"Knowing what is missing is an important first step."

October 27, 2023 1:07 PM

Zachary Turpin (Commonplace, 10/2023), "Have You Seen Me?: Missing Works of Nineteenth-Century American Literature": "To students new to the study of nineteenth-century American literature, it may seem that the field has been so thoroughly studied and catalogued that there can be very little left to discover about it. This could hardly be further from the truth." Partially inspired by Johanna Ortner (2015), "Lost No More: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Forest Leaves": "Having done my secondary source reading on her, I knew that Forest Leaves was deemed lost. Call it my naiveté as a young graduate student, but I figured I might as well type in the title in the society's catalogue."
posted by Wobbuffet (4 comments total)

I am happy to be alive at a time when people are busy discovering and promoting "lost" books just as actively as they are writing new ones.
posted by chavenet at 1:34 PM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I’m all for the long tail but Forest Leaves is another instance of libraries and archives knowing what they have and having it listed, and then a scholar comes along and says “IT WAS LOST! It was lost and I have found it!”

Yes, books can be “lost” when libraries forget they have them, or when libraries really don’t have them and a copy turns up as part of a decorative vignette in an antique store, but sheesh.

Nevertheless I’m happy for Ortner, it’s always nice to find something that was “deemed lost”. Good for her! Good for her to think of checking the catalog, just typing it in, why not. Not even having to go into an old card catalog, not having to read old book catalogs, just typing it in. Why not try it if you think something’s lost.
posted by Hypatia at 2:03 PM on October 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

Unless I misread something, Johanna Ortner isn’t claiming to have discovered the book herself, but to have double-checked academic sources and found that the orthodoxy in her field was incorrect. This isn’t a story about the triumph of research, but of doing your due diligence.

Also, it’s unclear from the article whether she was cataloged in the database as “Frances Ellen Watkins” (as the original title page had it) or “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper”.

Either way, whoever cataloged it didn’t know that this pamphlet was considered lost to scholars writing about her work, and it took a graduate student doing her due diligence to piece that together.
posted by Kattullus at 2:49 PM on October 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

If every scholar looking for every piece of every lost piece of literature were able to go to every institution that stores vast amounts of such things and do every search possible, we'd likely turn up a shit-ton of stuff that we've simply just lost track of. But you have to hold a thing in mind in order to know to search for it, and that in and of itself is the biggest barrier to finding anything.
posted by hippybear at 6:12 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]