Introduction: Bookish Outliers

Abstract

In the late 1980s the printing historian G. Thomas Tanselle put together a collection of essays by the recently deceased literary scholar and book collector Gordon N. Ray. In his introduction he paid tribute to him as ‘always at heart a bookman’, taking his cue from Ray himself who (in a talk to librarians reproduced in the collection) told his audience that his apprehension about speaking to an association of professional librarians dissolved as soon as he was advised ‘that I should speak as a bookman’.¹ Ray invokes ‘bookman’ unselfconsciously throughout the essays nor does Tanselle hesitate to use the term, but it rings oddly today, already a word belonging to another era. Like its period companion ‘antiquary’, ‘bookman’ does not surface in public discourse and rarely even in academic writing, an outmoded, even embarrassing, book-gender compound without either contemporary relevance or historical gravitas. Bookmen flourished as a familiar type in middle-class male culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—an odd collection of book-hunters, book collectors—and were understood as beings who lived in and among the books in their libraries.