I am a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies at the University of Guelph, returning to Guelph after completing my M.A. in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto.
My academic interests range from the Arts & Crafts’ very own William Morris and his Kelmscott Press to the radical history of Toronto’s deeply cool Coach House Books and Kentville’s artful Gaspereau Press.
I caught the small press bug playing with nineteenth century wood type in the Bibliography Room at Massey College and am forever grateful to the late and dearly beloved Nelson Adams.
My current project investigates how small press books make bookmakers feel and the ways in which bookmakers work to make us feel about and as a result of small press books in turn. I pay particular attention to how aesthetics-driven modes of production have historically been used to politically mobilize bookmakers (“you are what you make”) and imagined readers (“you are what you read”) alike.
I examine bookmaking as a redemptive act that invests both small presswork itself and the fruits of small press labour as politically reparative and ask: what kinds of promises are contemporary books and bookmaking invested with? How are these promises shifted when considered cross-medially? And how might tracing the affective affordances of books and bookmaking help us better imagine and design future forms of the book?
Beyond thinking through the topics signaled above, this is a space for general musings and works-in-progress.
For a quick-ish response, you can send electronic mail to abilemak [at] gmail [dot] com
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