313. Tracking Changes: An Interview with Bowling Green Browne Pop Culture Library Archivist Steve Ammidown

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Welcome to episode number 313 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and today I am talking with Steve Ammidown. Steve is the Manuscripts & Outreach Archivist at the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University. I have had to try to say that flawlessly about four times because I kept stuttering. It’s a really long title, but it’s really cool! We’re going to talk about what Steve’s job title actually means and what it is that he does, plus what the Browne Popular Culture Library has within its collection. Here are some sample items: board games, liquor decanters, promotional items, Pogs, pins, cookbooks, marketing ephemera, books, and many, many other cool things. All of those items live in the pop culture library. We’re going to talk about some of the more interesting parts of the collection, such as the fanzines, and the parts he’s currently developing. March 2019 is the fiftieth anniversary of the library, so they are also looking at what more they can do in the future, including focusing on their romance collection, which is hella substantial – that’s an official library term, by the way. We’re also discussing the challenges of being an archivist in a digital age and how the idea of a manuscript collection is changing, what with all of the shifts in the way we write and record things. We also talk about the library’s RWA collection, their category romance collection, their manuscript and papers archive from about forty-five different romance writers, and obviously the romance genre collection as well. Plus, Steve tells us about romances he’s reading and his impression of the genre as someone who, who discovered it as an adult. In one of the library’s recent tweets, Steve quoted Elizabeth Denlinger, who said, “It is a feminist act to preserve stuff that women have done and written.” Well, I entirely agree, and I really want to visit this library some day, so let’s take a road trip, and until then, let’s find out more about the Bowling Green State library.

This episode is brought to you by Wedding the Widow by Jenna Jaxon. Historical romance author Jenna Jaxon continues The Widows’ Club, a new Regency romance series centered around a group of women widowed by the Napoleonic Wars. With the tragedy behind them, one by one the widows of Lyttlefield Park are getting restless and ready to embrace the future. Of all the widows, Elizabeth Easton seems least likely to remarry. She is devoted to the memory of her late husband. Which is why she’s so shocked to be overtaken by passion during a harvest festival, succumbing to an unforgettable interlude with the handsome Lord Brack. Wedding the Widow by Jenna Jaxon is on sale now wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

Each episode receives a transcript, as you know, and each transcript is hand compiled by garlicknitter. Thank you, garlicknitter! This week’s podcast transcript is brought to you by Going Down Easy by Erin Nicholas. Hot fling or real thing? There are no Big Easy answers in Going Down Easy, the first in New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Erin Nicholas’s sultry new Boys of the Big Easy series. As far as flings go, single dad Gabe Trahan is pretty sure that Addison Sloan is his best bet. Once a month, Addison comes to New Orleans and then It Is On. Until Addison returns to New York, it’s just hot, happily-no-strings-attached sex. And beignets. And jazz. But lately for Gabe, it isn’t nearly enough… Sure, maybe Addison’s gotten a bit hooked on Gabe. After all, who can resist a guy who’s so sexy, so charming, so…available? But maybe he’s too available for her right now. Addison’s just moved to New Orleans, and relationships are definitely off the table. Besides, guys always bail when they learn her secret: that she’s a single mom. Only Gabe’s not running. Worse, he’s thrilled. But Addison never signed up for ever-after romance, and Gabe won’t settle for anything less. Now it’s a battle of wills, and when it comes to the woman he’s falling for, Gabe isn’t above playing a little dirty. Readers who love New Orleans, hot dads, and sexy contemporary romance will love Going Down Easy. Going Down Easy by Erin Nicholas is published by Montlake Romance. It goes on sale August 28th and will be available wherever books are sold.

We have a podcast Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com/SmartBitches, and Patreon pledges make a deeply appreciated difference in my ability to keep the show going, maintain all of the nifty equipment that I use, including the sound box that the cats are obsessed with, and also helps me commission transcripts for older episodes in our archives. I also ask the Patreon community for interview questions for upcoming guests, so if you would like to be part of the community, have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches.

I also want to thank some of the Patreon folks personally, so to Katherine, Kristen, Laura, Megan, and Jennifer Ann, thank you so much for being part of the Patreon.

Are there other ways to support the podcasts that you love? Absolutely! Leave a review however you listen. A lot of people talk specifically about Apple Podcasts, but however you’re listening is totally nifty, and if you leave a review there, that’s rad. You can also tell a friend or subscribe, whatever works, but if I’m in your eardrums right now, thank you! I’m honored to be here.

After the interview I have terrible jokes and information about music, but now, it’s podcast time. Let’s do this.

[music]

Steve Ammidown: My name is Steve Ammidown. I’m the Manuscripts & Outreach Archivist at the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.

Sarah: So what exactly is your, is your job? What is it exactly that you do? ‘Cause that’s a really awesome title; that’s, like, in my top three library titles that you’ve got there.

Steve: It’s really long when you add it to the university name. So I have two jobs: one is to process our collections relating to both romance and other things pop culture-y, so manuscript collections and personal papers and things like that, and then the other half of my job is to get out there and talk about it so that people actually come in and use our stuff, because otherwise it’s just a bunch of paperweights on a shelf!

Sarah: Right, obviously.

Steve: Yeah.

Sarah: Now, what, what sorts of things are in the Browne library? If someone has never been there or they just sort of bump into one of your social media feeds, you get a very small sense of what the library holds. What’s actually in the Browne library?

Steve: So it’s a good question. There’s a little bit of everything relating to popular culture, mostly in the 20th century. So it’s everything from popular fiction, romance included, but also mystery, science fiction, your sort of airport fiction – you know, the things you’d buy at the airport gift shop – and then it goes over into the slightly weird, where we get into comic books, which are not a typical academic library collection; comic art; pin-back buttons are a big collection of ours; matchbooks; trading cards; Pogs – we have a collection of Pogs.

Sarah: I love this. This has just made my day!

Steve: [Laughs] We have a, a pretty good size collection of Potato Heads.

Sarah: Amazing!

Steve: Toys of all sorts; movie-, movie-related items, including press kits, scripts, posters.

Sarah: Weird promotional items.

Steve: Weir-, very strange promotional items. It’s, it’s really anything relating to pop culture in the last probably hundred and fifty years? Board games –

Sarah: Yeah.

Steve: – card games, liquor decanters.

Sarah: Well, you have to put your liquor somewhere.

Steve: Exactly, and it –

Sarah: Duh.

Steve: – has to look like an airplane or a dog; otherwise, what’s the point?

Sarah: There is really no point.

Steve: Yeah. [Laughs]

Sarah: Now, one thing I know you do have is fanzines, which I find astonishingly cool! How many fanzines do you have, and what topics are they about?

