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INTRODUCTION

“I Am Here”

Early in the morning on Tuesday, the seventh of January, 1890, Thomas Connary—an Irish immigrant farmer living in the town of Stratford, New Hampshire—sits down in his study to read in one of his most treasured books, the Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love by the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich. As Connary, who is now in his seventy-sixth year, recounts, he occasionally looks up from his book at “her picture fitted by myself over the window facing northerly in the room I am now using for reading and writing purposes.”¹ As has been his routine for more than three decades, he inserts numerous notebook pages with religious meditations between the pages of Julian’s writing. Some of these handwritten pages show prayer and reflection emerging from his reading of Julian’s visionary accounts. The following statement, written in Connary’s somewhat idiosyncratic prose, allows us to reconstruct a specific reading situation, and it begins to convey the particular esteem that this devout farmer has for his religious literature.

Tuesday, early in the morning clear and dry, January 7, 1890, I am working in my book, next to Titlepage of Revelations of Mother Juliana in 214 pages, see her picture directly over the northerly picture now of the window in the room in which I am busy much of my time as I am sighting northerly, for purposes purely heavenly thank God. Mother Juliana was an Anchorite of Norwich: Who lived in the days of King Edward the Third, and published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields in 1864. The publishers are protestants. I have had the Book most of the time since it was published. . . . No glossary is required in the Book for my use—I understand the full force of the Divine blessed holy Heavenly words without explanation thank God. . . . Books however many, cannot be heavenly if God will not bless them, make them pure with His own heavenly graces endlessly continually always forever, so with money, so with the whole of earthly property. Thomas Connary

For Connary, reading Julian of Norwich alongside a wide range of spiritual and didactic texts signifies precious moments of privacy, emotional reward, and prayerful reflection. Far more than just acquiring and reading his religious literature, Connary invests significant labor in filling his volumes with a plethora of material, such as newspaper cuttings, religious images, poetry, and, most noticeably, handwritten pages of religious prayers and reflections as well as diary records of daily events and personal reminiscences. The augmented volumes are the result of years of laborious accumulation—a process that appears to have begun in the late 1860s and continued until shortly before Connary’s death in 1899.

These annotation practices and the manifold ways in which Thomas Connary interacts with books are the subject of detailed examination in this study. What can it mean to be inside one’s books, to participate in them, and to be shaped by them? The following chapters focus on the writings of an eccentric reader and book collector in order to investigate the passion and fervent piety that he pours into his books. Connary’s library allows us to explore the opportunities provided by the material book for structuring the practical, spiritual, and moral life of readers. His annotations offer ample evidence of how a book’s physical properties can participate in the imaginative and spiritual life of a reader: more than anything else, they show how books can become the material conduits for a deeply felt relationship to one’s neighbor as well as to the divinity. As this farmer-bibliophile works in his private room, he puts his books to many and varied uses, but the cumulative effect of his labors is to convert his library into a comprehensive proclamation of faith. In it, we find elaborate records of religious reading as an ingrained habit of everyday life, one existing alongside the routines of agricultural labor and the domestic duties of a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic living in New Hampshire.

Occasionally, when reading Julian of Norwich and many other books, Connary writes in the margins a brief yet pregnant comment: “I am here.” This, I will argue, is particularly ripe with significance. More than merely marking a specific juncture in his reading, it is the assertion of someone determined to inscribe himself into the experiences recounted in the book, to testify to their veracity, and, finally, to convert the printed book into a signed testimony of a particular intensity of religious devotion. For Connary, noting that “I am here” means to assert affinity and proximity with past authors and their writings in a way that is concrete and aesthetic as much as it is existential and ethical.

Connary provides us with some details of his early life in a note he inserts into his book The Council of the Vatican and the Events of the Time, printed in Boston in 1872:

March 25, in the year 1833, I left Castlemarket, my native home in Old Ireland, in the Province of Leinster, Kilkenny County, near Ballinakill in the Queen’s County, expecting to return to my native home in three months of time: when on the way I met a few people who were on the way to America, I accompanied them, and worked for Mr Josiah Bellows 2nd, and his family, in Lancaster, Coos County, New Hampshire in June that year, my home from that time to this day has been in the United States of America.²

Born in 1814, Connary was only nineteen years of age when he left Ireland. He was part of the early wave of Irish immigrants who came to the United States before the trauma of the Great Irish Famine and who brought with them overwhelmingly positive memories of Old Ireland. Intriguingly, the above record provides no further explanation of motives, no details about the trials of crossing, no impression of the thoughts running through the mind of a nineteen-year-old finding himself in an unfamiliar land.

