that in shopping malls he had discovered the secret history of the bourgeoisie and liberated the suppressed history that lays underneath the ideological masks. The greatest single testimony to the effectiveness of the book is a book that mimics it in its essentials, right down to duplicating the Parisian arcades with the Parisian Palais-Royal, Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch. We did not know what we had on our hands when we began to publish Benjamin, but it turned out to be something great.

A Very Hippo Holiday with Edward Lear

Edward Lear wrote some of the best-loved poems in English, including “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and has captivated the imagination of readers, young and old, for generations. As a holiday treat, we asked Sara Lodge, author of Inventing Edward Lear to reflect on Edward Lear as a Christmas poet.  

Edward Lear is an apt character to think about at Christmas-time. His nonsense books, most famously Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871), which contains ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, were published in December to catch the Christmas gift market. And Lear associated himself with the spirit of the season. Lear’s first, anonymous book of illustrated limericks for children, A Book of Nonsense (1846) announces on its title page that:

There was an old Derry down Derry, who liked to make little folks merry;
So he made them a book, and with laughter they shook
At the fun of that Derry down Derry.

As Vivien Noakes points out, Derry down Derry was ‘one of the fools of the traditional English mummers’ plays’. Mummers’ plays were a practice dating from at least the eighteenth century and probably linked to much older festivals and masques – they were traditionally staged at Christmas time by itinerant groups of actors who were not professional players but were drawn from the local community and were often raising funds for food and drink to celebrate the season. In the Buckinghamshire mummers’ plays, ‘Hey Down Derry’ or ‘Don Derry’ has a particular function. He is the announcer of the performance whose arrival signals its beginning. He calls on the assembly to make room for the entertainment, sometimes also pretending to sweep bystanders back with a broom that he carries for this purpose. In some versions he is the Fool, but in others he is Father Christmas.

It is telling that Lear invokes this figure on the title page of his Book of Nonsense, dancing with an audience of children who are jumping in the air or turning handstands. He is announcing his own entertainment at its commencement, like the Christmas mummer of old. In fact Lear in 1846, when he published A Book of Nonsense, was only thirty-four. He was not an old Derry down Derry at all. But as a figure who promised mirth to children, like Old King Cole, Old Mother Hubbard or Old Mother Goose, Lear was placing himself within a tradition that was extremely old. It is noteworthy that Lear refers to his authorial alter ego as ‘making’ children a book. This book is a hand-crafted object. Lear has ‘made’ it in a sense that only an artist-author can claim to do who has both written the text and drawn the illustrations. It has the hallmarks of a personal gift, even when sold in a commercial bookshop. Lear’s persona as the dancing Derry down Derry is part of that gift. Lear places his alter ego in the midst of his nonsense not as an author in the commercial sense but as a figure for the emotional transaction, beyond words, that the season invites.

James T Fields of Boston in his collection of sketches of eminent contemporaries Underbrush (1877) described Edward Lear, ‘Nonsense-Poet’ thus:

if you chanced, a few years back, to go to Farringford about Christmas time you would have been likely to find a tall elderly man, in enormous googles, down on all fours on the carpet, and reciting in the character of a lively and classical Hippopotamus new nonsense verses to a dozen children, amid a roar of laughter…

It is easy to picture the sixty-something Edward Lear, with his super-strength glasses to combat myopia, larking about at Christmas on all fours in Alfred Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight. One imagines that this ‘classical’ Hippo, inspired by its Greek name, may wallow in the Hippocrene, spring of the Muses. Most of Lear’s poetical works, from his nonsense verses to his illustrated alphabets, started their life as gifts: sung or recited at friends’ houses, enclosed with letters, or laid on a hotel table at lunchtime to delight bored holidaymakers. They have never lost the quality of gifts: and Lear’s comic persona ­– needy, funny, anxious, boisterous ­– is an integral part of the offering he presents.