Steve: Oh, there are thousands. I’ve never tried to count. We have a pretty broad range of fanzines for, for our sort of collection. It includes sort of your typical science fiction zines – you know, Star Trek, obviously – as well as Tolkien, sort of Lord of the Rings zines. Cleveland Amory had some zine fans –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Steve: – which is strange, but fun –

Sarah: Okay!

Steve: – as well as L. Frank Baum, the Wizard of Oz folks. And then we have a whole other collection of zines that is dedicated to the board game Diplomacy, which became sort of a play-by-mail sensation in the 1960s and ‘70s. That all came from one collector, and it’s, it, in and of itself, is six or seven thousand zines.

Sarah: Wow.

Steve: And then the rest of it is, is massive as well. And we have a small collection of, of ‘90s and later feminist zines from that era, sort of the more modern what we would think of as a zine now.

Sarah: Right. So in terms of library jobs, is this one of the coolest library jobs?

Steve: It, I, I think it is?

Sarah: Like, do you roll into work every day going, this is amazing!

Steve: I –

Sarah: I hope I’m not dreaming.

Steve: Yeah, I mean, I, I sort of plop down in my chair every morning with sixteen thousand category romances outside my door, and I think –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Steve: – how did I end up here? [Laughs]

Sarah: What is happening?

Steve: Exactly. I, you know, it was one of those jobs, I, I was working in the DC area, and this job came up, and my wife said, you have to apply for this job, because when she asked me after I graduated with my library degree, what sort of place do you want to work? And I said, I want to work in a pop culture collection. And so three years later, I applied for this job, and, and here we are. And it’s –

Sarah: That’s incredible.

Steve: – I pinch myself on a pretty regular basis.

Sarah: I, I, I do the same thing for my job –

Steve: I, I can imagine.

Sarah: – I totally understand.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I wake up and go, oh my God, this is my job? This is amazing; I love this.

Steve: Exactly.

Sarah: So as an archivist, how do you decide what artifacts and pieces of ephemera and other things to acquire and add to the library? ‘Cause there’s a lot of stuff in pop culture –

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and pop culture generates a lot of stuff.

Steve: It, it does, and we are nearing our fiftieth anniversary here.

Sarah: Ooh, congratulations!

Steve: Thank you! It’ll be March 12th, I think, somewhere around there. And, and we, we occupy an entire floor of the, the Bowling Green library, and we are always packed to the seams.

Sarah: Of course.

Steve: And so now my job and, and my boss’s job is to sit down and say, okay, so what do we do really well now? And how do we collect on that? And so we’ve sort of focused on romance over the last couple of years because it’s one of the, the collections we have that nobody else really does.

Sarah: No, no one else does really.

Steve: Yeah, and certainly not at the size and volume that we do. So we focused on that; we focused on some mystery and adventure fiction stuff, but, you know, we’re always willing to at least look at collections. We got, last year, at the end of the year, we got a, a couple of really interesting ones: one was a doll collection from sort of the early to mid 20th century.

Sarah: Ooh, creepy? Creepy dolls?

Steve: A little! A little, some of them –

Sarah: Yes!

Steve: – are a little creepy.

Sarah: Awesome!

Steve: But the, the donor was, you know, a friend of the library and was really passionate, and what we realized is looking at sort of our toy selection and things like that, a lot of what had been collected was very male-centric –

Sarah: Right.

Steve: – and so the doll collection gives us a chance to get into sort of girl culture of that time. You know, we had sort of teen magazines and, you know, Nancy Drew novels and things like that, but, but we hadn’t really collected the, the dolls, the toys that, that girls were playing with at the same time, so we look for those very specific things. Or then we get a collection like the Mickey Spillane manuscripts, where someone contacted us out of the blue, and you, you don’t say no to a collection like that. [Laughs] It’s –

Sarah: No! No.

Steve: There, there is no other collection of Mickey Spillane manuscripts of this number. There’s a collection in Minnesota that has a single manuscript, but we have –

Sarah: [Whispers] Wow!

Steve: – there are manuscripts for almost all of his books, several of which were saved from a fire and, and have these really cool burn marks on them and really play into, like, the Mickey Spillane –

Sarah: Whoa!

Steve: – ethos.

Sarah: That’s amazing!

Steve: And there’s some of his stuff from his comic book days and, and all sorts of things. So you never know what’s going to come through the door, so we try to stay open, but we’re looking to sort of plug in specific holes. You know –

Sarah: Of course.

Steve: – if we know there’s a gap, we’ll, we’ll try to fill that.

Sarah: Right.

Steve: Or if something is unbearably cool, we’ll just jump at it.

Sarah: Right, like, I’m sure that the entire Harry Potter universe, you were like, well, yeah, bring me all of that. All of it. All, please.

Steve: [Laughs] I wish! Actually, our Harry Potter collection could be a lot bigger. I really, I kind of –

Sarah: You know –

Steve: – wish it was, but a lot of the ephemera, a lot of the toys and ephemera we have are kind of unique?

Sarah: Yes, I, I know you did a display of the rare and unique Harry Potter items. I wanted to ask you what some of them were.

Steve: Yeah, we have, it, it looks like – I, you know, I’m going to get it wrong, ‘cause I haven’t read the books in about fifteen years, but it looks like a little potion-making kit? –

Sarah: Ooh!

Steve: – that appears to have been a promotional item from the Chamber of Secrets movie.

Sarah: Cool!

Steve: Which I – and, and no one knows how it got here, which is also a problem with pop culture items is it’s hard to know where they came from. You know, we have a wand; we have a, you know, Harry’s owl; we have, it, it’s a pillow that looks like –

Sarah: Oh, Hedwig, yeah.

Steve: Hedwig, yes, sorry. [Laughs]

Sarah: That’s okay!

Steve: It’s, it’s a Hedwig pillow. There, it’s, there’s all sorts of stuff, and then we have all, obviously the movies; we have some press kits that go along with those that have still images and character outlines and things, which are always really interesting, because it, it speaks to another element of the marketing of the movie.

Sarah: And a lot of the times, marketing and promotional materials are treated as very much disposable items; they’re meant to talk about a very specific thing at a very specific time –

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – but the way something is marketed at the time versus the way that it’s perceived in the present can be very different things.

Steve: It’s, yeah, and it’s absolutely vital to sort of understanding, as you said, how it was understood at the moment.

Sarah: Right.

Steve: You know, we are, you know, fifty years from, removed from the, the release of Vertigo or, or 2001, but if you can go back and look at how the ads were written, you get a real sense of, of what the marketing was like and what the headspace was for, for people who were trying to, to sell this movie to, to viewers.

Sarah: It makes me think of, do you guys have the older issues of Sassy magazine? Do you have those?

Steve: We do, yes.

Sarah: Okay, I am of an age, I’m forty-three, and that was exactly –

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – the magazine that, for me, is what Teen Vogue is for a lot of people right now.

