The respondents were also emphatic that library history should be defined broadly enough to include the exciting research and writing being done today under the rubric of book history. For example, the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society builds on that institution s vast collection of American imprints issued before 1876. Similarly, the new Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America at the University of Wisconsin-Madison draws on the combined resources of the libraries of the university and of the Wisconsin State Historical Society. To be sure, useful works on Virginia library history exist already. A century ago defensive Virginia antiquarians collected data, usually from wills and estate settlements, to prove that book ownership in colonial Virginia had been more widespread than smug historians from New England had claimed.
Much work remains to be done.
One promising area is the study of reading and readers. Librarians know that books have power, that reading helps to forge personal identity and that common reading can create communities. Books express and enforce social and cultural conventions, yet reading can also help loosen those bonds and subvert the power of the status quo. Inventories of imprints, the printed works produced in a particular place, have been compiled for Abingdon, Fredericksburg, Norfolk, Petersburg, Richmond, and Winchester, usually through 1876, and also for early German-language imprints in Virginia. The seeds of information in these volumes might flower into studies of the book trade and patterns of reading in Virginia before and after the Civil War, research projects that could also chart the emergence of a national market for printed books and magazines.