An obituary for Thomas Connary in the Coös County Democrat from the year 1899 provides some further details about this early phase in his American experience:

When about nineteen years old he left his home for America, and came to the town of Lancaster, N.H., in the early part of June. He had but fifteen cents in his possession at this time. He hired himself to Mr. Josiah Bellows for the small sum of seven dollars a month, and after having served his time with this gentleman he went about ditching for the farmers. During the winters he threshed wherever he could get employment. At that time, as is well known, threshing was done by hand. He seldom or ever got his pay in money but accepted the tenth bushel as compensation for his hard labor. He kept up this mode of livelihood for several years, then he purchased a small farm in Northumberland, on which he had a log cabin for a dwelling. While here his beloved mother, one sister and two brothers, John and Simon, came from Ireland to sweeten his life and labors. He now seemed happier, having his mother for housekeeper. At the age of thirty he married a worthy lady whose name was Lucinda Stone. The following year he demolished the log cabin and erected in its stead a homesome frame building, the first of this nature ever erected in the town. He lived in this town for five years, working chiefly for the neighboring farmers. He was always very intimate with his old employee, Mr. Bellows, speaking of him ever after in the highest terms and praise. There were born to them in Northumberland one daughter and a son. He sold his farm here and purchased the old Partridge homestead in No. Stratford, on which he spent the remainder of his life.

In 1846, Connary settled in the town of Stratford, Coös County, then a town of some 550 people located on the Connecticut River on New Hampshire’s northwestern border with Vermont.³ Comprising the two settlements of North Stratford and Stratford Hollow, the town was granted its charter in 1762 under the name of Woodbury; this charter was regranted in 1773 with the name of Stratford in memory of Stratford-on-Avon, probably via Stratford, Connecticut, from where some of its earliest settlers had come. In Jeannette R. Thompson’s impressive History of the Town of Stratford, New Hampshire, 1773–1925, published in 1925, we read the following about Thomas Connary, who was deeply involved in communal affairs: “Thomas Connary, one of Stratford’s most worthy citizens, came here in the ’40s, and held many important offices during the fifty years of his residence in Stratford. He was selectman and treasurer during the Civil War, and furnished much of the material for the town history of that period.”⁴

In this rural New Hampshire setting, which prospered as a farming and logging center, especially with the coming of the Grand Trunk Railway in 1853, Connary lived in his family farmstead with his wife, Lucinda, and their five children, Simon, Mary, John, Joseph, and Anne, until his death in 1899. Connary played a central role in establishing the Catholic mission in Stratford, according to Thompson:

T. Connary was the first resident Roman Catholic, and to his ardent zeal and fervent piety the present prosperous church owes much for its maintenance through its pioneer days. “Of Mr Connary it may be said with the utmost truthfulness that he has ever borne an irreproachable Christian character as citizen, neighbour, friend; and in business he has maintained the highest type, and no one has been more trusted and honored by his townspeople. Indeed the entire family are numbered among our best citizens.” . . . Through Mr. Connary’s efforts a Roman Catholic priest from Montpelier, Vt., came to care for the spiritual needs of the men of that faith who were employed in building the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, in construction here during the late ’40s and early ’50s; and Mass was first celebrated in a little building a few rods east of the station. . . . Mr. Connary bought the land on which the present church stands in 1866; but, as a church had been built in Bloomfield, building here was deferred until 1887, when a church was erected at a cost of $3,000.⁵

We know that after starting out with nothing and accepting “the tenth bushel as compensation for his hard labor,” Connary, once established, did well and managed his finances deftly. The census record of 1870 for the town of Stratford estimates the value of the Connary real estate at a full $6,000, one of the town’s higher valuations. In January 1899 the obituary in the Coös County Democrat characterized him as a “deeply religious man” whose “confidence in God was unlimited,” while noting that “he was very industrious and of good financial abilities. . . . His generosity to the church of his heart is well known often indeed depriving himself for this end.” Connary’s contribution to the Catholic mission in the area came not only in the form of donations for the foundation of the Catholic church in Stratford but also in the purchase of the land for the cemetery and church (established in 1879) in Bloomfield, Vermont, across the Connecticut River, a stone’s throw from North Stratford. Today, the stained glass window in the Sacred Heart Church in Stratford carries the name Thomas Connary, in memory of the benefactor and the town’s first resident Roman Catholic.⁶

Connary’s adherence to the Catholic faith was deep and fervent, fueled during his adult life by the diligent reading of Catholic devotional literature. While he collected books throughout most of his life, in later years his identity as a devout Irish American Catholic revolved around, and even gained meaning from, the purchasing, reading, annotating, and sharing of religious books. Records show that Connary was a member of the Stratford Hollow Library Association and that he was one of the twenty-six original subscribers (at the subscription rate of $10) when the Library Hall was constructed in 1884 to house approximately four hundred volumes.⁷ Most important, he gathered an impressive private library, predominantly of Catholic devotional, hagiographic, catechetical, and apologetic works, but also of dictionaries and general reference, as well as writing on the subjects of travel and topography, philosophy, and history.

We can only conjecture about the full extent of Connary’s library, which must have comprised several hundred volumes (see the appendix). This study looks at a segment of his library that has survived—a collection of about thirty books, nearly all on religious themes, purchased by Connary while he was in the United States from the 1850s onwards, and annotated by him from when he was in his fifties until a few months before his death at the age of eighty-four. It is useful from the outset to list those of Connary’s books that figure most prominently in the following discussion. All contain copious annotations and miscellaneous documents.

• James Balmes. Fundamental Philosophy. Translated by Henry F. Brownson. 2 vols. New York: D. & J. Sadlier, 1858.

• Elizabeth de Bodenham. Mrs. Herbert and the Villagers: or, Familiar Conversations on the Principal Duties of Christianity. 2 vols. (vol. 2 only). Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, Jr., 1853.

• Jean-Pierre Camus. The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales. New York: P. O’Shea, 1867.

