Reviews and Comments

So if you're interested in the 1937 volume Bookmaking on the Distaff Side, this is a fascinating response to it, with reprints from it and two essays about about that book came to be. Bookmaking on the Distaff Side was a "potluck book" (as one of the essayists describes it) that a group of women bookmakers jointly created by each woman printing her own gathering of her contribution, and then sending it off so that all the individually printed sections could be gathered and bound into a single volume of 100 copies. It's a delight! (You can see a digital black-and-white facsimile of it at HathiTrust hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.c081869458) Go look at that instead of reading this, unless you want to know the history behind it.

Bi lead runs her printing house while trying to stay friends with her old lover, protect her radical brother, and discovering straight sex with her old friend who is, of course, actually a long-lost Duke. What’s not to love?

Somehow I jumped from #7 to #9 so I went back to #8 because I'm a completist that way, plus the increasingly convoluted and soapy aspects of Ruth's life mean that I needed to catch up on those details. I always like the ones that feature Cathbad, and this had some but not enough. Also not enough archaeology. But, still. I fully expect I will read all of this series until there are no more.

I love this series and I love Ruth Galloway, and if I were a forensic archaeologist in East Anglia, I’d want to be her. But wow is her personal life getting even more like a soap opera and I could do without that and her worries about her weight.

This just didn’t work for me. I can see why it should—I like gothic books, I like haunted books, I like riffing off history to make fiction, I like queer women. And yet!! I blame the arch narrator and her annoying footnotes. (I even like fiction with footnotes! Infinite Jest! Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell!) I might also blame the illustrations? oh well. ymmv

I really wanted to read a history of romance novels from a book history perspective: emergence of the genre, publishing houses, how they are categorized, etc. This is not that. This is a self-published book that wasn't pushed hard enough to do the research it gestures at or even to consistently cite its research. There are some good insights! But skip it. Not worth the $10. Although to be fair, there's apparently not as much good research on this from the last decade+, so you might end up reading it anyway, if you're interested in the topic.