The first day on the Marguerite Hicks Project, we began with an inventory of the collection. After Professor Spunaugle and Dr. Peiser gave more information about the project to myself and my co-assistant editor, we sifted through each book and took pictures of any relevant information we thought we would need to understand the history of that book’s ownership, in hopes of finding out where Marguerite Hicks purchased it.
I had a class with Dr. Peiser where Professor Spunaugle showed us books from Special Collections, and taught us how to handle them properly, so I knew what to expect when it came to carefully turning the pages of the Hicks Collection. What I was not prepared for, however, was the deep dive into understanding booksellers’ marks, owners’ marginalia, bookplates and other markings that map out the life and love that a book experiences. While I had appreciated old books for their antiquity and wondered at how much history was carried through their pages, I had never really considered the owner being a vital piece in their lives. What the Marguerite Hicks Project has taught me more than anything isn’t just how to study old books, but how to study people through their books. It turns out you can learn a lot about a person through how they’ve taken care of their books, what sort of books they collect, and what they decide to put into those books—marginalia, notes to a loved one, or a conversation with the author. By adding things like recipes to a cookbook or writing out the author’s lineage, people personalize their texts with things they value as readers.
While working on the Marguerite Hicks Project, I have concluded that modern readers don’t have the same connection with their physical books as people have in past centuries. I think that has to do with the idea that marking up a book is somehow taboo. Earlier readers see this as making a text personalized, but now readers fear damages to their books—as if suddenly the book will lose all of its value because a person’s favorite quote is underlined, or because their name is written on a flyleaf. Engaging with physical texts by personalizing them has lost its value in the modern world, but as evidenced by Hicks’ collection, the action of making marks in a text doesn’t diminish the worth of the book, but instead shows that the book’s purpose was being fulfilled.
These volumes of novels and periodicals and pamphlets that Hicks collected are not just interesting leftovers from a hundred years ago, but rather a collection that tells a larger story: A story of a woman who had a fierce love for women’s literature despite her loss of vision, a story that defies the expectations of women in academia. What Marguerite Hicks has taught me so far is that books can be an extension of the self. We acquire and hold onto books that have become sentimental to us. We become attached to books that celebrate something we’re interested in, books in which we see ourselves. Hicks knew the importance of honoring women in literature and amassed an incredible collection based on that.
To me, being with Hicks’ books and learning all we can about them is the best way to understand Hicks. My work on the Marguerite Hicks Project made me look at my own collection of books differently and wonder what someone would think of me if they were to go through my books. While Hicks’ collection was a conscious effort, our own collections say something about us as people: how we unconsciously use the books we love as self expression.
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