• M. A. G. Chardon. Memoirs of a Guardian Angel. Baltimore: John Murphy, 1873.

• Frederick W. Faber. All for Jesus: or, The Easy Ways of Divine Love. Baltimore: John Murphy, 1857.

• Fables of Aesop and Others. Translated by Samuel Croxall. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859.

• St. Francis of Sales. The True Spiritual Conferences of St. Francis of Sales. London: Richardson and Son, 1862.

• George Foxcroft Haskins. Travels in England, France, Italy, and Ireland. Boston: Patrick Donahoe, 1856.

• Julian of Norwich. Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.

• Thomas H. Kinane. The Dove of the Tabernacle. New York: P. M. Haverty, 1876.

• P. R. Leatherman. Elements of Moral Science. Philadelphia: James Challen & Son, 1860.

• F. Lewis. [Louis of Granada.] The Sinner’s Guide. Philadelphia: Henry M’Grath, 1845.

• The Lives of Eminent Saints. Boston: Patrick Donahoe, 1853.

• The Lives of the Fathers of the Desert. Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, Jr., no year.

• James O’Leary. A History of the Bible, its Origin, Object, and Structure. New York: D. & J. Sadlier, 1873.

• Thomas Canon Pope. The Council of the Vatican and the Events of the Time. Boston: Patrick Donahoe, 1872.

This group of annotated volumes constitutes a remarkably well-documented—and self-documenting—archive that enables us to map a series of activities centered on the presence and the use of books. Viewed cumulatively, these artifacts allow us to reconstruct moments of reading, a physical setting, and the variety of uses to which the books were put. These traces reveal a dedicated reader for whom the reading of religious works represents precious moments of privacy and intimacy, as well as the reinforcement of social bonds that exist within a closely knit circle of family and friends. For this farmer-bibliophile, books are, quite simply, a necessity of life. Working inside books—reading, annotating, decorating, and pasting notes into them—becomes a means of pious self-fashioning and a dramatization of lived spirituality.

The following passage, found on a handwritten note dated February 12, 1890, and pasted in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, is an extraordinary statement about the powerful iconic status that books held for Connary. Written with his eccentric turn of phrase, it reads as a poignant, profound, and highly personal equivalent of Thomas Jefferson’s statement that “I cannot live without books,” or Jorge Luis Borges’s bibliophilic assertion, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”⁸

I have many Books and cannot think that I can ever be really happy anywhere without them: you will see that I speak of happiness now in this small paper, and when I speak of happiness in it, I speak of eternal everlasting heavenly happiness alone in it. For this one business purpose alone I love my Books, and for no other business purpose, from time I was born to this Wednesday February 12, 1890, I have loved my Books well only for the power which they give to me to have a heavenly home with our divine Creator continually for unending eternity. This way alone of Book keeping is God’s way to prosperity and heavenly happiness unending.⁹

This statement, found inside a book especially valued by its owner, is written late in life, as he looks back on his years of laborious accumulation and annotation. In it he begins to convey a sense of a redemptive culture of reading, in which material, utilitarian, and spiritual values are seen to enhance one another. It is this understanding of a redemptive discipline of reading which the following chapters will attempt to analyze in depth.

Studying Used Books: The Plan of the Argument

This study examines fine details of annotation practices and what I shall refer to as book enhancement. It does so to explore how a strikingly opinionated reader-cum-annotator from a somewhat neglected demographic in American cultural and bibliographic history materially manipulated his books to reflect and develop his religious beliefs and practices.

One might characterize the study of marginalia and annotation as microhistory that tends to focus overwhelmingly on what we might call (with an unhelpful epithet) elite culture and on the public and professional annotator. We have studies, for instance, of Gabriel Harvey, the quintessential Renaissance humanist reader, who read, admired, and annotated his classical authors as models of rhetoric in order to prepare himself for debate in the realm of political action. Much has been written about Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s inherently social annotations—clearly an archive of shared events of reading—that were circulated among friends and collaborators and eventually published. And we know of the Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard as a skilled exegete through his marginalia: we can follow him combing through his copy of the New Testament for useful references as he prepares his ammunition against the Danish state church, deemed by him to be compromised by decorum, moderation, and complacency.¹⁰ Marginalia can be public, assured, and produced by celebrated figures. But with Thomas Connary we have an example of “the common reader” (to use another unhelpful epithet) from a group that we too rarely regard as active creators or agents, often because so little evidence has survived. I will argue that in his library we witness a powerful statement of personal conviction not to be sneered at for its provincialism or for the simplicity—or, more accurately, rigor—of its theology. We see an intelligence purposefully staging itself, as books are imagined as instruments of social interaction in both domestic and public spheres.