 

Lear sketched endless caricatures of himself in letters to friends. In them, his body is always risible. In his twenties, he depicts himself as a lanky, blundering string-bean, blown away with his umbrella in a high wind. In later life, his self-caricature is small (he is the same size as slugs, snails and frogs), bearded, myopic with a plum-pudding belly and thin legs that stick out like a bird’s. Often, he is off the ground. Like Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, he gets into comic scrapes. One of the most important things I realised, in producing an account of Lear, was that – just as Charlie Chaplin is not identical with his most memorable character, The Little Tramp – Edward Lear is not identical with his self-caricature. The small, ‘minor’ figure who consorts with molluscs is a performance. The real Lear was tall, a well-read intellectual with serious ambitions and an extraordinarily large and varied social, cultural and political network. In tracing Lear’s intellectual life, I was constantly surprised by the strength and depth of his connections. He set Swinburne, Shelley, and his friend Tennyson’s verse to music; he was a self-elected member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with strong views on John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Ford Madox Brown. He was influenced by American artists including Frederic Church and Alfred Bierstadt. And, as a naturalist and natural history painter, he moved in scientific circles that included Charles Babbage, Joseph Hooker, and the Darwins.

When living in San Remo, which he did from 1871 until his death, Lear preferred a quiet Christmas, often refusing invitations. Raised a dissenter in religion, he valued simplicity in expressions of faith and his sensitive ear and mind disliked the ‘bother’ of big parties. Lear’s ‘sudden reversions’ from gloom to cheer, his equal and opposite desires for lively company and silent solitude, are to me the essence of December and the contradictory moods it can inspire. In appreciating this complex man, who so ardently seeks the reader’s sympathy and was all his life committed to greater tolerance amongst ‘humanbeans’, I gained greater understanding of my own frequent switchbacks as a writer from delight to despair and back again. One of Lear’s early limericks features a lady ‘Whose folly/ induced her to sit in a holly’. She tears her dress and grows ‘melancholy’; but the limerick is designed to amuse, converting her tear or tears into a smile we can join in. Whether you are approaching the holiday season with a grin or a groan – or both at once – Edward Lear has his arm in yours.

Who's Afraid of Lady Liberty?

On October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty as a gift from the people of France.  The 151-foot statue, designated as a national monument in 1924 and, for most people, it serves as a universal symbol of freedom and democracy.  Francesca Lidia Viano, author of Sentinel: The Unlikely Origins of the Statue of Liberty, explores a darker side of Lady Liberty.    

It is, by now, well known that the Statue of Liberty speaks differently to different people. For some, she is the protector of immigrants; for others, the symbol of minorities’ struggle for equality. More generally, it has been argued that the Statue is a guardian of the nation’s most cherished ideals: liberty and democracy. But some people believe that Lady Liberty also harbors deep, even conspiratorial, mysteries. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the Statue’s Alsatian architect, and his collaborators are sometimes said to be members of a secret society, the Illuminati, clandestinely working to undermine the pillars of order (property, national states, religion). Equally groundless variants of this story locate the Statue’s origins in secret Jewish cabals, and, with overt appeals to anti-Semitism, conflate her meaning with Zionism and international finance.

Americans started fearing the Statue even before she arrived in New York, in 1885, as a gift from the French. Many were puzzled or even upset that foreigners insisted on putting such a cumbersome gift in their harbor. But where did the fear of the Statue’s supposedly malign power come from?

One source certainly is the Statue’s appearance. Upon first arriving in New York harbor, Karl Rossmann, the immigrant protagonist of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, thinks he sees a sword rather than a torch in her upstretched hand. More recently, in the dystopian Man in the High Castle, the Statue, wearing a red sash with a swastika, raises her arm in a Nazi salute. Why is it so tempting to portray the Statue as aggressive? Though we seldom remember the circumstances, she was, in effect, born of hatred and vengeance. A year before sailing to New York, Bartholdi had fought in the Franco-Prussian war, in the Vosges, where Giuseppe Garibaldi had taken command of a troop of volunteers. They lost the war; Bartholdi’s hometown, Colmar, and all of Alsace fell into German hands. Bartholdi sailed to America to advertise his colossal statue of liberty (then of the Republic, as he called it), but not even this journey distracted him from his sorrows. While busy marketing the statue in New York and Philadelphia, Bartholdi drew sketches of a vindictive female embodiment of Alsace, bent over a wounded figure and raising her hand to curse the Germans (in a gesture reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty), her face green and contorted. At about the same time, Bartholdi added spikes to the simple diadem the Statue wore in all of his earlier models. Why?

