Book History and Fanfiction

I'm a graduate student of book history and library science. I post about my research, fic through a book historical lens, and analysis of fanfiction practices. Fan of: libraries, reading practices, access, niche pamphlets and elephant folios, the inexhaustible patience of Charlton Hinman; ATLA, She-Ra, PJO, LO, Austen, Alcott, +many more. she/hers

[sbooksbowm]

research masterpost

links to my published research & posts about my 2020 dissertation

Publications on Fanbinding

These are articles I have published on fanbinding (it’s been a busy year, as you can see!) Thanks to @renegadepublishing​ for always supporting the work of aca-fans.

“Binding fan fiction and reexamining book production models.” Transformative Works and Culture (March 2022).

w/ Kim Kennedy, “Reframing Monetization: Compensatory Practices and Generating a Hybrid Economy in Fanbinding Commissions.” Humanities (May 2022).

w/ Kim Kennedy, “Fanbinding and a Community-Generated Information Environment.” Proceedings from the Document Academy (August 2022).

Follow the Fans: The Real Live Dissertation

you can read the dissertation in full at this Google Drive link! I will keep this research masterpost here in some form so that anyone interested can look at how things changed over time (if that’s your jam, god speed)

Yes, you can totally send this to your friends, that’s why it’s on the internet

If you are interested in citing this dissertation in further scholarly work, please message me. I will almost definitely say yes, but let’s talk about it! Especially if you’re interested in the bookbinding chapter, we should hash out any ethics issues before I sign off. 

Intro to Le Stuff

what will you find on this blog?

what am I actually talking about?

affirmational v transformational fic

Assorted Rage Posts

AC - additional commentary; OP - original post

why fandom needs to confront its racism (among other things) [AC]

why fanfiction is folklore [AC]

why book history should pay attention to fanfiction [AC]

why unsolicited feedback doesn’t really fit in w fandom community [AC]

why snooty book culture is historically unfounded  [AC]

why coffeeshop AUs are a modern pastoralist fantasy [AC]

why fanfiction is a descendent of women’s coterie manuscript practices [AC]

why the gendering of fandom marginalizes it [AC]

why we write out of spite [AC]

why intimacy is fundamental to fandom [AC]

why fic preservation is important [AC]

why fanfiction is a preservation mechanism [AC]

why people enter fandom obliquely [AC]

why Penguin Books has a Penguin logo (and other history too) [OP]

why the word ‘ghost’ has an ‘h’ in it [OP]

why contradictions in fandom are actually a good thing [AC]

why fandom vocabulary shifts [AC]

research progress posts below the cut

The ‘Does This Make Sense?’ Check: Chapter Summaries

Introduction - Part 1 

Introduction - Part 2, fandom communication circuit

Chapter 1 - history of fannish media

Chapter 2 - Part 1, writer function

Chapter 2 - Part 2, writerly texts

Chapter 2 - Part 3, fannish frame of reference

Chapter 3 - Part 1, intertextuality and reader recognition

Chapter 3 - Part 2, paratexts and readers

Chapter 3 - Part 3, reading experience and community boundaries

Chapter 4 - Part 1, Introduction to The Bookbinders

Chapter 4 - Part 2, Methodology and Motivation

Chapter 4 - Part 3, Reciprocation and completing the fandom communication circuit

Chapter 4 - Part 4, Complicating the traditional publishing narrative

Chapter 4 - Part 5, The Redundancy of Preservation

Weekly Wrap Ups

10 July

17 July

24&31 July

7 August

14 August

21 August

27 August

4 September

11 September

18 September

25 September

2 October 

9 October 

16 October

23 October

[doomsday-dj]

There was recently a copyright infringement case in YA and I need everyone to know that the following sentence was in the legal decision:

“Hot, sexy, dangerous boys, central to virtually all young adult romance novels, cannot be copyrighted.”

[kuttithevangu]

“Regarding setting, the court held that both works taking place in Alaska high schools was not protectable because Alaska is a public place and setting a teen novel in a high school is a common genre convention.”