This study has benefited from the recent burgeoning of interest in bibliography, the material culture of the text, paratext, book history, and the social history of literacy. These flourishing areas of study have clearly come into maturity.¹¹ Two studies in particular have given new attention to manuscript annotation and moved bibliographic and readership studies in an exciting direction: Heather Jackson’s Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books and William Sherman’s Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Both are groundbreaking and absorbing books, and both have influenced my work with the Connary collection.¹²

Jackson’s genre study of marginalia, based on more than two thousand annotated books from the past three centuries, provides a positive assessment of the phenomenon of writing in books. She argues that such intervention by readers may usefully be studied as documentation of varied social experiences of interest to historians, biographers, and critics. Countering a too-facile dismissal of the genre of marginalia as sporadic, individualistic, and often quixotic, Jackson shows it to be full of complex motivation and historical circumstance: it even emerges in her study as a genre with a distinct social history, indicative of different psychologies of reading, as indeed does the condemnation of marginalia (prohibitions against the marking of books abound from the mid-nineteenth century on, with the establishment of the public library system).¹³ In two case studies, Jackson demonstrates convincingly how marginalia by S. T. Coleridge and writing found in copies of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, when examined carefully and cumulatively, provide revealing insights into habits of reading and constitute valid evidence for the history of the book and reading.¹⁴

Where Jackson largely focuses on the British reading culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sherman’s Used Books provides a welcome exploration of readers’ marks and writing from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth. With a preference for the more capacious term “book use” over “book reading,” Sherman offers rich evidence of an early modern culture of the book in which the recording of useful and meaningful notes in the blank spaces of a book was normative. This was a culture, he notes, in which the word “mark” (as in “mark my words”) meant “making books [one’s] own by making marks in and around them” long before it came to mean “noticing” or “observing.”¹⁵ As with Jackson’s Marginalia, Used Books presents two detailed case studies of specific readers’ creative book modification and annotation: the commonplace book of the prominent Elizabethan lawyer Sir Julius Caesar, used by him over six decades, and a 1571 copy of Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father, thoroughly annotated by the well-known Elizabethan scholar John Dee. These case studies examine hybrid forms of reading and writing that reveal both an “unexpected intimacy and vitality” of annotating habits as well as the centrality of such habits to scholarship and power politics in Tudor England.¹⁶

Combining valuable case studies with pertinent methodological considerations, Jackson and Sherman thus reorient our understanding of the book culture of past centuries toward a dialogic relationship between books and readers, where books accommodate responses to text, and where readers regard their annotations less as private records than as conventional and public—and in some cases even collaborative. Both studies, it should be noted, prioritize certain modes of interaction with the printed book. First, they scrutinize remarkable volumes annotated by remarkable individuals, most often with a publicly performative dimension. For Jackson, who favors what she calls a “period of sociability,” Coleridge becomes the paradigm for the sociable or professional annotator in whose circle personally annotated volumes were exchanged, often to make a display of learning or critical skills, with annotations operating according to “well, if unconsciously, agreed conventions.” For Sherman, too, examining reading and writing practices of (mostly prominent or professional) book users in Renaissance England reveals shared codes of communication: whether designed to organize knowledge, to structure worship, or to cultivate a public persona in the realm of Elizabethan connections and politics, we see the traces of a consistent habit of annotating as part of a collective elite culture of reading. Second, and not altogether unreasonably, Jackson and Sherman examine book markings with a discernable, even symbiotic, association between text and readers’ markings. Book annotation can endorse, facilitate reference, function as a mnemonic aid, or talk back critically to the text and its author, but it is always understood to respond directly and often discursively to the text at hand. In Jackson’s words, “the essential and defining character of the marginal note throughout its history is that it is a responsive kind of writing permanently anchored to preexisting written words.”¹⁷

This study adds to the valuable work carried out by Jackson, Sherman, and others, and it follows Sherman in preferring terms other than “reading” and “marginalia.” In the books under consideration here, annotated and enhanced by Thomas Connary, we find remnants of past reading and we come across extensive marginal annotation, but these form only part of a much broader spectrum of activities performed with and around books. Sherman’s consideration of hybrid book forms that merge print and manuscript, public and private, production and consumption are of particular relevance to my study of one book user who values books as much for the text they contain as for their capacity to function as a storehouse for miscellaneous items.¹⁸ The personalized library of Thomas Connary allows us to add further complexity to the reality of marginalia and book use and to see markings in books take a far greater diversity of forms than so far appreciated. His books constitute a complex record of use and reader response; the same material shows reading and book marking as structured, planned activities, but also as springing up spontaneously and as extravagantly unsystematic. Often this material defies the taxonomies developed by Jackson and Sherman and complicates their assumptions about writing in books as conventionalized, argumentative, corrective, or professional. Furthermore, Connary’s writing in books often cannot be said to be directly responsive to the print in any clear sense (i.e., engaging directly or argumentatively with the ideas in a text), although in some cases it obviously is. Even less can it be understood in any straightforward way in terms of the distinction between public and private that is integral to Jackson’s characterization of the genre of marginalia.

For Connary, the use of books is one of co-creation, in which the object is augmented and embellished as a precious devotional memorial. Interleavings (i.e., clusters of densely written notebook pages inserted between the pages of print), instead of marginal annotation, are far more conspicuous features of Connary’s labors in books. For more than three decades, he performs the painstaking task of copious interleaving, inserting himself into books piously, prayerfully, and autobiographically.