Steve: Right, right.

Sarah: And I look at those older issues, and, like, I, I can sometimes find them digitally, and I can sometimes find them very cheaply on eBay, but I remember (a) for me, as a teenager, they were completely disposable. We didn’t even recycle back then! I just tossed them.

Steve: Right, yeah.

Sarah: But it informed so much of how I think of myself as a female-identifying person, but I had no idea that that’s what was happening at the time, so when I go back and look at them, and I look at, like, the ads, even –

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – it’s, it’s incredibly illustrative of how a publication talked to young women at that time.

Steve: Absolutely! And, and with something like Sassy, it’s also a window into zine culture of the time and music culture of the time, and, and so it covers all these angles, so we’ve collected Sassy and Teen and Interview and some of these things –

Sarah: Yep.

Steve: – as, as this example of, of these sort of slices of time. Even e-, even Entertainment Weekly, we have a, a pretty full run of Entertainment Weekly, but it, it’s important, because you understand how TV shows and movies were being talked about at the moment they were released, before they became –

Sarah: Yes.

Steve: – popular or flops or whatever.

Sarah: Yes: this is how we think we’re going to talk about this thing versus it’s already out: here’s how we’re responding to people –

Steve: Right.

Sarah: – other people talking about this thing. It’s a totally different conversation; it’s the difference between promotional material for a book and a review of a book. They’re not the same thing.

Steve: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Sarah: So as an archivist – this is a, a bit of a weird question, but I was looking through some of the images of your collection, and you have a lot of manuscripts, like original romance novels written out on what looks like a steno pad.

Steve: Yes. We’re –

Sarah: And books –

Steve: Yeah.

Sarah: – books are not written like that as much anymore.

Steve: No.

Sarah: What, what can you do as an archivist when, when we’re writing things digitally, and we’re publishing e-books, and there isn’t a physical ephemera necessarily to go with the creation of a, of a book?

Steve: So that’s something that, that we are struggling with, especially as a popular culture library –

Sarah: Right, of course.

Steve: – ‘cause we’re collecting right now for right now. And it’s something we’re struggling with. We, we have some, some pilot programs in place to try and, and work on collecting things, but especially with things like e-books, you know, an author can go in and change it, or Amazon can go in and change it.

Sarah: Of course!

Steve: So, you know, making – you know, and then you have to decide, do we want the original version as published, or do we want the, you know, the one that is sort of the author’s perfected version?

Sarah: Yep. The director’s cut, as it were.

Steve: Right, exactly, and, and I think for us it would be better to have, usually the, the original version is the more interesting. So, yeah, so we want to encourage authors to save PDFs – as, as sort of backwards as that sounds – to save PDFs of their work.

Sarah: No, that makes total sense! It’s a digital image of what they’re doing.

Steve: Yeah. And, and Word files and, and things like that. You know, part of the, as you said, part of the older collection is handwritten stuff and proofs that had, you know, had red pencil on them. You know, we don’t get that anymore. That’s –

Sarah: No.

Steve: – that’s gone by the wayside. We’re trying to encourage authors to, to save some of the stuff in their own files so that when it comes to I want to give my papers to X, you know, they, they have something to give.

Sarah: Right, it’s –

Steve: And it’s also –

Sarah: – not just a thumb drive.

Steve: And, and it’s different for archivists too, because our, we are used to waiting until the person dies or until they’ve retired from whatever profession they’re in, and now it’s almost like the archivist has to be there when you sign that first contract to say, hey, you should save this in this format, and so that’s – some of the messaging we’re trying to work on is this idea that we, we as an archives want to document the process, the product, and the response. So we, we want to document the writer’s process and the editor’s process and all of these other things that go into the product of the book, but we have to do that digitally now, in addition to paper, so, you know, we want people to save as much as they possibly can. [Laughs] And correspondence is another thing: you know, emails are, are a very different thing than collecting things on letterhead.

Sarah: Very different.

Steve: And the National Archives has not, you know, fully figured out how to collect email, other than just grab as much as you can, so if they haven’t figured it out, we – [laughs] – we don’t really have a chance, other than collect as much as you can.

Sarah: Right, and how, as an archivist, do you – like, I, I don’t think I have the Track Changes version of my second book.

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: I probably do somewhere, but even then, how do you, how do you archive that as a piece of the process where I, as the author, look back and think, wow, I had two really cool, intelligent editors who made me a better writer – ‘cause the thing about learning to write on the internet is that word count is a meaningless concept and you don’t ever have to stop, whereas if you have an editor who’s working to physical page numbers, they’re like, yeah, no. No. You cannot turn in a hundred, ten thousand, million one and ninety.

Steve: Right, right.

Sarah: So I have that part of my own –

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – my own process, but how do you, how do you save a document with Track Changes windows on it so that you can see the conversation about the thing in progress?

Steve: That’s a good question, and it’s something that, that I have not been able to figure out the best way to do this at this point for us.

Sarah: No, me neither.

Steve: You know, what a lot of places do is, they will just image your hard drive? And take everything on the hard drive –

Sarah: Oh, that makes sense.

Steve: – in the state it’s in.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Oh God! Delete all of your porn files, people! Delete all that stuff you downloaded that you don’t want anyone to see! [Laughs]

Steve: Right, right. Well, like, if you go to, if you go to Emory University down in Atlanta and visit their special collections –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Steve: – you can work on Salman Rushdie’s computer. They have –

Sarah: Duuude!

Steve: – they have found a way to image his hard drive in such a way that you can interact with all the files and, and see, see how those things work.

Sarah: Dude!

Steve: So that’s kind of the future, but that’s the future for institutions that have the, the funds and the technology to do those things. So we’re, we are doing the best we can is, is really the answer I can give at this point. [Laughs] It is, it is.

Sarah: That’s a hard question. So what is some of the weird, weirder stuff that you have related to romance? Like, I think you guys have a Nora Roberts bobblehead, right?

Steve: No. We have a Nora Roberts tissue box.

Sarah: But you don’t have a bobblehead?

Steve: I don’t think we have a bobblehead.

Sarah: If I have a bobblehead, I will send you the bobblehead.

Steve: Okay. I would love –

Sarah: A bobblehead was –

Steve: – love to have that! [Laughs]

Sarah: – it was for, the bobblehead was for the Hager-, Hagerstown Suns; she threw out the first pitch, and the first, you know, one thousand people got a Nora Roberts bobblehead!

Steve: Oh wow! That’s so awesome!

Sarah: Yeah, I’m pretty sure I – I mean –

Steve: I was not aware of that. I’ll have to, I’ll have to see if I can find one of those.

Sarah: If I have one, I, I will commit to sending it to you.

Steve: Okay.

Sarah: I just have to, I’m not going to dig it out of my closet while I’m recording –

Steve: That’s all right.