The common explanation is that Bartholdi wanted the starry crown to represent the rising sun of the American republic. But what if Bartholdi picked up a symbol that was equally suitable to America and Alsace (or, more broadly, France)? Like many artists, he signed his monuments with coded references to his personal story. The star on the Statue’s head could be read as a rising sun (or, more problematically, a setting one). But it could also be a comet, a Christian symbol of disaster and apocalypse, which appeared in Colmar’s coat of arms. Colmar’s comet also represents the city’s weapon of choice, the Morgenstern, or “morning star,” a spiked club used in medieval combat. With her pointy star on her head, the Statue was one of numerous artworks Bartholdi imbued with military themes in those years, many of which explicitly embodied violent and revanchist sentiments. In short, the reason the Statue of Liberty continues to be seen as bellicose may simply be that she originally was intended as such.

Along with her symbolic weapon, the Morgenstern, the Statue carries a real one as well, which – paradoxically – is her only real link with the United States. With no eagle or stars and stripes, the Statue of Liberty’s only truly American emblem is the Declaration of Independence clasped in her left arm. As symbols go, it would be difficult to find one more ambiguous in the context of the time. Originally meant as a declaration of intents against Britain, the Declaration also acknowledges the equality of rights among individuals. And yet, when the Statue arrived in New York, women could not vote in most state and federal elections, Chinese immigrants had been banned from the country by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and Native Americans had been dispossessed of their lands. Minorities were immediately struck by the hypocrisy of the situation. In the middle of the inaugural celebrations, feminists boarded a ship and followed the men to Bedloe’s Island (now Liberty Island) to protest against discrimination; Chinese immigrants wrote to newspapers to complain against their exclusion. Was the Statue meant to encourage minorities to persevere in their struggles? Probably not. Bartholdi and his collaborators looked to the Declaration as a document of national emancipation and a guarantee of individual liberty and property. As it turns out, however, works of art have a life of their own; they absorb meaning from their viewers, not only from their builders. Whatever Bartholdi and his friends said (and whatever is said today), the Statue continues to rally gender, sexual, and racial minorities whenever politics and laws neglect to defend their rights proclaimed in the Declaration. Frederick Douglass once said that the Declaration was “the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.” The same can be said of our Statue.

On other occasions, the Statue has been perceived as too exotic, too un-American, to be at home in the United States. A newspaper once warned Bartholdi that “nude figures suggest great discomfort” in New York harbor. And, indeed, the Statue was made for warmer climates. This part of the story begins in 1855, when a 21-year-old Bartholdi sailed up the Nile with a group of painters. Dressed in local garb, he visited tombs and markets, unrolled mummies, and took pictures of farmers and young girls. Then, he left his friends behind and attempted to reach the mythical realm of Saba. From this experience, and a second journey to Egypt in 1867, Bartholdi produced the prototype of what would later become the Statue of Liberty: a veiled “Oriental” woman raising an enormous lantern with her right hand and wearing the traditional tunic of local women farmers or fellahs. The message of the prototype, titled Egypt Enlightening the Orient, was clear: to be placed at the Red Sea entrance to the Suez Canal, she was meant to celebrate Egyptian progress and the French investments that had made the construction of the Canal possible.

When Bartholdi presented his project in Egypt, the pasha was unenthusiastic. Bartholdi tried to change the fellah according to the pasha’s suggestions, until it became clear that the Egyptians would never finance the enterprise. One is usually told that Bartholdi abandoned the project after the pasha’s rejection and started working on an old idea from his friend Édouard René de Laboulaye, an eccentric professor of law, who had once proposed that France give a statue of liberty and Franco-American friendship to America. Evidence, however, shows that Bartholdi continued working on his fellahs long after the pasha’s rejection, until the eve of his American journey, and that his veiled fellahs (now on display at the Bartholdi Museum of Colmar) became increasingly similar to the figure that we today associate with our Statue of Liberty: her lantern became a torch or a burner, and a piece of broken vase (a symbol of liberty) appeared in her free hand. There is no doubt that Bartholdi modeled the fellahs while thinking of the Egyptian and American scenes simultaneously. Indeed, Bartholdi confessed to his mother that “the same principles” could be applicable to “two hemispheres,” the East and the West. He did not say more, but it is clear that he thought the New World as uncivilized as the colonial Orient, both struggling to rid themselves of slavery and both competing for European money. Bartholdi’s journey to America would confirm his prejudice that the country was beautiful and ill-mannered and reinforce his idea of using the Egyptian statue as a blueprint for an American one.