Freeman v. Deebs-Elkenaney | Loeb & Loeb LLP

Freeman v. Deebs-Elkenaney | Loeb & Loeb LLP

[kogiopsis]

I've read the entire decision (skimming over the purely legal precedent/definitions bit) and here are some of my favorite bits:

[bemusedlybespectacled]

“indeed, it seems that the Pacific Northwest (Twilight) is a common locale for finding vampires and werewolves at a high school” oh my god

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Can't wait to run across this drama summarised in a three hour video essay

[theprofessional-amateur]

Recently on Unhelpful File Labels in the Archives:

On-Going Project. Folders were empty.

Well Written Articles, 1999. There were no articles in this folder. There were a lot of budget reports though.

Stuff. You are killing me smalls.

Section 569-055 Knowingly burning or exploding. This was just papers shoved between files, I have a lot of questions and zero answers.

[theprofessional-amateur]

Some previous “winners”

Miscellaneous Old Stuff. *long sigh*

Other Idiocy. Honestly, this one was fitting.

(R) Man Claws. I have so many questions. Like, SO many

Keep for historical reasons. Neat.

Unprocessed Internal Provenance. Or how I answer the question “so what brings you to therapy?”

[theprofessional-amateur]

•••Possibilities for 2005••• you can really feel the optimism, which almost makes up for the pile of nonsense

[theprofessional-amateur]

Dogs Against Drugs. Ok McGruff.

[theprofessional-amateur]

The Lawsuit. Because in a series of legal files for an org over 100 years old, I am sure there is only one.

[theprofessional-amateur]

Other Crazy. Not to be confused with “other idiocy” which is already in this thread.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Okay but “Unprocessed Internal Provenance” is legit chilling.

[tapacamino]

Some gems from when I worked in the entomology department of a museum:

Bonus calendar appointment in my Outlook:

[historicity-was-already-taken]

[freeshavacado]

you can only reblog this today

[chelmnik]

thinking about how much less funny and charming goncharov would have been if the lore had been shaped after genai took off. like part of the beauty of people making goncharov gifsets and the like was the collage work of finding shots from new hollywood movies that could plausibly have come from the soviet neapolitan mafia film goncharov - it relied on people’s literacy in the history of film! whereas now you would, even with the broad genai taboo on tumblr, have a ton of people just generating “robert de niro playing soviet hitman in 70s movie” instantly at vast scale and it wouldn’t look quite right cause it’s not made out of Real Movie… thinking about how the meme really blew up in 2022 when image generation was getting a lot of attention but still kind of janky and certainly not omnipresent the way it is now. our last pre-slop meme…

[skiplo-wave]

From bottom of my heart

Putting folks hard work through a machine you don’t deserve call yourself fan of art.

[sionnualanicheallachain]

I think there's actually an additional level of betrayal here.

When I was a teenager and learning about critiquing, one of the things I was explicitly taught was that you don't share other people's manuscripts without permission, full stop. If you're critiquing someone's story, you don't show that draft to your partner, or your friend, or anyone, no matter how good or how bad or how funny or how weird or how whatever you think it is. You have been extended a degree of trust, but that does not come with the right to extend that trust to someone else on the author's behalf.

So even before you get to don't feed other people's work into AI, there's the very basic and technology-agnostic social contract of if you are critiquing someone else's draft, the permission to read it only extends to you and the feedback you provide should only be coming from you. Feeding it into AI is adding insult to injury, but even if you took the AI out of it and substituted another human reader it would still be Super Not Okay.

[the-haiku-bot]

I think there’s actually

an additional level

of betrayal here.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[wildmansters]

The thing that really boils my potatoes about AI in general is that I have been a creative professional for over a decade now and the devil has ALWAYS been in the details. Big and small, I've had single-person businesses rip me to shreds over how their colors turned out on newsprint, and have worked with huge companies with THICK brand guidelines with every detail of their brand identity laid out and enforced with an iron fist.

