The articles collected here represent a selection of the papers presented at the Newfoundland and Labrador Book History Symposium, held at Memorial University on 7–8 May 2016. Organized by the Memorial University Department of English, the Basilica Museum, and the Newfoundland Historical Society, the symposium coincided with the launch of The Finest Room in the Colony: The Library of John Thomas Mullock, edited by Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby and myself and published by Memorial University Libraries, and an accompanying exhibition held at the Basilica Museum in St. John’s. Taking Bishop Mullock (1807–1869) and his wide-ranging book collection as its subject, The Finest Room features essays, intended for a general reader, written by 21 scholars working from across the disciplines. Our hope was to extend this spirit of collaboration and public outreach through the hosting of a public symposium examining Newfoundland and Labrador print culture more broadly. Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby and I are grateful to Memorial University’s Public Engagement Accelerator Fund and other sources of support that enabled us to complete these interrelated projects, and to Newfoundland and Labrador Studies for publishing selected scholarly articles emerging from the symposium, the full program of which is included in this issue. The articles collected here reflect the curiosity, knowledge, and insight brought by all the participants, whose generous contributions made for a lively and stimulating event.

In “Thinking through the History of the Book,” the keynote address of the 2015 conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), Leslie Howsam took a step back to ponder the study of book culture and book history, its methods and its aims. Noting that its practitioners come from all fields of inquiry, Howsam dubbed book history “an ‘interdiscipline’ — an intellectual space where like-thinking scholars bring their differing mindsets and methodologies to bear on material texts.” Drawing on her own definition of book history as “a way of thinking about how people have given material form to knowledge and stories,” Howsam observed that what all book culture studies share is “that indefinable ‘something’ which has to do with thinking in terms of materiality, mediation, and mutability.” The common ground of book historians is, in short, the “sense of the creation, mediation and consumption of the objects of communication being crucial to the way that culture and society work.”[1]

The papers collected here examine, often in multiple and intersecting ways, the materiality, mediation, and mutability of the knowledge and stories that have helped shape Newfoundland and Labrador. The material object is the spark of Stephen Crocker’s study, which takes as its starting point a family heirloom, a much-read copy of Medyett Goodridge’s Narrative of a Voyage to the South Seas, and the Shipwreck of the Princess of Wales Cutter: with an Account of Two Years’ Residence on an Uninhabited Island (1838). As an example of the castaway genre, Crocker argues, this work articulates British imperialist anxieties about “the meaning and effects of isolation, and the possibility of recreating European ideas of civility in the outer reaches of the known world”; equally, as a Bildungsroman and family history, it offers a “cognitive map” for one Newfoundland settler family’s transatlantic identity. In another foray into material evidence of transatlantic book culture, Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby examines the surviving library of Bishop John Thomas Mullock — held today within the Episcopal Library of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. John’s — in order to understand the significance of Mullock’s “unbiased collecting habit” in relation to his lifelong scholarly methods, as well as his envisioned public library for St. John’s.

The mediation of texts can take many forms, from the market demands faced by publishers and the agendas of policy-makers and censors, to the vagaries of distribution and the specific cultural contexts of individual readers. Such dimensions of print culture feature in all the papers here but are especially foregrounded in several essays, including Pearce J. Carefoote’s “Keep Your Enemies Closer: Banned and Controversial Literature in Bishop Mullock’s Library.” Discussing several such titles in detail, Carefoote offers potential explanations for Mullock’s selection and preservation in his collection of volumes prohibited by Rome’s Index of Forbidden Books, which Carefoote calls “a single tool in the most effective censorship campaign ever undertaken in the West.” While Carefoote’s study looks to Europe, Jennifer J. Connor turns to the United States, specifically the Grenfell mission, which established travelling and small local libraries servicing Labrador and northern Newfoundland in the early twentieth century, decades before the first government-run libraries were created in 1926. Connor’s “local-level” study “offers insights into the extent of literacy not previously understood from state-based sources,” while suggesting “the extent to which American — not British or Canadian — printed materials shaped the literary, cultural, and aesthetic sensibilities of a far-flung populace at the coastal margins of the industrialized world.” This emphasis on a localized readership is shared by Margaret Mackey’s study focusing on the immediate post-Confederation period. In it, the author examines how the literacy education of one St. John’s reader — herself — was mediated in a significant part by “helper” institutions, namely Prince of Wales College, Gower Street United Church, Gosling Library, and the Girl Guides.