Sarah: – ‘cause that would be a terrible sound file for everyone involved.

Steve: [Laughs] Exactly.

Sarah: But what are some of the weirder things that you have in the collection for romance?

Steve: So when I first got here I, I sort of went through that collection of, of promotional materials and conference swag and all of the things that we do have. I took out a lot of sachets? There were a lot of fragrance sachets that –

Sarah: What? Like the kind you put in your sock drawer?

Steve: Yeah, that were, like, attached to bookmarks and things? Those do not archive well. They just –

Sarah: No! [Laughs]

Steve: They just smell bad after a while.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Oh God!

Steve: So there were those –

Sarah: What’s the –

Steve: – mouse pad.

Sarah: Mouse pads and –

Steve: Yeah, so there –

Sarah: Okay, so –

Steve: – there’s a lot of mouse pads.

Sarah: [Laughs] I’m sorry; I’m still stuck on sachets.

Steve: [Laughs] They, I couldn’t believe they were in there. I don’t know who put them in there, but not a good idea. Don’t keep those.

Sarah: No!

Steve: Don’t keep those.

Sarah: That’s a bad idea. So sachets are out.

Steve: Yes.

Sarah: Mouse pads –

Steve: Yeah, mouse pads we have a bunch of. We have a Nora Roberts mouse pad; as I said, a Nora Roberts box of tissues; a Nora Roberts pair of mini-binoculars? Which –

Sarah: Ooh!

Steve: Yeah, but they were for a Nora Roberts book, not a J. D. Robb book, so I’m not sure what that, what that was about.

Sarah: Well, there’s three, there’s three flavors of Nora: there’s the contemporary Nora, the paranormal Nora – or the paraNora, as I call it – and then there’s the romantic suspense Nora, so that was probably –

Steve: Probably, probably.

Sarah: – for a romantic suspense title.

Steve: And then visors were a thing at one point? I –

Sarah: What was that about? Was there, like, a lot more sun?

Steve: I don’t know! And, and they were from Harlequin. There were like, you know, they’re Canadian! They should know better.

[Laughter]

Steve: So, nail files, obviously, you know, a very practical tool. And, and –

Sarah: Oh yeah. I got one of those at RWA this year for Shelly Laurenston’s keynote; the, the nail file was actually a key chain –

Steve: Ahh!

Sarah: – and it said sharpen your claws – Shelly Laurenston, ‘cause she writes shifters.

Steve: There you – oh, see, that’s clever. I like that. I like those where –

Sarah: Isn’t that brilliant? So cool!

Steve: – where it sort of really ties into something. Yeah, fans, you know, paper fans are al-, obviously always popular.

Sarah: Yep. Mm-hmm.

Steve: T-shirts. The, there’s a couple of small, like, office clocks, like little things you would put on, on your desk.

Sarah: Tote bags! You got a lot of tote bags.

Steve: I’ve got a bunch of tote bags.

Sarah: That’s sort of like the law of working in publishing, though. The minute you work in publishing, you have way more tote bags than you are ever going to need in your life.

Steve: Yeah, there’s, you know, in one collection there’s three or four RWA tote bags in a row, and then in our RWA collection, that also has a number of tote bags and T-shirts. There’s a number of –

Sarah: Ooh!

Steve: – Orlando T-shirts from the ‘90s in there, and mugs, coffee mugs, obviously. Always a popular item.

Sarah: So with your Twitter feed, you have today’s button.

Steve: Yes.

Sarah: How many buttons do you have?

Steve: [Laughs] So I am not capable of counting that high?

Sarah: [Laughs]

Steve: There are, well, let me see: there are twelve large boxes of buttons that have, they’re panels of cardboard that have fabric stretched over them.

Sarah: Right.

Steve: Each of those twelve boxes has maybe five panels in it, and each of those panels has – ah, it depends on the size of the button – anywhere from fifty to a hundred and fifty buttons on it? There’s a lot. And then –

Sarah: That is a lot of buttons.

Steve: – and then we have three panels that are on display in our lobby that are also filled with buttons – or four panels; my bad – that, that are also filled with buttons, and, and the genesis for today’s button was I realized that no one ever sees our buttons. We have all of these things, and some of them are ridiculous, some are clever, some are just weird, and –

Sarah: Right.

Steve: – and it, it quickly became my morning meditation. So I come into the office, I grab the iPad, I just sort of walk around a little bit, and I’m, you know – ‘cause you never see the same button twice; it’s fascinating.

Sarah: No, of course not.

Steve: And, and, and I pick a button, and I take a picture, and I try to find, usually try to find some kind of context to it, you know, because a lot of the context has been lost for these buttons as well, especially the ones from the ‘50s and ‘60s that have these –

Sarah: Right.

Steve: – you know, weird sayings on them, and you’re like, what, what does that have to do with anything? I don’t understand.

Sarah: What the hell does that mean?

Steve: And, and so I try to figure that out so that other people don’t have to. And then I share it on our Twitter feed, usually between 8:30 and nine o’clock every morning. Just sort of gets the brain cells moving, and, you know, I think, I think some, some people find it at least clever, if not, if not interesting, so.

Sarah: Well, the, the way in which a, a pin or a button captures a specific time is really interesting, because I also remember very clearly having a jean jacket that was –

Steve: Oh yeah.

Sarah: – covered with pins, but it wasn’t just, it’s not just the thing that the pin says or the pin is about; it’s also about the fact that the person who put it on themselves was decorating themselves with this message and aligning themselves with whatever that pin was talking about, even if now that pin makes zero sense.

Steve: Exactly, yeah! It’s what, what that pin said about the person who was –

Sarah: Yes.

Steve: – who was wearing it.

Sarah: It’s fascinating!

Steve: It’s –

Sarah: What are some of the coolest ones you have that you’re just like, this is so rad, I can’t believe this hangs out with me all day?

Steve: [Laughs] There is a, a pin from the 1977 release of Star Wars that is a picture of Darth Vader, and it says “DARTH VADAR LIVES,” except Vader is spelled wrong.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Steve: It’s, it’s spelled V-A-D-A-R instead of –

Sarah: Oops.

Steve: – V-A-D-E-R, and supposedly thousands of these were made before anyone caught the error.

Sarah: Oh no!

Steve: And so those are the ones I love; like, the weird, you know, they’re like the upside-down plane stamp of –

Sarah: Yes!

Steve: – of buttons. Like, no one has that, but we have it, and that’s really neat!

Sarah: And then you’re not only archiving the error, but you’re archiving a tiny piece of the one dude who was like, yeah, that was my bad; sorry.

Steve: [Laughs] I’m sure that –

Sarah: My bad!

Steve: – I’m sure that guy saw that on Twitter and, and just freaked out. And I apologize.