It is inevitable that we resort to terms such as “eccentric” and “idiosyncratic” to convey the striking nature of the material evidence under consideration here. We might do well to remind ourselves of what Anthony Grafton refers to as the “obstinate, irreducible individualism” of the reader, and Jackson’s observation that the collective profile of past readers “can only be a group portrait of individuals.”¹⁹ Indeed, when focusing on such singular evidence and conducting, as I shall do here, a detailed forensic exercise in order to partly reconstruct a reading history and a pattern of use, we should acknowledge that most conjectures about the use of books and past events of reading are epistemologically uncertain, with a somewhat solipsistic side to them. But, on the other hand, we should not be overly reluctant or embarrassed to use whatever material remains we may come across to assist us in the important endeavor of reconstructing past encounters with, and perceptions of, books. When we examine the archive of Connary’s books and documents we find material that is irreducibly individualistic and eccentric, but also understood by the owner to have profound social implications. In reading and book collecting we find welcome opportunities for silence and introversion, but books can also prepare a reader for social interaction, assist in the management of a household, and reinforce social bonds. The discipline that Thomas Connary refers to as his “Book keeping” always takes place within a larger continuum of activities that situate him in public life and in networks of social and domestic responsibility.

The following chapters examine not only routines and methods of book collecting but also the complex motivations and the historical circumstances that underlie the use of books. By analyzing Thomas Connary’s writing and annotation habits in depth, and regarding these as always engaged in a form of intertextual dialogue with the contents of his books, we can gain new insights into the religious culture of New England Catholicism, religious tension and tolerance, the publishing of religious literature, and the capacity of such literature to guide religious desire, social activity, and moral discipline. Such an approach means to follow Jackson, Sherman, and others in moving beyond one dominant tendency in current book history research that examines books owned, purchased, or borrowed as recoverable and the source for quantifiable information, while marginalizing the book read as private and irrecoverable. Indeed, this study will foreground the physical remains of past acts of reading in order to examine creative uses and appropriations of the book object. The aim is to offer an interpretive account of a complex process that produces an enhanced aesthetic around the material artifact of the book and explores its phenomenal depth.

Accounting for this process of creative book alteration leads one naturally to the term “appropriation.” Jackson, for example, refers to the production of marginalia as “an act of self-assertive appropriation,” and, as Matthew Brown notes, the term has become a dominant critical concept in readership studies, capturing more than any other a reigning paradigm:

Readership history rightly suggests that readers in the past can be posited as neither fully dominated by the culture of a ruling elite nor fully free to make a text mean anything they want it to mean. A conceptual solution to this problem has been to cast reading as an act of appropriation. Readers are hemmed in by genres and traditions, and within such controlled contexts—even in a pious culture of humility and rote repetition—they actively appropriate textual matter. . . . Given this dialectic of freedom and control, of play and constraint, readership historians advocate, when turning to individual readers, a sensitivity to conscious uses and appropriations as means to measure the creative, critical, or submissive habits of readers.²⁰

It is quite useful to see Connary’s interaction with his books as a process of appropriation, and as a particularly creative mode of appropriation at that. But, like Brown, I wish to use the term “appropriation” guardedly, especially when this is taken, as it often is, to suggest the reader’s subversive or consciously aggressive and transgressive approach to the book and reading. In his groundbreaking study of the rituals of reading among theocentric Puritans in early New England, Brown demonstrates in exemplary fashion how the concept of the reader’s appropriation of textual matter can be nuanced through an analysis sensitive to historical, geographical, and theological factors.²¹ In this study I take a similar path by devoting attention to the cultural, bibliographical, and theological contexts that surround Connary’s archive of annotated books. Ultimately, the term “appropriation,” as a single critical term, cannot capture the range of highly personal, often contradictory, modes of Connary’s interactions with his books. Probably no one single term can do justice to the numerous ways in which the book artifact can function crucially, and signify diversely, within the rhythms and reiterations of spiritual life.

This examination of Thomas Connary’s book enhancements is centrally concerned with four subjects: reading, paratext, obsession, and epiphany. In the remainder of this introduction, I briefly introduce my approach to these subjects and outline a plan of the argument.

Reading

I have already stated my preference for the term “book use” over “reading”: in some cases reading can take second place to other forms of interaction with the book, some of which may give little heed, or none at all, to the contents of the printed text. This is certainly true in Connary’s case, but he also reveals much about himself as a reader and about the flexibility and development of his reading processes. In the chapters that follow, we look first at what kinds of books he reads before proceeding to consider the question of how he reads and enhances his books. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the contents of Connary’s library and examines the supply end of Irish American book production that catered to the practical needs and ardent devotional Catholicism of the post-Famine generation. Connary’s library provides a comprehensive and highly personal representation of a rich diaspora print culture, and in it we find the names of most of the notable individuals in Irish American writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, whether authors, translators, or publishers. The appendix lists the books known to have been in the possession of Connary and his family. This accumulation of books cannot be said to be truly representative of publishing output and collecting trends, but it nonetheless gives a good impression of the types of reading programs that helped shape the flourishing of Catholic communities in the decades following the first wave of Irish immigration into America.

This archive of books and annotations provides occasional glimpses of a systematic and attentive reader, one who is stirred devotionally and enabled theologically from repeated, in-depth reading. Such productive exchange between text and reader will be highlighted in this study, which is in part motivated by the observation that much current book history and readership study gives very little sustained or analytic attention to the text. We will examine those instances when we see Connary as an astute and critical reader in an impassioned dialogue with the content of his books. The approach is to read Connary’s annotations closely alongside the passages that they gloss, to show how an understanding of textual content is a prerequisite to fully appreciating the reader’s extensive and intertextual gloss of prayer and theological reflection. Two of the most treasured and densely annotated books in his library are in the genre of the spiritual autobiography, and we will consider how these influence his thinking on salvation, social obligation, and the good life.

