Promiscuous Print: Legal Deposit Libraries, Rejected Texts, and New Methods for Negative Bibliography

PROMPRINT will uncover and analyze the rejects of legal deposit: the printed texts excluded from the ostensibly universal archive promised by copyright libraries. Legal deposit works to preserve every text published in a specific group of libraries.

While this principle is egalitarian, the cultural promiscuity of print has often troubled the prestigious deposit libraries, as deposit brings such historically controversial forms as novels, children’s books, almanacs, and pamphlets into elite collections. The project asks: (1) Which textual forms and genres do deposit libraries reject?

How and why does this change over time? (2) How can digital tools and quantitative analyses help to map absences and gaps in deposit collections? (3) What are the best models for using these tools and analyses in relation to particular texts and types of texts, as in the examples of obscene books, colonial texts, and children’s literature? (4) How does the process of putting together local and centralized records to uncover deposit rejects lead to generalizable methodologies for finding texts absent from other archives and collections? (5) What does a focus on rejection, relegation, and negative bibliography (the study of gaps in the bibliographical record) add to book history, including current debates over digitization?

The project answers these questions by focusing on a particular case study: deposit in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom.

In this period, an unprecedented increase in the production of printed texts led to high pressure on the deposit system at the same time that cultural interest in deposit as a system for knowledge preservation grew.

Beyond the case study, though, the project will drive forward wider understandings of how literature is canonized and forgotten, collected and destroyed.