But I guess all of that stuff doesn't matter anymore? Who gives a fuck if this AI generated baby has six fingers, that mom-and-pop shop is still going to use it. That rug from Temu says Happy Thanksgivirg? Oh well haha it's just a silly funny thing now (nevermind that you never would have given a B-grade item from a craft show the same consideration). I don't actually care that the AI Coca-cola ad has a truck that changes size every scene, but I can't help but think about how, if it had been some poor underpaid artist, they would have been laughed out of the building.

I don't really know how to put it in a succint way but it just feels all the more obvious how much more grace and flexibility has always been possible but never offered.

[renegadeguild]

Binderary 2026: Week One

All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!

Here’s the list of who’s running the week 1 workshops:

Beginner's Primer: Bookbinding Vocabulary and Parts of the Book: @silentsunpress Workshop Safety: catz Makin' the VIP Work for You!: @simply-sithel Endbands (French Double Core): @celestial-sphere-press Designing a Book in Affinity 3 (Beginner): @kate2kat Typesetting in Microsoft Powerpoint: mahoganydoodles

[akaanmo]

i think i just witnessed a miracle

[fractiousrvt]

There is always hope

[hunybody]

please read this substack about pantone choosing cloud dancer for color of the year 2026

[three--rings]

No really, you should read it.

[therapatical]

you know what has sincerely irked me ever since I saw the announcement?

the shade.....is inconsistent across the marketing.

this image is the main one for most of the announcements about it:

enhance

enhance some more

now let's look at the actual swatch

IT'S NOT THE SAME. THEY'RE DIFFERENT COLORS. I WILL PUT THEM SIDE BY SIDE TO PROVE IT:

those are two completely different colors. literally. those are not the same color. the one in the ad is distinctly more warm toned & brighter!!!!!!!!

LIESSSSSSSS

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I'm even angrier now, I mean people were saying it was just Landlord White but that really truly is Landlord White. All the colour scientists in the world got together to determine which shade of white-ish was the most depressing shade possible. Which shade made people look at it and instinctively think "I am staring at the wall of a for-profit prison into which I have been confined on false charges". And they gazed upon what they had wrought and realised that there was no justifying their decision to the public, so they straightup lied about what their decision was in the press release. And the pit they had dug themselves was so deep that even their significantly better lie drew universal disdain.

[rythyme]

hi so game changer was literally a stucky hockey AU anyway how is your day going

[watertightvines]

Oh, it’s both better and worse than that!

It was original fiction that she turned into a Stucky AU so she could post it to AO3 for reader feedback and then turned back into its original form once she started submitting to publishers.

You’ve heard of filing off the fanfic serial numbers, now get ready for creating fraudulent serial numbers for original fiction.

[theoutcastrogue]

Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

“We survived, but it wiped out the library,” Internet Archive’s founder says.

"This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas."

[sweaterkittensahoy]

I love the Internet Archive. As a crocheter who loves vintage patterns and has found very recent books (2000s+) that are out of print because of the archive, i cannot say enough nice things about it.

But the lawsuit was about the Archive knowing and continuing to scan books that were IN COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES WHERE THE ARCHIVE IS INCORPORATED AS A CHARITY.

Which is very important to remember when seeing tweets like this:

1984 is NOT out of copyright in the United States. Where the Internet Archive is incorporated. And also, what a wild fucking choice to plant a flag in when 1984 is so absolutely and completely not some nearly lost novel that may still technically be in copyright but is out of print and would not be known by anyone if the archive didn't do its work.

All the Archive had to do to not lose a lot of those books was to NOT FUCKING VIOLATE COPYRIGHT ON BOOKS THAT ARE SUPER WELL-KNOWN LIKE FUCKING 1984.

Like, there's a lot of crochet books that aren't technically out of copyright but still scanned and up there because crochet books go out of print pretty easily and it's understood no one's looking to fight over the copyright for a book that's not gonna sell any real amount of "legit" copies, so who gives a shit.

I love the archive. I want it to continue. It's one thing to keep alive websites and resources that will disappear without their help. It's another to pretend like violating a publisher's rights while claiming it's for the greater good. There are legal ways to get these books. Request them at your library. Buy them. Write an email to the author to see if they'll just send you a copy.

