Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to public libraries. Contributors explore libraries at particular moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes Alberto Manguel's account of the Library of Alexandria as well as chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson, Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration, dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and public spaces. Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical poetics of the personal library within its extended social, aesthetic and cultural contexts.

In analyzing the nonfiction works of writers such as John Wilson, J. S. Mill, De Quincy, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, Jason Camlot provides an important context for the nineteenth-century critic's changing ideas about style, rhetoric, and technologies of communication. In particular, Camlot contributes to our understanding of how new print media affected the Romantic and Victorian critic's sense of self, as he elaborates the ways nineteenth-century critics used their own essays on rhetoric and stylistics to speculate about the changing conditions for the production and reception of ideas and the formulation of authorial character. Camlot argues that the early 1830s mark the moment when a previously coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric was fragmented and redistributed into the diverse, localized sites of an emerging periodicals market. Publishing venues for writers multiplied at midcentury, establishing a new stylistic norm for criticism-one that affirmed style as the manifestation of English discipline and objectivity. The figure of the professional critic soon subsumed the authority of the polyglot intellectual, and the later decades of the nineteenth century brought about a debate on aesthetics and criticism that set ideals of Saxon-rooted 'virile' style against more culturally inclusive theories of expression.

The Animal Library marks the debut of a remarkable poet o a poet of the flesh, his own and that of the animals he has lived with all his life, whether real or imaginary. Jason Camlotis father was a furrier and he grew up in a world where, inevitably, ibaby fur gets in your eyesi or in iyour mouth.i In dreams, the poet becomes a whale corpse iwashed up/ on a very pale beach/ and hundreds of flies came, / and people, / to see the tusk, / spun like coral glass.i And as the boy grows up, images, at once curiously literal and yet surreal o images of being devoured or skinned alive o stay with him. The beauty of this collection is one of the mot juste, a concreteness and precision, coupled with a superb sense of rhythm.

o Marjorie Perloff

Critical Comment

i...Camlotis graphic exactness adds to the power of his vivid, animated images.i

o Betty Goodwin

i...Camlotis style is rich and telling, taking us from smutty Chicago to ancient Greece, from the 19th century Decadents to modern biological polemics.i

o Hour, 2001

In analyzing the nonfiction works of writers such as John Wilson, J. S. Mill, De Quincy, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, Jason Camlot provides an important context for the nineteenth-century critic's changing ideas about style, rhetoric, and technologies of communication. In particular, Camlot contributes to our understanding of how new print media affected the Romantic and Victorian critic's sense of self, as he elaborates the ways nineteenth-century critics used their own essays on rhetoric and stylistics to speculate about the changing conditions for the production and reception of ideas and the formulation of authorial character. Camlot argues that the early 1830s mark the moment when a previously coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric was fragmented and redistributed into the diverse, localized sites of an emerging periodicals market. Publishing venues for writers multiplied at midcentury, establishing a new stylistic norm for criticism-one that affirmed style as the manifestation of English discipline and objectivity. The figure of the professional critic soon subsumed the authority of the polyglot intellectual, and the later decades of the nineteenth century brought about a debate on aesthetics and criticism that set ideals of Saxon-rooted 'virile' style against more culturally inclusive theories of expression.

Lewis Carrol meets Allen Ginsberg.... This is poetry about an angel-poet, wings paper-clipped, seeking spiritual food in the modern office cubicle. He pecks away at office-machinery (+ la Dilbert) and dreams among his fellow stick men and women of being a Wordsworthian visionary o or at least an iaction figureeni. Jason Camlot is a scholar of Victorian nonsense and humorous verse and these poems are a ehowli amidst the islithy borogrovesi sort of affair, a wild, brilliantly refitted variety theater act. Other pieces, equally wan, hilarious, noir, plumb nineteen thirties Hollywood (and present day movieland) hijinks, Hemingwayis war-with-booze style, and the dark obsessions of Important Men. The writer and his writing is epasti conscious, but completely versed in contemporary Canadian and American poetry. This is an immensely funny, witty, up-to-date collection o zany, zippy, and zine-y Critical Comment iThe book is deceptively easy to read and packed with pop-cultural references, while skillfully skipping between an array of styles and personae.io McGill Tribune, Jan. 2006iJason Camlot packs a lot into the 100-plus pages of Attention All Typewriters. His wit and erudition are everywhere apparent.io Montreal Review of Books, Spring/Summer 2006 iPlaying with the form and, throughout this collection, with ideas about the real work of the poet, Camlot is finding and admitting and contemplating and celebrating his office upon earth.io Broken Pencil, #30 iJason Camlotis new book is an enigmatic and funny tour de force. Riding the board of high culture, it surfs the waves of pop that break relentlessly over our lives and emerges tangled in seaweed and garbage, soaked, but still standing.io david antin iJason Camlot finds poetry in the most unlikely places: in hilarious stoned college dorm memories, the boredom of emeaninglessi office jobs, a rhymed litany of frequented drinking haunts, or a confessional meditation on warmongering America. I applaud these poems for their slightly jaded integrity, for their formal astuteness and wit, for their engagement with a not-so-desirable reality. Camlot valiantly fights the good fight: against conformity and numbness, against that which excludes poetry from daily life.i o David Trinidad

Featuring over fifty illustrations and twenty-three original chapters that explore cases from a wide range of fields, including library and archival studies, literary studies, art history, media studies, sound studies, folklore studies, game studies, and education, Collection Thinking builds on the important scholarly works produced on the topic of the archive over the past two decades and contributes to ongoing debates on the historical status of memory institutions. The volume illustrates how the concept of "collection" bridges these institutional and structural categories, and generates discussions of cultural activities involving artifactual arrangement, preservation, curation, and circulation in both the private and the public spheres. Edited collaboratively by three senior scholars with expertise in the fields of literature, art history, archives, and museums, Collection Thinking is designed to stimulate interdisciplinary reflection and conversation. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in how we organize materials for research across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. With case studies that range from collecting Barbie dolls to medieval embroideries, and with contributions from practitioners on record collecting, the creation of sub-culture archives, and collection as artistic practice, this volume will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about why and how collections are made.

Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early "talking records" and their significance for literature, from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot's experimental readings of "The Waste Land" and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.

Holmes entered the cabinet / of the respectable reverend / (who was in fact a closet naturalist) / and found so many Victorian things. In the early 2000s flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. In Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and feelings in poetry. Vlarf pursues expressions of sentiment that may have become unfamiliar, unacceptable, or uncool since the advent of modernism by mining Victorian texts and generic forms with odd inclinations, using techniques that include erasure, bout-rime, emulation, adaptation, reboot, mimicry, abhorrence, cringe, and love. Erasures of massive volumes of prose by John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin become concise poems of condensed sadness; a reboot of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" is told from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy with an imaginary albatross pal; recovered fragments from an apocryphal book of Victorian nonsense verse are pieced together; a Leonard Cohen song about Queen Victoria is offered in a steampunk rendering; and a meditative guinea pig delivers a dramatic monologue in the vein of Robert Browning. Camlot moves through Victorian literature as a collector in a curiosity shop, seeking the oddest forms of feeling in language to shape them into peculiarly affective poems.