In the end, the Statue of Liberty kept very little of her Egyptian attire: her Arab tunic is gone, as is her sensuous pose. But the Statue’s crown (from which spikes now protrude) is still present along with the torch and the symbol of liberty (the chains resting at the statue’s feet). Yet what, one may ask, is the use of a crown in a republic? To answer this question, one should return to the Statue’s other creator, Laboulaye, an academic, a Catholic Freemason, and a businessman descended from royal bureaucrats and international merchants. Laboulaye was nostalgic. He mourned not only the beheading of Louis XVI, which his grandfather had witnessed, but also France’s loss of its empire in America to the British in the Seven Years’ War. To the Statue’s sponsors, Laboulaye once said that the French were like the Jews, who had been “kept in the desert before entering into this happy place;” contrary to the Jews, however, the French could “only hope … [to] get there.” But where? According to the London Times, it was a tasteless way to say that America was France’s promised land and that the Statue was meant to signal the future resurrection of French colonial power in America (not unlike how her Egyptian sibling was meant to celebrate France’s colonial power in Egypt). Sure enough, Laboulaye wanted to impress on the American and French publics that the future colossus would carry with her fond memories of the French monarchy and the empire it had once built in America. Indeed, he warned the Statue’s sponsors that their commitment to the building of the colossus was “not a matter of party,” because it was meant to celebrate “the old and new France”: the France of Louis XVI and of the newly established Republic of 1875. One could think that the Statue represented France’s dying monarchy at sunset, when – in Laboulaye’s words – the sun “cast a last ray of gold and crimson in a milder sky,” and America’s rising star of a Republic at sunrise. But what if the French really did intend the Statue to represent the sunset of the French monarchy and the dawn of France’s republican resurrection in America? In his 1863 book Paris in America, Laboulaye told the fable of a medium magically sending him and the whole city of Paris to Massachusetts, to live in a sort of exemplary republic signaled by a “luminous point which pierces the horizon.” Is the Statue that luminous point, the promise that the French made to themselves to return to their lost colonies?

Although many of the Statue’s supposed secrets are projections and fabrications, the complex story of her origins still holds some genuine surprises. Aggressive, armed, and monarchical, she was originally envisioned as a champion of European colonial influence and privilege. Yet, her association with the Declaration of Independence, the instinctive bond she established with minorities, her pledge of vengeful resistance, and her foreign origins make it difficult to label her a monument to white supremacy. She is rather the perfect portrait of the Eastern divinities that fascinated Bartholdi during his Egyptian journeys: like the ancient fertility goddesses, who created life through terrible pain, who were the first mothers but also the first destroyers, the Statue is at once ugly and beautiful, a warrior and a mother, aggressive and tender, good and evil. Her multifarious reception reflects the complexity of her origins. People are right to observe that Lady Liberty holds fearsome secrets, but those that people project onto her today are far from those that haunted her original architects.

 

 

Jonathan Lusthaus and His Obsession with Cybercrime

Jonathan Lusthaus has just published Industry of Anonymity: Inside the Business of Cybercrime, a fascinating account of the lives of cybercriminals and the vast international industry they have subversively created. We asked Jonathan about how he got interested in this unusual, yet important field.

While Industry of Anonymity is a labor of love, it is also a product of luck. In a different reality, it might never have been written. When I moved to Oxford to begin a Masters program in the sociology department many years ago, I was set on researching religious violence. Unfortunately, the work I wanted to do didn’t match the research strands among the faculty. In a classic student conundrum, I was quickly forced to come up with a new dissertation topic at short notice.

As it happened, just before the deadline for announcing topics, the former Guardian and BBC journalist Misha Glenny came to Oxford to give a talk. A well-known author on organized crime, Glenny was writing a new book on cybercrime at the time. That project would become Darkmarket, and the sneak preview we were treated to opened my eyes to a world I had never considered before.

