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This paper argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Walt Whitman's manuscript books informed how and what they wrote during the antebellum decades. It begins by establishing that between 1830 and 1860 readymade manuscript books began displacing the loose-leaf assemblages that were more common around and long before 1800. The readymade manuscript book consequently facilitated renewed abstractions of the labors of reading and writing, as well as their remove from the resistances and complications of writing materials that trace back to earlier shifts in the history of literacy. From these shifts in antebellum material culture came Emerson's efforts to transcend mere readymades and Whitman's embrace of the readymade as the medium of transcendence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project takes up the intersection of medium and content as a place where they can radically reconfigure one another. The entire process is a sort of unlearning; the habitual use of paper is disrupted. Physicality and meaning merge and emerge. Readers' doings interact and transform both the meaning and background - the content (meaning) that traditionally would be simply re-presented via sheets of paper (background). Troubling just a small, habitual action leads to remarkably different modes of knowing and being. Action, object, meaning, reader and author (re)form tentative self-altering assemblages. These assemblages spiral out in new directions, moving beyond the confines of authorial intent. (Re)new(ed) configurations of self, meaning and object spring forth, opening themselves to different vectors. In order to explore these possibilities, I ask that you print out this article double-sided and cut/fold/etc. as instructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper occupies a special place in histories of knowledge. It is the substrate of communication, the stuff of archives, the bearer of marks that make worlds. For the early-modern period in particular we now have a wealth of studies of ‘paper tools’, of the ways in which archives were assembled and put to use, of the making of lists and transcribing of observations, and so on. In other fields, too, attention has turned to the materiality of information. How far is it possible to draw a stable methodology out of the insights of literary and book historians, bibliographers, anthropologists, and those working in media studies? Do these diverse fields in fact refer to the same thing when they talk of paper, its qualities, affordances and limitations? In attempting to answer these questions, the present essay begins in the rich territory of early-modern natural philosophy – but from there opens out to take in recent works in a range of disciplines. Attending to the specific qualities of paper is only possible, I argue, if it is understood that paper can be both transparent and opaque depending on the social world it inhabits and helps to constitute. Paper flickers into and out of view, and it is precisely this quality that constitutes its sociomateriality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]