The mutability of knowledge and stories — how texts are composed and altered through new editions and adaptations, and how ideas are transformed in new cultural contexts — is apparent in Hans Rollmann’s examination of Moravian education and Inuit literacy in Labrador, and its focus on the late-nineteenth-century Württemberg-based pastor and publisher Christian Gottlob Barth’s illustrated collection of Bible stories, a worldwide best-seller translated into Inuktitut, which in later editions also served as a school text in Labrador. Also focusing on the nineteenth century, Calvin Hollett examines the circulation of religious books and tracts within settler populations in Methodist and Anglican outport communities, arguing these materials “provided the narratives that informed spirituality in a storytelling oral culture where, once heard, they were told and retold in a personal and creative way in kitchens and in stage lofts, and, among a mobile people, in winter houses, on sealing vessels, on the Labrador, and on the western shore.” While several of the studies outlined here emphasize local reception of print, Donald W. Nichol examines an instance of local publishing in his history and reading of The Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador (ENL), the five-volume work published over 13 years between 1981 and 1994. Envisioned and initially edited by Joseph R. Smallwood, ENL is a landmark Newfoundland publication, “a monument that most other provinces can only aspire to have,” that takes its place in the pre-Wikipedia history of encyclopedias, each of which is marked by a (perhaps hopeless) quest for a comprehensiveness and an “agonizing . . . instant out-of-datedness” upon publication. Indeed, as his eclectic piece indicates, Nichol is infected by the encyclopedic impulse, addressing omissions and supplying updates to ENL’s “mosaic of modern history.”

Together, the essays gathered here “[decentre] print culture history,”[2] in the words of Patrick Collier and James J. Connolly, whose edited collection, Print Culture Histories beyond the Metropolis (2016), demonstrates how rural, nationally peripheral, or colonial sites, when examined from their own standpoints, are not simply passive recipients of publications emanating from the large metropolitan centres, but are actively “appropriating, grappling with, and taking part in modern print culture in ways indelibly marked by local conditions, affiliations, institutions, and patterns of sociability.”[3] As the present collection demonstrates, long before Smallwood launched the ambitious and province-centric ENL, outports, towns, and city neighbourhoods alike were “sites of cultural creativity” where inhabitants often made sense of their lives and locations through some degree of participation in print culture.

These essays extend the existing body of scholarship and research into the book culture of this province. As an aspect of our larger culture, the history of the book in Newfoundland and Labrador has been approached directly or indirectly in numerous discipline-specific studies in such fields as education, history, literature, and religious studies. Memoirs and other popular works also offer rich accounts of individuals’ encounters with print as students, teachers, and librarians, among other roles. While it would difficult to list these titles with any hope of comprehensiveness, a brief overview of the existing focused book history studies, as well as studies of authorship, publishing, and reading in Newfoundland and Labrador, is more manageable.

Foundational to much of this scholarship is Memorial University Libraries’ Centre for Newfoundland Studies (CNS). Established in 1965, the CNS adopted a mandate that encompassed the collection of all published materials relating to Newfoundland and Labrador. Over the past half-century, the centre has been both an important contributor to the field and a resource for other researchers. The CNS founding librarian, Agnes O’Dea, published the two-volume Bibliography of Newfoundland in 1986. More recently, publications emerging from the centre include Suzanne Ellison’s Historical Directory of Newfoundland and Labrador Newspapers (published in three editions from 1988 to 2001) and the online Newfoundland and Labrador Map Bibliography, compiled by Alberta Auringer Wood. The Periodical Article Bibliography (PAB), currently containing over 100,000 citations to periodical articles relating to Newfoundland and Labrador published between 1668 and the present, is a major digital resource being produced under the ongoing supervision of the Head of CNS, Joan Ritcey.[4]