Sarah: Yeah, I –

[Laughter]

Sarah: So what areas of the library are you the most passionate about? What are, what areas of the collection are you like, oh, I wish I had five hours to tell somebody all about this?

Steve: [Laughs] You know, it depends. I, I was not a romance reader before I started here, but quickly became one?

Sarah: Oh, dude, I’m sorry.

Steve: But –

Sarah: It’s a very expensive habit.

Steve: Well, not for me! [Laughs]

Sarah: You’re a librarian! You’ve got, you’ve got a loophole!

Steve: I can literally sit here and, and read a romance novel, and it’s work! I don’t do that, I don’t do that generally.

Sarah: Yeah, me too!

Steve: Yeah!

[Laughter]

Steve: I don’t do that generally –

Sarah: It’s pretty great!

Steve: – but sometimes I can sit here and go, huh! This is really interesting! And, you know, read fifty or sixty pages before I’m like, oh, I should actually go send that email now.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Steve: But, you know, the romance collection, I’m passionate about that because of how unique it is. The comic book collection I just love because I love comics. The cookbook collection I could talk about for hours, because that, it’s everything from church cookbooks to weird Knox Gelatine cookbooks from the ‘30s to, like, modern vegetarian cookbooks and, yeah.

Sarah: Oh, weird Jell-O and gelatin is the, oh, that’s just very scary.

Steve: Yeah, there’s, like, tripe involved, and I, what is that even –

Sarah: No! No!

Steve: – what? Yeah.

Sarah: Why?

Steve: You know, I love the, the weird and strange, so I love digging into that stuff and, and finding things. ‘Cause I think that’s what a lot of people are interested in, especially people sort of outside the research community. Like, people who would just stumble across us on Twitter want to see the weird stuff, so that’s, that’s what I try to give.

Sarah: Well, obviously!

Steve: [Laughs]

Sarah: Like those recipe cards from, like, Weight Watchers or a similar company where you’d get Jell-O with, like, chicken and ham in it –

Steve: Oh yeah, yeah.

Sarah: – or something completely bizarre.

Steve: Or, like, tuna, and you’re like, what? That – [laughs]

Sarah: Why did you sculpt your tuna? There’s really no reason for that. And yet cookbooks are always very sort of aspirational –

Steve: Yes.

Sarah: – you know? Like, you’re going to learn to make this. You’re going to, this is something that you can do; it’s a learning and aspiring activity and, and a, you know, choosing which food you’re going to eat and which recipes you’re going to make, and then which ones you’re going to, like, talk about is also a way of – much like wearing a pin – decorating yourself.

Steve: Yeah, and, and to sort of flip that on its head, for the authors of the cookbooks as well, it’s, it’s an aspirational thing of, I’m going to change how people eat.

Sarah: Yes.

Steve: So it’s interesting to look at it from both sides. And cookbooks were another place where women were able to write in the first part of the 20th century without any sort of sanction, so there’s stories –

Sarah: Yeah.

Steve: – in there, and there’s, you know, hints at, at the sort of backstage of women’s lives that you wouldn’t find in other, in other works.

Sarah: So what in the romance collection do you have, and what would you like more of?

Steve: Ooh! [Laughs] Le-, the, let’s take the first part first. So we have, as I said, somewhere around sixteen or seventeen thousand category romances.

Sarah: That is a lot.

Steve: It is a lot, and, and –

Sarah: They’re not very sturdy!

Steve: No. They are packed in pretty tight so they don’t start collapsing or flopping over. And it covers every, every publisher that, that had tried its hand at that form, so from, you know, Dell to Bantam to –

Sarah: Yep.

Steve: – Harlequin, obviously, and Silhouette and, and some of the, the other, smaller ones; you know, Second Chance at Love is in there, and there’s some very early Love Inspired, some Sweet Valley High, which we put in with the, the sort of romance area.

Sarah: Yeah, that was the gateway for a lot of people.

Steve: It really was, and there, there was also a YA line that was sort of spun off by, that was Bantam, right? Yes.

Sarah: Yeah, I think that was Bantam.

Steve: Yeah, and, and so Bantam spun off a YA line from that. It’s really interesting ‘cause every cover looks like it was taken from a sweater catalog?

Sarah: Yes! [Laughs]

Steve: It’s a girl in a different sweater on each one, and it looked –

Sarah: Yes. It was a lot of sweaters; it was really cold, man.

Steve: It, it was! Yeah.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Steve: So, and then we get into the standalones, which, you know, go from, you know, the Gothics in the ‘70s through Woodiwiss and Roberta Gellis and into the ‘80s and ‘90s, all the bananas, banana Johanna Lindsey covers, all of that stuff, and that is probably another ten or fifteen thousand titles? So there’s a lot is what I’m trying to say. There are a lot of titles.

Sarah: [Laughs] I bet.

Steve: If you can think of a title, we probably have it. And, and that, that’s one of the services I provide on Twitter is just, like, did you know this title existed?

Sarah: Yep!

Steve: But then on top of that, we also have our manuscript collection, which began – so there’s sort of two stages of it. In the mid ‘80s we received the papers of Norman and Dorothy Daniels. So Dorothy is best known as a Gothic romance writer –

Sarah: Right.

Steve: – prolific, to say the least, and no one is entirely sure which books Norman wrote and which books Dorothy wrote.

Sarah: Ohhh!

Steve: They sort of used each other’s names at different points?

Sarah: Interesting!

Steve: Yeah. There’s, there’s a whole research project in there for someone who’s interested in especially Gothic romances.

Sarah: That’ll make your job harder!

Steve: It will! It will, but I, and I try to dig into that once in a while to try and find out some facts, but it’s, it’s very murky. And then in 1995, Cathie Linz, who was a category romance writer, obviously, and a librarian herself, was on the RWA board and contacted us because RWA was looking to archive some of their historical materials.

Sarah: Ohhh!

Steve: And that was the genesis of our Romance Writers of America collection, which we still have twenty-some-odd years on, and from that, in 1997, we held our first conference related to romance, and that was to sort of celebrate Susan Elizabeth Phillips donating her papers to us.

Sarah: Right.

Steve: And Cathie Linz also donated her papers at that time, and so from ’97 to about 2004, we collected, I think we have about forty-five authors represented?

Sarah: Wow!

Steve: And there, you know, there are names like Susan Elizabeth Phillips and Cathie Linz and Patricia McLinn and, and some of those folks, but also Virginia Myers, Roberta Gellis, Gwynne Forster, Shirley Hailstock, some of those names as well. And some of them were very small; they’re, like, one book; but some, like the Roberta Gellis collection takes up about thirty-five boxes, so it’s –

Sarah: Wow!

Steve: – it’s almost all of her work at this point.

Sarah: So what does the, what is the, the sort of purpose or goal – I’m not sure what the right word is for an archivist – but what is it that the RWA collection is capturing?

