Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to public libraries.
Contributors explore libraries at particular moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes Alberto Manguel’s account of the Library of Alexandria as well as chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson, Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration, dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and public spaces.
Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical poetics of the personal library within its extended social, aesthetic and cultural contexts.

Jason Camlot is the author of three previous collections of poetry, The Debaucher (Insomniac Press, 2008), Attention All Typewriters (DC Books, 2005), and The Animal Library (DC Books, 2001). He co-edited the essay anthology Language Acts (Vehicule Press, 2007), about English-language poetry in Québec, and has done extensive research into sound recordings of 19th- and 20th-century poetry. Jason teaches Victorian literature, among other things, at Concordia University in Montreal. He edits the Punchy Poetry imprint for DC Books.

Jason Camlot's profile page

J.A. Weingarten is a Professor at Fanshawe College and the author of Sharing the Past (2019) and the co-editor of Unpacking the Personal Library (2022). He has also published numerous articles and papers on Canadian literature and culture. He lives with his family in Guelph, Ontario, where he can be found carefully tending to his tomato garden.

J.A. Weingarten's profile page

At a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the wholesale migration of the academic world online, and an urgent re-think of how teaching, learning and research are conducted, this book’s enthusiastic interrogation of issues around the value and purpose of libraries, and of the nature of humanities research conducted within them, is timely. It is fitting in 2022 to be thinking about these things, and this book offers an interesting, stimulating and encouragingly positive answer to the question, “Why libraries?”

Alice Crawford, Digital Humanities Research Librarian, University of St Andrews

For archive rats, librarians, and deep-dive historical lit nerds, Unpacking the Personal Library offers a prismatic lens on how libraries speak.

Emily Raine, Montreal Review of Books