Blanks: Data, Method, and the British American Print Shop

Abstract

The recent rise in study of paperwork and paper knowledge has much to teach a forum dedicated to reading and writing archives. Surveying what Benjamin Franklin called “little jobs,” Peter Stallybrass argues that the early modern era’s single-sheet printing—the massive production of broadsides and blank forms in particular—was a priority for handpress printers: more stable and more lucrative than book publishing, and thus always necessary in the undercapitalized print trade of the period. Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing (2012) discusses the bureaucratization of the French republic, where political representation of the once disempowered converts to the delays, deferrals, and inefficiencies felt by the powerless through the failures of paperwork. Lisa Gitelman anatomizes the document as a genre—its logic of “knowing-showing”—of recognition, proof, and accountability. Significantly, the new paper scholarship appreciates information-based records, implying that it is the quotidian, rather than the literary, that fills the archive. Yet thinkers affiliated with paperwork research rarely present, in historical terms, the subjective life engaged by such ordinary forms. Stallybrass and Gitelman insist that blank forms do not elicit modes of conventional literacy. While job printing, for Stallybrass, “transformed the texture of daily life,” it did so “without necessarily having any connection to reading” (340). Like Stallybrass, Gitelman focuses on function: “Job-printed forms didn’t have readers,” specifying that whatever reading is entailed by genres like bills of lading and stock transfers, it is not reading that has very much to do with the readerly subjectivities that came to such special prominence in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the subjectivities of literature in general and the novel in particular. (Paper 31, 30–31)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.