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“LABORING IN MY BOOKS”:THOMAS CONNARY’S BOOK ENHANCEMENTS

My work [is] in papers large and small—in newspapers—in numberless Books large and small of all kinds, and of every kind and sort, firmly embodied in the most beautiful material temporal property we now have everywhere in this world as most purely precious and necessary for us to have in it.

—Thomas Connary, note dated January 29, 1889, between page 214 and the end flyleaf of Julian of Norwich, Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love

Enhancing “the Blank Paper Surface Room”

The collection of Irish American literature surveyed in the previous chapter motivates Thomas Connary to be at his most creative as he decorates and annotates individual books in complex ways, making them the portable signifiers of his own religious identity. One question that needs to be addressed from the outset is how best to account for this type of material evidence. What Connary refers to as “laboring in my Books” involves a complex process of annotating and inserting handwritten notes, newspaper cuttings, drawings, letters, devotional prayers, and meditations. For want of a better term, and following a suggestion by Heather Jackson from her book Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, I will refer to this as a process of book enhancement.¹ Jackson acknowledges the absence of an apt term in our critical discourse and discusses several examples of the decorated and/or annotated book, introducing terms “that seem just about right for certain cases, but none that is adequate to the set as a whole. Among those rejected are fetish, icon, talisman, portfolio, album, scrapbook, and shrine. It might be that we need a new word altogether: bibliofile, perhaps, or BEPU—Book Enhanced for Personal Use.”²

Connary, as we will see, makes of his printed books what we may term composite volumes, or devotional miscellanies, which contain a wealth of material. To term his additions to his books “annotations” or “marginalia” fails to capture the diversity of practices in which he engages. Indeed, I will make use of most of the terms rejected by Jackson, attesting to the complexity of Connary’s engagement with the physical book. But I will be consistent about the terms “book enhancement” (the process) and “enhanced book” (the product) to describe the volumes that make up Connary’s library. By an “enhanced book” I have in mind a book that has been physically and materially enlarged—that is, a book that is made more voluminous through the addition of pages and miscellaneous objects. But I also have in mind the enhancement of a book’s symbolic and iconic properties. Ultimately, these understandings of the term “enhanced book” cannot be separated: laboring in books, and investing them with spiritual and imaginative power, is to turn books into prayers and testaments of personal faith and even to designate them as vessels of sacrality.

Thomas Connary began his project of laboring in books rather late in life, and it appears to have marked for him the culmination of a life of active and devoted Catholicism. The pattern of Connary’s annotation and enhancement practices looks something like this: starting from the early 1860s, we find little else than ownership inscriptions and occasional notes regarding purchase (price, method of procurement, etc.). When we enter the 1870s, Connary provides sporadic annotation—mostly in the form of transcribed poetry, biblical quotations, and extended prayers—much of which addresses members of his own family. It is from the final years of the 1870s, when Connary is in his sixties, that his book enhancement acquires momentum, and he begins to insert his own handwritten religious reflections into his books. He spends time decorating his volumes in the early years of the 1880s, and numerous items of poetry—either transcribed or cut out from various newspapers and Catholic magazines—find their way into the volumes as well. The addition of densely written pages of religious and moral affirmations becomes particularly abundant throughout the eighties and nineties; the last dated page found is from June 10, 1898, six months before the owner’s death at the age of eighty-four.