Cybercrime – something I had figured as a purely technical phenomenon – involved people. These people communicated with each other, worked together and traded products on large online marketplaces. There was a secret world here, an undiscovered economy. I sensed immediately that I wanted to explore and map this new underground economy that seemed to be hidden from sight.

Luckily, I was in the perfect department to do this. Following scholars like Diego Gambetta and Federico Varese (who would become an inspirational doctoral supervisor), one of the strengths of Oxford sociology is the study of extra-legal governance. This examines how groups outside the control of the state, such as criminals and insurgents, regulate their own dealings. They can't rely on the courts or the police, so they have to develop their own institutions of governance.

Cybercrime presented a fascinating sociological puzzle: how do cybercriminals manage to cooperate together on a wide scale? It would seem that criminals, and anonymous ones at that, don’t make great business partners. You ostensibly can’t beat them up if a deal goes wrong. Yet we were seeing increasing levels of collaboration taking place, and later I would come to the realisation that a fully-fledged cybercrime industry had formed. How was this happening? Answering this question became the heart of my research. 

One of the first people I interviewed for this project asked me whether I would continue working in the cybercrime space after my masters. At the time, I was starting out and hadn’t really thought about it. But he told me that this was a fascinating and hugely important area, with tremendous opportunities and one that I should stick with.

After I finished my masters and the pilot research on which this book would be built, I realized that this interviewee was right. I had become obsessed with the topic of cybercrime. I had begun researching this topic with no knowledge of cybercrime and no contacts at all. I wanted to change this and interview the most knowledgeable people I could find – whether from law enforcement, private sector or cybercriminal backgrounds. If I travelled to a country, I wanted to do research on cybercrime while I was there. I knew this was an enormous topic, and an enormously important topic. And I knew that one day it would become a book.

After seven years of fieldwork, this passion had taken me to Russia, Ukraine, Romania, China, Nigeria, Brazil and more. I have interviewed 238 people, including some leading former cybercriminals. I have visited the sites where key historical events took place, such as a conference held in Odessa by some of the pioneers of the cybercrime industry. I have moved from the periphery of the topic towards its heart, and had an amazing adventure along the way.

This journey confirmed my view that the human dimension of cybercrime is vital to understanding the challenge and seeking solutions to fix it. Cybercrime is not just a technical phenomenon but one that is driven by people. Its victims are also people. By focussing on the technical, many can simply turn away and chose not to address the problem. It is complex and ultimately mystifying. But when we have a better understanding of how cybercrime affects us in personal terms and how the attacks stem from people in different parts of the world, we are in a much better position to engage people and make progress in addressing the threat.

Frankenstein, Born January 1, 1818, Still Alive

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of the most haunting and enduring works ever written in English, and arguably our greatest tale of horror. Below, Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao, whose widely celebrated annotated edition of the novel we published in 2012, reflect on Shelley’s creation, Frankenstein’s “Creature,” and the work’s lasting cultural legacy.

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Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus was published January 1, 1818, and since then has never been out of print, or out of range. The range is more than the book: it is a fable and a language. On December 21, 2017 (the darkest night of the year), Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, denounced the recently passed unilateral tax bill this way: “It’s a Frankenstein. Anybody who’s familiar with Frankenstein knows it was… a monster that was created… Do you know the ending of Mary Shelley’s story?” she exclaimed. “The monster comes back to destroy.” Her reference needs some nuance: Frankenstein was the creator, not the creation. And the creation was not “a monster,” but deemed so on the basis of a physical appearance outside or beyond the normative range. And the Creature (let’s call him) was abandoned and abused, and miserably lonely, before he became a vengeful destroyer. Such reservations aside, we can marvel at the readiness of the reference, needing no footnote 200 years on: who is not “familiar with Frankenstein”?

The novel main-titled Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The publication of 1818 was anonymous, from a down-market press. It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. She proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage confection at London’s Royal Opera House in August—running for nearly 40 nights in this debut. Scarcely a month goes by now without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events.