The purposes and practices of Connary’s reading are diverse and overlapping. He reads husbandry manuals for knowledge about livestock and farming, and he relies on a range of practical and didactic writings for his management of the corporeal and moral welfare of his family. He consults a broad range of titles for general knowledge on geographical, political, and historical topics, while books on Irish culture and history kindle nostalgic longing and are instrumental in cultivating a sense of Irish rootedness in the Connary family. Catechetical and theological works are employed to bolster religious education in the household, and a devotional literature, often of a mystical flavor, fuels an already ardent Catholic faith. (These categories of reading material are surveyed in greater detail in chapter 1.)

Accompanying such diversity of goals in Connary’s reading is a multiplicity of reading processes and reader response. With access to a considerable number of books owned and used by the same reader, we can make some assessment of the complex modalities of reading, and we may see how each instance of reading is part of an evolving routine, with different elements attended to and with varying levels of intensity.²² It is difficult to assign Connary’s reading habits to a single, unified category; he habitually and unproblematically merges oppositions to which scholars often resort in the attempt to understand past traditions of book use.²³ Connary reads both extensively and selectively, and he reads intensively, with texts becoming the focus of concentrated, even meditative reading. Sometimes he responds to the text as a whole, but more often his concern is with local particulars, his attention fixed on a paragraph or even a word, not on the broader picture.

However fragmented the evidence, the enhanced books yield some insight into the microprocesses of reading and into the distinction made in cognitive psychology between on-line and off-line processes in readers’ experience and interpretation of the text.²⁴ On-line processes involve the immediate reading and comprehension of the text. Reading performed in the here and now may lead the reader to write occasional elaborations and corrigenda in the margin, to underline or otherwise mark as he or she goes along, to record reading times and other reading context, or to add spontaneous remarks that highlight and endorse specific passages. These are traces that indicate repetitions and the immediate experience of reading, sometimes showing that considerable mental effort is associated with the act of reading, and sometimes suggesting how reading can be a spur to imaginative, nostalgic, or meditative flights motivated by a passage or a few words. Such on-line reading is of a different nature than off-line processes that take place when reading is interrupted or concluded and more comprehensive consideration and interpretation is possible. At this level, antipathy or sympathy with a text or its author can be established and recorded, texts can be combined and integrated in myriad ways, or a work can be understood in the light of established dominant ideas.

In Connary’s case, much of his interaction with books seems detached from any act of reading, and evidence is particularly rich for off-line activity, in which texts are routinely combined with, and assimilated to, a complex of strongly held moral and religious beliefs. Another form of off-line activity also documented amply in the material is the recording of details about the reading situation and programs of book use. Often book historians rely on such records preserved apart from the books read, in diaries, notebooks, book reviews, and the like, but with Connary we find observations of this sort carefully preserved inside books on interleaved notebook pages. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine a variety of on-line and off-line processes in Connary’s reading activities, but they also show the difficulty of keeping these processes entirely separate. For example, it can be difficult to determine whether an inserted note that disagrees with a point in the text represents an on-line or off-line response, as these may differ very little in form and substance, and a handwritten record of date and time is oftentimes ambiguous, as it may indicate a moment of actual reading or another form of book use and enhancement disengaged from the act of reading.

To examine Connary’s book uses, this study proceeds by a form of forensic bibliographic method. This involves paying close attention to factors indicating patterns of book handling and reading, such as underlinings, manuscript punctuation, forms of emendation, inserted bookmarks, wear and tear of pages and bindings, deposits on or between the pages, and imported elements such as decorative embellishments and additional text (print or manuscript). It means also investigating the circumstances of reading—by looking, for example, at contextual statements about the reading situation, datings, ownership records, notes about procurement, evidence of shared book use, and personalized indices and reading plans.

Approaching Connary’s radically customized volumes through a type of in-depth bibliographic inquiry allows us to make inferences about the diversity of book uses and to form an impression of reading practices that are intensive and extensive, silent and vocalized, withdrawn and communal. Past acts of reading can never be transparent to us now, only partially reconstructed. However, it is one of the tasks of the book historian to make educated, plausible conjectures about reading habits by attending to the physical particulars of the material objects before us, by building on what a rich literature on reading history and reading processes past and present has taught us, and by carefully situating and historicizing books and audiences.