Steve: Well, I, I think for us it’s capturing the history of a genre. If you look, you know, they were there from 1980, and, and you look at how far romance has come since then and now is this billion-dollar industry, to ignore that as, as an academic institution would be silly. That had to come from somewhere, and so documenting that and saving that history is really important, I think. We’ve done that for mystery novels and science fiction and, and all this other stuff, and, you know, who, who can tell what the difference is between those and, and romance? Something about gender something…

Sarah: Probably more fuchsia in the romances is my guess?

Steve: A little bit, a little bit. And, and so I –

Sarah: In the older ones?

Steve: – I think for us it, it represents taking on this bigger task of documenting the, the evolution of, of a very important genre within, within American fiction in the 20th and 21st century.

Sarah: So what more would you like to add to the romance or the RWA collection if you had options to add to this particular part of the library? What more would you like to have?

Steve: So we’re working with RWA to make sure we have as complete a set of conference files as we can.

Sarah: Right.

Steve: There are some years, especially in the last ten years, we hadn’t really worked with them to get the current files updated. Because the conference is such a big deal and is so important within the genre, that’s something we want to do, because, you know, frankly, for RWA we have most of their evolutionary stuff, how they got to this point.

Sarah: Right.

Steve: So the conference stuff, as well as, you know, things like the, the files dedicated to Cockygate and, and, and those sorts of things where, where they have to step forth as, as an advocate for authors, because I think that’s important as well to, to document.

Sarah: Oh, very, very much so.

Steve: Yeah, because so much of that stuff happened on Twitter and Facebook that, you know, you have to save it somewhere so that it doesn’t go poof.

Sarah: Right, and, and the thing I, when I speak to writers about your online and social platforms, whatever you put on Twitter and whatever you put on Facebook belongs to them. Doesn’t belong to you anymore –

Steve: Exactly.

Sarah: – it’s theirs. So if you’re an archivist, you can’t count on it always being there.

Steve: Exactly.

Sarah: They could disappear very easily!

Steve: Yeah, I mean, you always have to remember on social media, you are the product.

Sarah: Yes, you are the product being sold.

Steve: Exactly. So you, you can’t rely on anything as –

Sarah: Always.

Steve: – a permanent source of, of archive material. That, that’s where we come in is, is trying to, you know, swimming, swimming upstream, but trying to preserve as much of this as we can. You know, and it, and it’s things like, you know, marking the, the shift from sweet romances to Candlelight Ecstasy and, you know, those things and sort of the hard-, the hardcover stuff, but also – or not hardcover, but the, the hard, the bound versions – but also –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Steve: – the shift from paper to electronic manuscripts and, and the ways in which we went from typewritten to computer printed and comments that were written in pen to, you know, comments attached to a Word file.

Sarah: And, and the shift of what format romance is being published in, if it’s in a, a mass market paperback, or now more books are moving into trade.

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: That’s a whole other aspect of, of collecting, I imagine, not only just for space but for also pointing out the differences in what those formats include.

Steve: Absolutely, and, and there are novels for which we have four or five copies, and it’s because they have been moved from sort of one format to the other –

Sarah: Yeah.

Steve: – or, you know, in some cases we have the foreign language editions.

Sarah: And then there were the, the ones that I called the venti sizes? This was a bunch of years ago. Probably, mm, maybe seven or eight years ago, publishers were experimenting with a tall mass market paperback?

Steve: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: I called it the venti, ‘cause it was so ridiculous looking.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I saw a whole bunch of those, including some Nora Roberts novels, and she, I remember at the time, was, like, yeah, I hate it. It’s horrible; it’s uncomfortable –

Steve: [Laughs]

Sarah: – it’s un-, it’s not pleasant to hold in your hand; I hate that thing.

Steve: Yeah.

Sarah: So there’s, like, the weird, like, experimental sizes.

Steve: Yeah, and, or even sort of other experiments, like Harlequin doing manga versions of romance novels.

Sarah: Yes.

Steve: So we have some of those as well. So, yeah, just trying to mark all of those changes, and that’s really, you know, in terms of the collection, and like I said, you know, we’re experimenting with the electronic stuff as well to, to do the same thing of marking that shift towards, towards e-books, towards self-pub, which I think is another huge thing that, that other places aren’t necessarily collecting, so that we understand, you know, there’s, there’s a difference between a self-published book and a Kensington- or an Avon-published book, you know, and then you add on, like, an Amazon Worlds paperback, and those tend to be that kind of almost venti size as well; they’re really big sometimes.

Sarah: Yes. They’re very tall; it’s weird.

Steve: Yeah, it’s very strange.

Sarah: And I have extremely small hands, so any kind of experiment in the height and weight that makes it harder for me to hold onto a book is like, you’re just, you’re just going to make me keep reading e-books –

Steve: Right. [Laughs]

Sarah: – ‘cause it’s always the same size! Always the same size in my hand! [Laughs]

Steve: Yeah. I, I read a, a paperback a few weeks ago, and, after a long time of reading just e-books, and I was like, I, I can’t read into the gutter! What, what is going on?

[Laughter]

Steve: I have to open this book bigger? What’s going on?

Sarah: I always struggle, because I have poor eyesight, with text sizes? I think the text in a lot of books is getting smaller, or I’m getting older –

Steve: Yeah.

Sarah: – or both, and I, I, I joke all the time that on my reading devices, I have the text cranked all the way up to great-great-grandma size.

Steve: Yes.

Sarah: Like, I have very large, large letters on the screen, so if I pick up a printed book I’m like, I can’t read this. My eyes hurt just thinking about it. What can a romance fan or, or researcher find at the library? And if some, you know, rando person wants to visit the collection or just sort of wander around, is that a thing that people can do?

Steve: We are open to the public.

Sarah: Road trip!

Steve: Anyone can come in; we’re happy to have you. We’ll give you sort of the backstage tour if you ask nicely. We are a closed-stack collection, so we have a reading room, and generally you can request the book through our catalog, and we will bring it out to you, so – and, and they’re all available, so, you know, if you want to read whatever Nora Roberts we have from her, her category days we’re, we’ll bring it out.

Sarah: I want the one with her on the cover. I want the one where she’s the cover model; that my favorite one.

Steve: Which one was that?

Sarah: Oh, dude! I’ll have to find it for you. I, she was a no-, she was a cover model for one of her early categories.

Steve: Oh! Oh, I think I remember this! Yes!

Sarah: I’m going to find it for you.

Steve: [Laughs] So, yeah, so we have, like, Irish Thoroughbred, which is her first category book.

Sarah: Right.