The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Victor Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-seller Reflections on the Revolution in France recoiled at the new France as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, raged against “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny. Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, pointed out that the system of monarchy was an “artificial monster,” a “luxurious monster,” and its despots a “race of monsters in human shape.”

The language of “monster” had another stage, with heightened interest in the era of the rights of man, when large populations of human beings were systematically brutalized. With much controversy, and against the lobbying of wealthy plantation owners, England outlawed participation in the slave trade in 1807; but slavery in its colonies was legal until 1833. (Frankenstein reaches its third and most popular edition in 1831). Who was a “monster”? Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and slave-masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Defenders of slavery cast the Africans as monsters: subhuman, improvable perhaps by conversion to Christianity and disciplined work, but a threat, especially the men, if freed. “In dealing with the negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength…would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” The reference was transparently Frankenstein, not only the novel but also the recent stage-plays, which stripped the Creature of the eloquent and moving language Mary Shelley wrote for him, and rendered the familiar or cinematic tradition: a mute, lumbering, physical threat.

What Is a Good Talking Book?

As the first full history of recorded literature from Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph to today’s surging audiobook market, Matthew Rubery’s The Untold Story of the Talking Book documents a vibrant tradition of audiobooks extending back to the late 19th century, as well as the devices, formats, companies, and government entities that ushered them along. In doing so, the book addresses a number of longstanding questions: What difference does it make whether we read a book with our eyes or ears? Is listening to books really “reading,” or is it something else? What accounts for the curious sense of shame people sometimes feel for listening to books instead of reading them in print?

In the excerpt below, Rubery details early efforts by the American Foundation for the Blind, the Library of Congress, and others to define the purpose and parameters of the talking book. The embedded audio player presents the corresponding section of the audiobook edition of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, read by Jim Denison and available from Blackstone Audio.

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“What Is a Good Talking Book?” was the question posed in 1938 by Talking Book Topics, the AFB’s quarterly magazine. Once the talking book library had been established, its studios began to take an interest in quality as well as quantity. William Barbour, a former Broadway actor working for the AFB, singled out three characteristics: clarity, editorial accuracy, and artistic perfection. Above all, a good talking book faithfully reproduced the original book. “We demand that our readers preserve complete fidelity to the text which they are reading,” wrote Barbour. “We want those who listen to our books to feel that they are hearing exactly what the author wrote.” Exactly: the talking book was treated like the printed book in another medium.

For Barbour and many others, ink-print, talking, and embossed books differed only in conveying information via the eyes, ears, or fingers. The AFB’s policy of bibliographic equivalence assured audiences that they were reading the same books as every one else. This policy also sought to uphold the talking book’s legitimacy by aligning it with a familiar format rather than presenting it as something completely new. Listening to books might offer a pleasure all its own, but, if so, that pleasure was a secondary consideration. The goal was to allow blind people to participate in the same activities enjoyed by other people.

Talking books preserved the printed book’s features or at least a sense of “bookishness.” “Page” was often used instead of “side” to describe records, for example. The talking book was not only a spoken version of the book but also a bookish version of speech. The bibliographic emphasis ensured that talking books would be evaluated in terms of printed ones. Such fidelity rendered the experience of listening to a book as much as possible like that of reading one in print. The AFB embraced fidelity to the point that, in a few cases, narrators were asked to reproduce obvious errors (sometimes even spelling mistakes) in order to ensure that blind readers received the exact same treatment as other readers.

Talking books reproduced every word of the original book. The Library of Congress’s “Specifications for Talking Book Records” insisted that the wording be identical: “The Talking Book edition of any work should conform just as closely as possible to the text of the printed edition.” Scripts likely to be known by heart—the Bible, historical documents, favorite poems—had to be word perfect. Accuracy was stressed to ensure that talking books were treated as equivalent to ink-print ones. For instance, they recited verbatim the textual apparatus (front matter, acknowledgments, and so forth) skimmed or skipped altogether by the typical reader. The narrator of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy spent thirteen hours on the fifty-six-page index alone. Chapter headings, epigraphs, and other paratextual features likewise had to be read aloud; manuals instructed narrators to read footnotes at once since records had no page breaks. Educational recordings even cited page numbers in order to convey the source book’s layout.