Paratext

Gérard Genette’s famous typology of the paratext has brought with it a new awareness of how concrete textual presentation is crucial to the experience of reading and the production of meaning.²⁵ “Paratext” is defined as the accompanying textual elements, supplied by authors, editors, or publishers, that surround the main text and influence the reception of the text and its interpretation by the public.²⁶ Paratext consists of elements both internal and external to the book. The internal elements (the “peritext”) include framing components, such as the cover, typesetting, authorial attribution, title, list of contents, preface, and illustration, while elements situated outside the book (the “epitext”) cover a large complex of public or private contexts that surround a text and bear on its reception, such as interviews, reviews, correspondence, and private conversation. The latter is a far more blurred territory of implicit contexts with no precise limits, “circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space.”²⁷ For Genette, paratext as a conceptual category converges toward authorial intention: paratextual elements constitute the threshold into the text, guiding the reader’s engagement with, and understanding of, the text, and they are inserted by the author or by the editor or publisher (a reason, perhaps, why both Jackson or Sherman bypass the theme of the paratext in their studies of readers’ markings in books).²⁸

This study argues that Genette’s survey, which was never intended to be exhaustive nor directly concerned with development and historical context, can usefully be broadened to involve a broader range of phenomena that are in no direct sense authorial or editorial.²⁹ Paratext can perform other functions than to ensure that a text is read “correctly” according to the author’s intention. It can include the co-creativity of the reader and those elements (sometimes highly distinct) inserted by the reader that impact and shape the reading experience and the full experience of the book. As Peter Stallybrass remarks, “if paratexts make readers, so readers both negotiate paratexts and make new ones.”³⁰

Thomas Connary is a reader who is highly responsive to the paratext of his books and who demonstrates extraordinary creativity in inserting his own paratextual framing. He fills the margins and the blank front- and endpapers with his own extensive writing; he comments on the author, publisher, printer, typography, book format, the year and place of publication, book binding, and number of pages; and he draws attention in various ways to prefaces, dedications, imprints, lists of contents, plates, and frontispieces. Furthermore, the very nature of the book medium encourages him to produce a voluminous paratextual expansion that is essentially a process of reconstructing the book through the addition of his own materials and written guidelines for reading. In the subsequent chapters, I refer to this more broadly as a process of book enhancement. Chapters 2 and 3 profile Connary’s various annotations and book enhancement practices, and they examine the self-styled paratextual apparatus that he layers in books to guide his own reading and that of others. Paratexts proliferate in these enhanced books, and their relation to main text is one of adjacency and collaboration. They take the form of, for example, handwritten dedications and rededications, reading directives, and exhortations, in addition to an elaborate visual paratext consisting of decorative embellishment, framing and dividing lines, and imported plates and illustrations.³¹

All of these paratextual devices work to orchestrate reception and reading practices. They also make possible a multidimensional use of books in which reading directives and the highlighting of passages point to various points of entry into text and facilitate a dynamic navigation of books in which the boundary between text and paratext becomes indistinct. The reader’s inserted paratext is the trace of another authority who proposes a new way of processing, ordering, and prioritizing text. This acquires further significance when the owner assumes shared uses of books, intending annotation as paratext to become an integral part of the medium and to determine the experience and actions of subsequent readers. This is the type of socially oriented peritexts characterized by Jason Scott-Warren: “Prompted neither by the author nor by the publisher, these are ’accompanying productions’ which aim to influence how a copy of the text will be interpreted by the readers who will later share, or borrow, or buy, or steal, or inherit it. . . . they create a frame for future readers of that volume.”³²

Chapter 3 addresses in detail the social paratext of Connary’s books—a particularly performative dimension of the paratext where we find him addressing his family with dedications, reassurances, and directions.³³ This part examines Connary’s attempts to influence the reading activity of his closest social circle, and it extends Genette’s idea of the epitext by suggesting that kinship can assert itself as an important part of the social epitext of annotated books: the affection for those closest of kin can be part of the exterior context through which a book is mediated to a reader, and it may become a determining factor in ensuring or constructing a proper reception. The books examined here are rooted in the domestic sphere and inscribed with paternal affection and a shared hope of redemption. When we consider the epitext of Connary’s books and the context of the reading situation in a household, we see how closely texts, spaces, and relationships can interpenetrate.

In the following, I deal mostly with evidence internal to the book, using the forensic bibliographic exercise to provide an account of Connary’s book enhancements and reading habits. But aspects of social context and the external epitext that structure the reading experience and enrich its meaning need to figure prominently as well. Among these are lineage and kinship, Irish identity and the experience of emigration, the location of reading and the spatial arrangement of the reading room, and, finally but most overwhelmingly, Irish Catholic devotion. This factor of devotion becomes the overarching context and catalyst for the material enhancements preserved in the form of inserted correspondence, exhortation, and prayers. Devotion is the epitext—both private and social—which structures the mental world of a reader and which his volumes are made to incorporate.

Obsession

The Connary collection of annotated books immediately confirms the current scholarly orthodoxy that reading is not a passively receptive mode of consumption but co-creative, and it supports a widespread perception—expressed, for instance, by Adrian Johns in The Nature of the Book—that “an apparently authoritative text, however ’fixed,’ could not compel uniformity in the cultures of its reception. In practice, rather the reverse seems to have happened.”³⁴ This is a study of a reader with considerable agency, and, like other studies of enterprising readers, it can provide nuance and challenge to general or statistical assessments of reading. Moreover, it allows us to understand aspects of readerly intensity and eccentricity in specific reception contexts and acts of reading.³⁵

I have already offered commentary on the inescapable idiosyncrasy and uniqueness that characterize any systematic annotator of books. But with Connary we move further into a territory of eccentricity and even obsessive behavior. In her book Marginalia, Jackson dedicates a chapter to “fanatic” readers who establish special relationships with particular books that become “dangerously emotional,” where the forms of interaction with particular volumes become, in her words, “manifestly over the top.”³⁶ What is not always certain, though, is wherein fanaticism resides for Jackson and precisely how her case studies “define the outer limits of common usage.”³⁷ Among her examples are three kinds of hybrid book forms: the commonplace book, which serves as a personal “filing system” with material culled from diverse sources; the “extra-illustrated” book, into which readers import decorative materials such as prints and magazine clippings; and, finally, treasured Bibles, which “[attract] supplementary materials, almost as an act of worship, certainly in a spirit of reverence.”³⁸ What appears to be the common denominator for these kinds of volumes is that readers apply to them a particular measure of system and enthusiasm. With Thomas Connary, on the other hand, we abandon routine conventionality and the somewhat eccentric to observe a proper fanatic at work.

