Book history postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in book history began with a practical problem. For my undergraduate dissertation I wanted to write about Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and my supervisor suggested I look at what the library actually held rather than relying on a modern paperback. I ended up comparing a three-volume circulating library edition with a later single-volume yellowback reprint. The text was largely the same; almost everything else was different. The cheaper edition carried advertisements for cocoa and railway insurance, had been reset in a tighter type, and bore the pencilled name of a reader in Bolton. I had expected to write about sensation fiction and instead found myself writing about price, format and who was expected to hold the book. That shift in attention is what I would like to pursue formally at postgraduate level.

My degree gave me a solid grounding in close reading and in nineteenth-century literary culture, and modules on the history of the novel and on editing introduced me to textual scholarship. I found the editing work particularly useful: collating passages by hand taught me patience and showed me how much interpretative decision-making sits inside an apparently neutral edition. I have since read Adams and Barker's essay proposing a model of the book based on events in a book's life rather than on the people involved in making it, which helped me see my dissertation as a study of publication and reception rather than of authorship. Roger Chartier's argument that form conditions meaning has shaped how I read second-hand books now, and I would like to test these approaches against material I have not yet learned to handle, particularly early printed books and non-Anglophone traditions.

Since graduating I have worked four days a week as a bookseller in an independent shop with a large second-hand section. Much of the job is ordinary retail, but pricing and cataloguing stock has been an unexpectedly good apprenticeship. I have learned to recognise book club editions, to spot a rebacked spine, and to notice when a dust jacket does not belong to the volume inside. I keep a notebook of features I cannot immediately explain and look them up afterwards, which is how I first understood signature marks and the logic of gatherings. Out of curiosity I taught myself to sew a simple pamphlet and then a section-sewn notebook from instructions and a good deal of trial and error; the results are uneven, but folding and sewing a text block has made printing imposition far more intelligible to me than any diagram did.

I also volunteer one Saturday a month with a local history society, which is digitising a box of parish pamphlets from the 1890s. I share the work with a retired archivist: she handles the metadata and I photograph and check images, then we compare notes on inconsistencies. We disagreed for some weeks about how to record printers whose names appeared in several spellings, and eventually settled on a convention we could both apply consistently. Around eighty items are now catalogued. It is a small project, but it has taught me that descriptive standards are decisions rather than facts, and that collaboration mostly means agreeing what to do about the awkward cases.

Postgraduate study would give me the bibliographical training I have been approaching sideways: descriptive bibliography, palaeography or typography, and sustained work with primary material under supervision. In the longer term I hope to work in rare books, whether in a library, an archive or the trade, and eventually to write a dissertation on cheap reprint series and the readers they assumed. I would like to learn to make such arguments properly, with evidence I know how to gather.