In 1998, William Barker and Sandra Hannaford published “Towards a History of the Book in Newfoundland,” a background paper for the History of the Book in Canada project, which was revised and developed as William Barker’s “Three Steps Towards a History of the Book in Newfoundland” and published in 2010 in a special issue of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, edited by Nancy Earle, which focused on “Book Culture in Newfoundland and Labrador.”[5] That special issue followed on the heels of the three-volume History of the Book in Canada (2004–07), which examines the history of print in what is now Canada from the beginnings to the year 1980.[6] Newfoundland and Labrador features in all three volumes, with discrete articles by William Barker (“Books and Reading in Newfoundland and in Labrador [to 1840]” in volume 1) and Bert Riggs (“At the Sign of the Book: Dicks and Company of St. John’s” in volume 2).

While creative writers are well represented in authorship studies centring on the province, these studies have typically extended their scope beyond strictly literary circles. Female authors of Newfoundland and Labrador are included in the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory’s Canada’s Early Women Writers, described on its webpage as a “bio-bibliographical database of Canadian English-language women writers who published before 1950.” This ongoing project encompasses authors working in all genres, from poetry to scientific writing to journalism. Kristina Fagan Bidwell has explored authorship in late nineteenth-century Labrador in her 2010 study of the Inuit-Métis author Lydia Campbell. Twentieth-century female authors, their communities, and their publication venues are the focus of Danielle Fuller’s Writing the Everyday: Women’s Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada (2004), which contains a chapter on the novelist Joan Clark, as well as a two-chapter section entitled “Life Sentences: Women Writing Newfoundland,” which details the founding of the Newfoundland Writers’ Guild and the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador, among other topics. Another interesting recent contribution to our understanding of the networks facilitating authorship is Jeff Webb’s Observing the Outports: Describing Newfoundland Culture, 1950–1980 (2016). This work examines the institutions, specifically Memorial University, and the interdisciplinary research communities that supported the production of such major scholarly publications as The Dictionary of Newfoundland English.[7]

Studies of Newfoundland and Labrador printing and publishing include E.J. Devereux’s “Early Printing in Newfoundland” (1963) and Jean Graham’s overview of “Printing and Publishing” in The Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador. Hans Rollmann has produced a body of work outlining the history, beginning in 1790, of Moravian printing in Inuktitut for and (later) in Labrador. Sandrine Ferré’s L’édition au Canada atlantique: Le défi de publier une région (1999) and Roy MacSkimming’s The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers (2003) both offer chapters examining Newfoundland book publishing in the twentieth century.[8]

Studies of readers in the province are beginning to emerge, with two recent examples being Judith P. Robertson, David Lewkowich, and Jennifer Rottmann’s 2010 study of contemporary book clubs in St. John’s and Margaret Mackey’s captivating monograph, One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography (2016). Newfoundland book collectors have also received some scholarly attention: in addition to The Finest Room (2016) on Mullock, already mentioned, W.G. Gosling has been the focus of an article by Melvin Baker and George Story, published in 1996.[9]

Before concluding this inevitably incomplete survey of Newfoundland and Labrador book history studies, I must acknowledge the contributions of one eminent scholar. As an author, memoirist, historian, critic, and teacher, Patrick O’Flaherty illuminated Newfoundland and Labrador print culture in works ranging from his foundational The Rock Observed: Studies in the Literature of Newfoundland (1979) to recent highlights, including his 2013 Pratt Lecture, “Poetry and Politics in Newfoundland in the 1940s.”[10] We were honoured to welcome Dr. O’Flaherty as a presenter at our symposium, and are saddened by his sudden passing on 16 August 2017.

The story of the book in Newfoundland and Labrador continues to be written today by the policy-makers, publishers, purveyors of print, educators, librarians, and of course the writers, storytellers, and readers who all help create Newfoundland and Labrador’s dynamic culture and society. We hope that this themed issue of Newfoundland and Labrador Studies will illustrate that participation in print culture has long been an aspect of Newfoundland and Labrador life and that it remains a vital one today.