Steve: You know, and we’ll, we’ll happily bring it out to you, and the same goes for the comic books and, and everything. You know, our stuff is here to be used, so if people want to come up and sit on a couch and read a book, we’re happy to have ‘em. And we do have couches. You know, mo-, it’s mostly tables with a, with slightly comfortable chairs, but we have couches as well, and, and we try to make it a, a comfortable, pop-culture-y experience. We have movie posters hanging in the lobby. Right now we have a, a Harry Potter exhibit, as we said, that we rotate on a, a pretty regular basis. So yeah! So we try to have some fun with it. But we’re, we’re open, open to the public whenever we’re open. Right now it’s eight to five most days.

Sarah: What kind of requests do you get from visiting scholars? Like, do you work in advance to have a bunch of stuff available for someone who’s doing a large project? Like, what, how do you work with researchers?

Steve: Yeah, so we try to work at least by email first off to sort of establish, this is what I’d like to see. You know, we’ll send them, you know, this is the finding aid for the collection you want to look at; you know, try to identify the boxes and folders you’d like to look at, and we can have it ready for you. But at the same time, I’m also happy to sit down with people and say, okay, this is a general notion of what I want to research; how can you help me? And we’ll do our best to, to pull whatever kind of primary or secondary resources we have. You know, we have, you know, runs of Romance Writers Report, and we have a full run of Romantic Times.

Sarah: Oh, that is something I wanted to ask you about! You have Romantic Times as well.

Steve: Yes! We actually were lucky enough to get their photo archive before they shut down –

Sarah: Cool!

Steve: – so we –

Sarah: Oh, that’s very cool!

Steve: – so we have their, it’s the physical sort of production photo archive from when they were a print magazine, as well as a lot of discs with layouts from the, from conference editions and, and things like that, as well as some videotapes from conferences, from RT conferences.

Sarah: Oh, those must be some cool videotapes. So that means you have a VCR; you’re the only person I know who probably does.

Steve: We, we do have some antiquated equipment.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Steve: Right, right now I have a researcher out in the, the reading room who is using a tape cassette machine to –

Sarah: Whoooa!

Steve: – to listen to an old RWA conference session. So we do have some antiquated material floating around, so we try to keep players around to, to play it. Because you never know! You never know what you’re going to find.

Sarah: No!

Steve: And we’re lucky enough to have a music library one floor below us, which is sort of part of the pop culture library but separate. They, we came up together. The, the music library started a year before we did, and we shared a space for about a decade before we – [laughs] – everybody said, you’re both too big; go get your own floors. But the music library has, they have DVD players and VHS players and tape cassettes and, and all of that stuff, so there’re plenty of, of obscure devices around.

Sarah: Wow. So you have both the history of the genre and also the history of the things that build up around the genre.

Steve: Right, right. That, and that again goes to the process, product, and response part of –

Sarah: Right.

Steve: – you know, the reviews and how the books were received and, you know, in, in, you know, and, and this maybe more in TV and film but, like, how they were then modified by fans and fanfiction.

Sarah: Yeah.

Steve: So yeah, so trying to get that, that part of it so that people understand, oh, this book got four stars from RT; how did that happen? You know, or it got one star, but now it’s a classic and, you know, how the, again that how it was perceived in that moment.

Sarah: So how do you archive the online community and response? Completely selfish question, obviously.

Steve: [Laughs]

Sarah: But how do you, how do you archive the, the online activity and interaction about the genre? Because it’s, you know, a lot every day, believe me.

Steve: Yes.

Sarah: I, I, I am aware it’s a lot.

Steve: Yes. [Laughs]

Sarah: It’s, oh, it’s a lot. [Laughs] It’s so, it is, everything happens so much!

Steve: Right, right. So with websites, such as your own, there are scraping tools that we can use that, that essentially sort of capture a website at a moment in time, and it can capture every page on a website or just the home page. It usually can’t capture, like, newsgroups and, and things like that that are attached to it, but –

Sarah: Right.

Steve: – but definitely, like – and, and we’ve done this a little bit with RT’s website and trying to capture at least their front page so we know what that looked like. And that’s something we’re experimenting with right now is, is being able to offer that to a site like yours or a site like All About Romance or a site like RT where, where so much of the last twenty years of the genre is captured.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Steve: You know, because RT went out of the print game at one point, and, you know, not everyone has access to RWR, it makes a difference to be able to capture these websites. When it comes to thinks like Twitter, that’s a little more difficult, and that’s something we haven’t really started to do yet. There are tools being developed by, by some really wonderful archivists out in the community, but we haven’t gotten to a point where it’s sort of quick and easy to save everything related to Romancelandia on Twitter.

Sarah: Right.

Steve: We can’t just, unfortunately can’t just push a button and do that, so.

Sarah: Plus, you have the context of the conversation that you also have to document.

Steve: That’s the really hard part, yeah.

Sarah: Right, ‘cause a lot of, a lot of, a lot of the conversation about romance is in varying levels of, of, like, a code. We have our own language about the genre –

Steve: Yeah.

Sarah: – and then we have a code about what we’re talking about, and then there’s subtweets, which is like, it’s a whole other code!

Steve: Exactly. That happened to me last night. I was –

Sarah: That’s tough!

Steve: – I was trying to figure out what this one tweet was about, and it took me five minutes of poking around to figure out, you know, oh, it’s a subtweet about this, and –

Sarah: Yeah. That, that happens to me often.

Steve: And, and yeah, you can’t document that. Not easily, at least. So subtweets are, are not easily archivable. Because they’re done in code, and they’re done in, in some sort of backwards, you know, backhanded compliment kind of fashion, you can’t –

Sarah: Yes.

Steve: – you can’t easily capture that.

Sarah: No, and it’s hard to decode it if you don’t have some level of fluency in it already.

Steve: Oh, absolutely, and, and that’s one of the things with our Twitter account is I’ve tried to use that as well to sort of learn that code for Romancelandia so I, I understand what people are talking about, what might be of interest, and, you know, authors that I should be paying attention to, and, and things like that.

Sarah: As a person who entered the genre as a librarian –

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and, and sort of started reading romance, what are some of the things that you’ve noted about the genre, both as a reader and as an archivist?

Steve: You know, I think I, so, I tend to read pretty intentionally? I’m, I’m not as likely to just pick up a book. I’m, I’m going to go read something that people are talking about, so –

Sarah: Right.

Steve: – I started reading Alyssa Cole because everyone was talking about Daughters of a Nation, and so I, I got a copy of that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Steve: – and that just blew my mind. You know, I started reading Courtney Milan because I asked my wife, what should I read? And she was like, you should read Courtney Milan! And I went, oh, I get it! Like, I, you know, I sort of, I, I’ve started to find my own, you know, the heroes and heroines I like to see, and, and I think that’s, that’s one of the things –

Sarah: Yep.

Steve: – is seeing how different subgenres are. You know, it’s not just a matter of location or, or something like that; you can really get turned on or turned off very quickly within, within subgenres. I’ve discovered that romantic suspense is not really my thing, and that’s okay!

