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Deselection and removal of materials (a.k.a. weeding) and gift acquisition of materials (a.k.a. gift books) are two essential practices for librarianship, yet may not be as routine as other aspects of collection development. These practices often become special projects that require more effort and time than routine practices. In June of 2022, the Christopher Center Library Technical Services Department opted to transition from special project weeding and sporadic gift acquisition to an alternating schedule of deselection and gift acquisition. Due to personnel changes and a smaller workforce within the library, creating a routine practice for collection management was not only best practice, but also was necessary to prevent burnout and bottlenecks within workflows. This article will reflect the first 12 months of the newly developed and implemented policy and explore the successes, obstacles and best practices for libraries interested in routine collection management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the complex theory of gender and media as depicted in the poetry of poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Also cited are the works of Landon in annuals or gift books, Landon's exploration of the relationship of media and women writers, and the claim by Sarah Anne Storti that Landon is a brilliant media theorist and practitioner.

This essay explores gift books as an antebellum periodical genre, focusing in particular on the ways their editorial and authorial practices engaged with marketing them as desirable objects and exquisite, sentimental gifts. Commonly marketed as Christmas and New Year presents, gift books often engaged in forms of "product placement," ranging from unpretentious ads to fne metafctional narratives with a mise en abyme structure. One of the premises of this essay is that the metafctional dimension of some gift book genres invited singular, private readings that enriched and expanded rather than limited the reading experience. The argument is applied to the example of Eliza Leslie's combined role of gift book author and editor. Although today Leslie is remembered mostly as the author of cookbooks and books on etiquette, in her lifetime, she was also famous as the author of fction and as the editor of two gift books: The Violet and The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present. A reading of her short story "The Ghost-Book" (1839) will show how Leslie's authorial and editorial strategies overlap within a single narrative as she advertises the gift book by introducing a humorous Gothic reverse image of gift book fction and its proper readers and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Yorkship Family School Collection in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian consists of letters, photographs, and keepsakes shared by Mrs. Jerry Davis's 1968 fourth-grade class and their pen pals in the fourth platoon of Company A, First Cavalry Division, serving in the Vietnam War. This fourth-grade class at Yorkship Family School is a remarkable case study in socializing children to war. Not only was the teacher, Jerry Davis, such an exception to the largely unrealized potential of how elementary school curriculums commonly approached Vietnam—when the amount of teaching time devoted to the war varied tremendously by school, individual teacher, and year—but, moreover, it speaks directly to how making the war real to children helped them to reconcile a bitter national controversy and better understand Vietnam's place in American history as adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay looks at Mary Shelley's short story 'The Heir of Mondolfo' (c.1820s) and the author's continuing interest in radical politics and the living world. I argue that, while Shelley's early novels have rightly received a great deal of ecocritical attention, her later short stories, written for gift books and literary magazines, grapple with the question of how to ethically engage with extra-human environments within the increasingly reform-minded 1820s and 1830s. The first part of this essay looks at the form and cultural history of the gift book and how this has contributed towards the maligning of Shelley's short stories, but also how Shelley subverts the genre with tales of tyranny, poverty, the mistreatment of women, and radical engagement with the living world. The second part explores 'The Heir of Mondolfo' and how it presents a feminist version of environmental themes raised in Frankenstein and The Last Man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the mediums of Romantic poetry, particularly manuscript albums and printed literary annuals, to analyze the links between poetic form and the different material forms it takes. Also cited are the arguments for historical poetics in the New Lyric Studies, the proposed Book Historical poetics to recognize how materiality shapes poetry and its historical poetics, and Andrew Piper's poetics of miscelleaneity that includes gift books, literary annuals, and manuscript albums.