The final chapter of this study examines the association that can sometimes exist between book annotation and obsession. We enter the realm of the personalized and obsessive to study a reader whose confrontation and collaboration with books appears compulsive at times. For Connary, the prodigious expansion of his books is the material effect of a bibliolatrous obsession and a desire to cling to words and pious proclamations. Pursuing these ideas further brings us into a discussion of issues of psychopathology and mental distress and an exploration of how the enhanced, inscribed book may function as a vessel for nostalgia, personal retrospection, and the retrieval of traumatic memories. Furthermore, by drawing on sources such as U.S. census records and nineteenth-century psychiatric manuals, we are able to understand something about Connary’s association with madness in the latter part of his life, when he increasingly came to feel the tenuous nature of physical and mental equilibrium.

Studying Thomas Connary’s book use reveals inscrutable eccentricity and a reader for whom the tangible presence of annotated books can alleviate mental afflictions. This is a relationship with books rooted in substance and physical instantiation, as enlarged volumes are being felt, handled, and experienced in routine sessions. But it is also a relationship based on the idea—one not uncommon and with incalculable manifestations through the ages—that books possess redemptive power and are worthy of important ritualized activity. At the core of the obsessive behavioral patterns characterized in this study is a deep consciousness of the book and its rich signifying power.

Epiphany

Laboring in books—writing marginalia and providing other forms of augmentation and decorative enhancement—means to become a co-creator, to infuse a book with additional meaning. In book use is found a space for textual and discursive meaning, and through it Connary maps his thoughts on subjects of theology and the moral life. But laboring in books is equally an aesthetic and devotional exercise, a prayerful activity that acknowledges God’s power and presence. Upsetting any bifurcation between surface and depth, interior and exterior that we may instinctively bring to such material, we will examine a mode of book use that fuses spirituality and the sacred with an attention to the manufacture and materiality of the printed book. The treasured object of the book, in its inscribed and augmented state, can preserve the owner’s past experiences of clarity and religious intensity.

The following attempts to reawaken the voice of this book collector—a voice that would not speak to us were it not for the accidental survival of his books and papers. For that reason, the writing that follows will be punctuated by quotations from Connary (and longer quotations than is the norm in our scholarship) in order to give a sense of a distinct voice and a distinct vocabulary forged by him for the activity of reading and handling books. Most notably, the five main parts of this study will be interspersed with short sections in which I allow Connary to recount his own religious, epiphanic experiences, while offering some comment on how the experiential dimension lies at the heart of his Catholicism and spiritual self-articulation. From early adulthood, Connary purports to have had a series of spiritual experiences of a felt relationship to the divinity, and these are recorded with considerable precision and narrative force in his annotated books. By structuring this exercise around extensive quotation of Connary’s own words, I hope to go some way toward bringing back to life a past reader and a remarkable book-centered devotion with some interesting mystico-theological nuance. In particular, the aim is to convey a sense of an idiosyncratic voice on the margins of history. Connary establishes his own language to capture what, for him, is the essence of devotional literacy and spiritual authenticity.

A reader can assert himself as author, and Connary tells and recounts and provides a considerable extension of the book’s signifying power. This study examines aspects of nonprofessional authorship and says something more broadly about the range of opportunities provided by the material book for recording and communicating religious fervor and personal history. But it is necessary to confront the constructed nature of the evidence under investigation. Connary’s writing is conditioned by memory, yearning, and narration, and it is as notable for its intensity as for its careful rhetorical craftsmanship, which draws on metaphorical and quasi-mystical registers. One voice entirely dominates the material, holding and asserting interpretive power. It is a voice of unquestionable sincerity, yet also, we need to recognize, one that offers its univocal, idealized depiction of a redemptive reading discipline and seeks to disseminate a distinct language for epiphany and Christian eschatology.

The following chapters shift the focus from a conventional understanding of the author and a perceived fixity of print toward a reader-oriented study of devotional and didactic writing. They explore in detail how books (always spelled in Connary’s notes with a capital B) are precious inscribed objects, and how the process of inscribing them becomes a form of partaking in the nature of the divine and a mode of prayer. Pursuing such ideas further means that we need to think about dimensions of presence, the sacred, redemption, affective and somatic reading experiences, epiphany, and deixis—dimensions that we are perhaps rather ill-equipped in the present intellectual climate to bring into our study of book history and the history of reading.³⁹ It is a central claim of this study that such dimensions are crucial to our attempts to understand the power of physical objects to materialize belief and to reconstruct the actual uses, individual and social, of religious writing in print and manuscript culture.