When I went to flea markets with my parents, I loved finding old books, seeing how worn the pages were, looking at handwritten inscriptions and notes just inside the cover or in the margins of the pages, and knowing the book had passed through other hands. (Sorry, librarians!) I often wondered who had checked the book out before me, who would take it out after I returned it, who currently had another copy of the book. I loved the feel of a book in my hands, and I would leave my own little physical mark on it by dog-earring the pages to mark the spot I left off at.

When I was younger, I used to take out stacks upon stacks of books from my public library. Today’s post is by Sophia Lola, Class of 2022, a Writing Seminars major. For more about our public-facing work, please see our gallery of final projects and blog. For more about our series title, please see the first post. Through their short essays, bibliographies, and analyses of digital sources, students are providing to a broad audience accurate information about and appreciation for the “scribbling women” they studied. Posts in this series were written by undergraduate students in the spring 2020 Museums & Society class Scribbling Women: Gender, Writing, and the Archive. We used rare books, archival materials, and digital primary sources in the Sheridan Libraries’ collections to prompt and guide inquiries into the creation, reception, preservation, and legacy of texts from the 1820s through the 1930s-speeches, private writings, and published poetry, fiction, and journalism-by North American women who brought attention to race-, gender-, and class-based inequities.

Hospital sketches by louisa may alcott