Called Back (1883) by Hugh Conway (Frederick John Fargus) was one of the bestselling novels of the late nineteenth century and was first published as an issue of 'Arrowsmith's Christmas Annual'. This article is an exploration of the reasons driving the novel's commercial success. Firstly, I position Called Back and the Arrowsmith late-Victorian Christmas annual within the tradition of Victorian festive reading matter by approaching this question through material and periodical culture lenses. I also posit that the commercial fortunes of Called Back benefitted from the topical intertextual connections between its depiction of Siberia and related material circulating contemporaneously in the print media landscape. Secondly, I argue that Called Back was first and foremost a variant on the festive ghost story that employed both hauntings and gothic devices in its narrative, but that it was also a tale well placed to trade upon nostalgia for the golden age of sensation fiction. I additionally suggest that this hybrid quality can illuminate in large part the novel's post-Victorian obscurity. Finally, the article contends that Fargus' trio of mid-1880s novels (Called Back (1883), Dark Days (1884), and Slings and Arrows (1885)), written for the Arrowsmith annual title, represents the work of an author aiming to cultivate his status as a novelist associated with a distinct brand of festive reading matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concentrates on a manuscript that the calligrapher Esther Inglis (1571-1624) dedicated to Maurice of Nassau (1567-1625) in 1599. She was of Huguenot descent and lived in Edinburgh. He was heavily involved in the Dutch Revolt. During her lifetime she produced a number of gift books, of which some 60 are still extant, usually religious in content, written in a variety of hands, carefully decorated and bound, their size sometimes not much larger than a matchbox. They were offered to high placed persons within the circle of the Scottish and English courts, in the hope of a reward. In 1599, however, she decided to present a booklet to Maurice. Why? This article traces Maurice’s role in the Protestant cause as the main reason for the manuscript’s production, shows the influence of Dutch propaganda prints in its decoration and looks at how it could have reached Maurice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the claim that American author Nathaniel Hawthorne was anxious on the placement of stories in gift book commodities, and instead held that literature is about providing a powerful aesthetic experience. The author argues that the tales "Alice Doane's Appeal" and "The Great Carbuncle" gothicize and challenge cultural and tokens of affection conventions. Also noted is the relation of Hawthorne's sensibility to the modern conception of art derived from Romanticism.

This essay explores the celebrity of British women poets in early nineteenth-century America, when print culture on both sides of the Atlantic encouraged and catered to the desire of readers for ever-closer relationships with poets by commercially circulating and disseminating their poems, biographical information and visual representations. It focuses on Sarah Josepha Hale’s participation and intervention in these cultural mechanisms by examining her gift bookThe Ladies’ Wreath: A Selection from the Female Poetic Writers of England and America(1837) and, in particular, its expanded second edition (1839). Reinforcing, while also complicating, celebrations of women poets in this period as figures associated with gentility, domesticity, sentiment and ideals of femininity, Hale draws on the discourse of fame and celebrity to underline women poets’ achievements and professionalization and the diversity, variety and intellectuality of their poems, and to position British and American women poets and readers within a transatlantic poetic sisterhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sarah Bowdich's story 'The Booroom Slave' has elicited little critical attention except in recent studies mainly investigating the black and white lithograph that accompanied its first publication in the Forget Me Not Gift Book in 1828. This article, however, focuses specifically on the text as an important tale of travel enhanced by its various strategic retellings. In the 'Booroom Slave', Inna first recounts her traumatic capture, journey to coastal slave markets, and escape through a male African interpreter when she meets the tale's (English) narrator, who then retranslates Inna's journey and its consequences for her literate readers. But this double telling of travel within the story is also matched by the two-fold iterations of the whole. It was similarly recast by male interpreters when reprinted in America in 1829 in The African Repository and Colonial Journal. Sarah Bowdich then reshaped it in 1835 for her Stories from Strange Lands by adding extensive footnotes elucidating its West African references from her own travel experience of 1816. By exploring these parallel, doubly reframed, female travel narrations, this article argues that 'The Booroom Slave' offers a critique of the limitations of the British/European civilizing mission that was far-sighted not only for the early nineteenth century, but also for the tale's postcolonial afterlives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the intersection of racial and gendered discourses in the representations of foreign women published in souvenir books commemorating the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Topics covered include the photographic and textual documentation of the staged foreign scenes that dominated the souvenir books, how the books classify the world's women into various ethnographic types, and the instabilities and weaknesses inherent in racial and gender signification seen in the books.

After repeated efforts to streamline their gifts-in-kind selection and processing, librarians still face concerns over the small percent of books added and the amount of staff time required. The primary problem is that the purpose of the gifts program is to add reasonable and relevant materials to the collection, and too little of what is received fits that description. Resulting questions include whether the library needs to continue to receive gifts, and if so, whether there are ways to identify which books might be worth adding to the collection. To answer these questions, the authors reviewed circulation records of gift books acquired over a seven-year period and compared those lists with required reading lists for classes, interlibrary loan reports, and lists of financial donors. Results indicate that gift books do circulate, and that required readings lists can be helpful in gift book selection. Librarians are also encouraged to analyze circulation rates by subject on a periodic basis to hone their selection of gifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of the world literature anthology in providing an accessible and contained canon of African literature. It can be classified as a review article of the Third edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, the first major world literature anthology not to feature Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. With the lack of a central African text, the inclusion of texts by younger and more far-flung writers provides a new way to look at African literature as a countercanon. An unexpected consequence of this omission is a decentering and a widening of the scope of what students may define as "African" literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]