2 An Examination of Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic as a “Liminal Space”
3 Crisis Book Browsing: Restructuring the Retail Shelf Life of Books
4 “Your Bookshelf Is Problematic”: Progressive and Problematic Publishing in the Age of COVID-19
5 Old Books and New Media: Reader Response to The Thorn Birds and Late Night with Seth Meyers
6 Videoconferencing as a Digital Medium: Bookshelves in Backgrounds Throughout History
7 Digital Masks of Printed Books: On-Screen Representations of the Materiality of the Codex
8 Bookish Objects on the Bookshelf
9 Writing with Spines: Bookshelf Art, Found Poetry, and the Practice of Assemblage
10 Elmer the Elephant in the Zoom Room? Reflections on Parenting, Book Accessibility, and Screen Time in a Pandemic
11 A Bookshelf of the World: Bringing Students’ Books Inside the Classroom—A Means for Epistemic Equality?
12 Online Learning, Library Access, and Bookcase Insecurity: A German Case Study
13 “Ummmmm, guys? Don’t microwave your books”:Readers, Authors, and Institutions in #PandemicReading Tweets
Corinna Norrick-Rühl is Professor of Book Studies at the University of Muenster (WWU), Germany. Her recent publications are The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities (2020, co-edited with Tim Lanzendörfer, in this series) and Book Clubs and Book Commerce (2019).
Shafquat Towheed is Senior Lecturer in English in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at The Open University, UK. He directs The Open University’s History of Books and Reading (HOBAR) research collaboration and was UK principal investigator for the Reading Europe Advanced Data Investigation Tool (READ-IT) project (2018–2021).
Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic provides the first detailed scholarly investigation of the cultural phenomenon of bookshelves (and the social practices around them) since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. With a foreword by Lydia Pyne, author of Bookshelf (2016), the volume brings together 17 scholars from 6 countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA) with expertise in literary studies, book history, publishing, visual arts, and pedagogy to critically examine the role of bookshelves during the current pandemic. This volume interrogates the complex relationship between the physical book and its digital manifestation via online platforms, a relationship brought to widespread public and scholarly attention by the global shift to working from home and the rise of online pedagogy. It also goes beyond the (digital) bookshelf to consider bookselling, book accessibility, and pandemic reading habits.
Corinna Norrick-Rühl is Professor of Book Studies at the University of Muenster (WWU), Germany. Her recent publications are The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities (2020, co-edited with Tim Lanzendörfer, in this series) and Book Clubs and Book Commerce (2019).
Shafquat Towheed is Senior Lecturer in English in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at The Open University, UK. He directs The Open University’s History of Books and Reading (HOBAR) research collaboration and was UK principal investigator for the Reading Europe Advanced Data Investigation Tool (READ-IT) project (2018–2021).