Internet Archive shit the bed by willfully and knowingly scanning and sharing a bunch of Hatchett's backlist, and Hatchett had every right to take them to court for it. To see them still milking the "omg copyright holders are so mean!!!" take is really fucking annoying.

[garlend]

And to be clear, "is hosting 1984 for free access immoral?" is a completely irrelevant question. What's important is that the internet archive threatens hosting everything else they host by hosting 1984.

[barbwritesstuff]

I have learnt today that my library refers to me as 'the specific and highly active user' and has denied some of my purchase requests because 'we can't skew the collection too much toward the taste of the specific and highly active user'.

I did suggest roughly 100 vampire books for purchase last year. I think this probably has something to do with that.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

op is there any particular reason the librarians would feel safer not invoking you by name

[alexanderwales]

Merriam/Webster RPF

[alexanderwales]

I'm pretty sure that Noah Webster and George Merriam never met in real life, and also, there's a 45 year age gap. But what if ... ? If we allow for some minor historical inaccuracies, we could really get this ball rolling.

[theothin]

[motherblackcap]

[ID: an xkcd comic, showing three people looking at a computer, with one of them at down and typing at it. They type the following:

"Dear internet: We, the current editors of Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style", must—with great reluctance—clarify a point of orthography: "Strunk & White" should be used for the style manual and "Strunk/White" for the erotic fan fiction pairing." /End ID]

[aropride]

walking into a museum and the little info cards by each artwork just says "credit to the artist!" "lmk if ur the artist and want me to tag u" "found this on pinterest :)"

[aropride]

[lelif]

the beauty of life

- // @fairycosmos // ? // - // @cassidyshotchocolate // - // - // elsie de wolfe// @podencos // afternoon on a hill, edna st. vincent millay// rien ne va plus, margarita karapanou, tr. by karen emmerich// - // - // @ annalauraart on instagram// culpable, joy sullivan// - // @ jordanklancaster on instagram// @ niall.breen.comics on instagram// agatha christie// @plasticlove1984 //sweeter than fiction, taylor swift// the summer day, mary oliver

[technofeudalism]

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

[technofeudalism]

since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

A Dark Room - text-based science fiction role-playing game.

corru.observer - science fiction adventure web game.

Improbable Island - old-school text adventure game.

Candy Box 2 - incremental clicker game that evolves into RPG.

Arcanum - open source wizard clicker game.

sandspiel, Powder Game, Powder Game 2, The Powder Toy - more sand physics games.

Orb.Farm - fishtank simulator.

Façade - experimental game with a real-time interactive narrative where you try to fix a failing marriage.

The Catacombs of Solaris - trippy art game.

Yume Nikki Online - online version of the surreal classic plus fangames.

The Barncle Goose Experiment - combine element/alchemy game based on antique theories of abiogenesis.

Fallen London - free-to-play text-based open world RPG.

Nested - very unique text-based universe expanding game. described as possibly @orteil42's favorite thing he's ever made.

The Process of Elimination - interactive web novel (by @hypertextdog)

Discworld MUD - multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books.

Horse Master - surreal text game about training a horse.

EYEZMAZE - flash (RIP) or HTML5-based puzzle games.

You Are Jeff Bezos - text game. spend Jeff Bezos' fortune.

The Password Game - challenging puzzle game where you have to meet password requirements (by neal)

Universal Paperclips - incremental paperclip making game.

Half-Earth - planetary disaster planning game where you try to save the world using socialism.

ChooseYourStory - community-driven website centered on CYOA style story games.

PhD Simulator - random event based text game. make your choice each month and see if you can graduate on time.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - open source roguelike.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - turn-based survival roguelike set in the modern day.

Nethack - open source roguelike originally released in 1987.

FarmRPG - simple, mobile-friendly, text-based farming RPG.

Kingdom of Loathing - browser-based community MMORPG.

PokeRogue - browser-based Pokemon roguelike

Tools

Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)

Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.

Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)

Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.

PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

Non-Games

Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.

Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.

17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.

Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.

The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)

Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)

Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)

If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.

r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.

r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.

thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.