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Steve: I’ve read a couple where I’m just like, ooh, this is built, this is a romance built around a serial killer, and I’m not, just not sure that’s, that’s a thing for me.

Sarah: Oh no, I cannot read romance that involves entrails, harming animals, or harming children.

Steve: Yeah.

Sarah: If there’s entrails, I am right out.

Steve: Yeah, exactly.

Sarah: Which is weird, ‘cause I can, like, watch surgery and eat spaghetti, and that’s not a problem –

Steve: [Laughs]

Sarah: – but, like, in books, my imagination is so much better than anyone on television making something gross; my imagination is really good at that, so I just don’t feed my brain that, ‘cause otherwise I’ll be awake at three in the morning, like, oh, oh, no, no, nonono.

Steve: Yeah.

Sarah: And even then, the, you know, the tropes, as we talk about what we like, that’s also a code. Like, if you –

Steve: Oh, absolutely.

Sarah: – if you don’t like romantic suspense but you might like Gothic, what are the elements that they don’t have in common that are the things that are drawing you?

Steve: Right, right. You know, and, and, like, I find myself drawn to cinnamon roll heroes.

Sarah: Yeah, those are my favorites.

Steve: Which is – yeah, like, so that, that’s something I learned, and I was like, yeah, okay, that makes sense!

Sarah: Oh yes!

Steve: And, and again, it’s all in a code. It’s all sort of wrapped up in this, in this language that, you know, the people who understand it go, oh yeah. Yep, exactly.

Sarah: Yep.

Steve: And, and it definitely, you know, as someone who started reading romance in his forties, you know, that’s pretty unusual for the genre. I’m definitely, just got a, a slightly different take on it, I think.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

Sarah: And reading, I’ve noticed that reading as a librarian or reading as an archivist is a different experience than reading as a reader who isn’t thinking also about the structure of things going round –

Steve: Absolutely.

Sarah: – the book.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, because I, you know, like, in reading Alisha Rai’s Forbidden Hearts series –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Steve: – like, I started thinking about that as a soap opera and, and putting it –

Sarah: Oh, that’s very much a soap opera.

Steve: – putting it in the, the pop culture context in my head and, you know, how it connected to this and this and, and, you know, it was like, oh, this is great! And it had nothing, you know, it, I really enjoyed the story, but I was mostly wrapped up in, in the, all the little, the Easter eggs with it, within it.

Sarah: Yes. Before I forget, so you can write this down –

Steve: Yes.

Sarah: – the Nora Roberts Silhouette where she is the cover model is The Last Honest Woman.

Steve: Okay. I will have to –

Sarah: And that is Nora on the cover.

Steve: Hmm!

Sarah: It’s number 451 if you need the number.

Steve: That’s helpful, because we actually have them categorized by publisher, by series, and then by number, so.

Sarah: You have the, the Jude Deveraux Barbie dolls?

Steve: Do we? I’m not sure!

Sarah: There’s a couple of Barbie or collector dolls. There was a –

Steve: Okay.

Sarah: – Harlequin limited edition doll for one of the Nora Roberts books. There’s, there’s been a couple of romance dolls –

Steve: Okay.

Sarah: – and there’s one that is Jude Deveraux, The Raider I think it is.

Steve: Okay.

Sarah: It’s amazing.

Steve: I’m writing this down.

Sarah: Yeah, ‘cause you definitely – they’re about a hundred dollars on eBay, but they’re, they’re incredible. It comes with a charm bracelet –

Steve: [Laughs]

Sarah: – but you shouldn’t take it out, you shouldn’t take it out of the bag, because you can’t use it. It’s worth –

Steve: Right, exactly.

Sarah: – it’s worth more.

Steve: [Laughs] Well, and that, you know, and that, that sort of goes again to, you know, we, we didn’t collect dolls because that was, we had, you know, a very specific angle of things where we’re looking at a lot of –

Sarah: Yes.

Steve: – we collected a lot of boy toys and, and so, you know, we’re sort of playing catch-up in some areas, and that’s definitely – I am putting that on the list. Everyone’s going to think I’m weird, but I’ll –

Sarah: I will send you a link.

Steve: – put that on the list. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh no, I don’t think you’re – I will – [laughs] – I will send you a link in about – oh God, this already, five years ago already, I did a, a very close-up picture tour of my set of these dolls, and they’re, they’re just ridiculous. I love them so much! It’s why I have them in my office!

Steve: I love it.

[Laughter]

Sarah: So one of the things you tweeted recently was actually an article from The Paris Review about women –

Steve: Yes.

Sarah: – in rare books, but there was a quote that, from Elizabeth Denlinger that said, “It is a feminist act to preserve stuff that women have done and written.”

Steve: Yes.

Sarah: Is that one of the major sort of driving elements to this collection as well?

Steve: It is one of my major, major driving elements to this collection? I, you know, I, I come from a background in Gender and Women’s Studies, and, and I sort of, it doesn’t take a really smart person to figure out that women’s writing has always been devalued.

Sarah: You don’t say.

Steve: Yeah, exactly!

Sarah: Writing about women’s writing? Similarly devalued!

Steve: Exactly!

Sarah: It’s really fun to explain what I do. Do you ever get people being like, wow, that’s a dumb library? Like, does anyone ever just sort of, like, just dumbfounded-ly say to you, wh-, why?

Steve: We, I, I do have to explain myself pretty frequently –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Steve: – to friends, family, and strangers.

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Steve: But, you know, I think it’s, when it comes down to it, it’s about documenting the way people lived.

Sarah: Yep.

Steve: As any lib-, any sort of special collection archives does, and for us it’s collecting the way people live right now, which is unusual, but not unexpected or, or by any means weird. We want to collect what’s important right now so that people in the future can understand this moment. And romance is clearly part of that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Steve: – you know, as it does sort of fill that thing of, well, what, you know, we know from all of these other libraries what men were writing; what were women writing? And this is, this plays a big part of it. And, and what were people reading? What was the average, average person reading? is, is something that we don’t get to answer a lot. We get to answer what, you know, Michael Chabon novel was someone reading, but, like, what, you know, what, what is someone who’s just getting their book from, from the library and Overdrive, what were they picking up? And if you go in Overdrive, and I know for ours it’s, there’s thirty-five thousand romances at any given time.

Sarah: Oh, absolutely.

Steve: And so that, that’s an important thing! Like, that’s, that, that number tells you that there’s something there that needs to be paid attention to.

Sarah: So you mentioned that you are preparing a crowdfunding campaign. What are you doing?

Steve: [Laughs] So we’re, we’re not ready to move on it yet, but hopefully in the next couple of weeks we’ll initiate a, a crowdfunding campaign that’s specifically aimed at the romance collection. We are in the midst of a couple of big projects, one of which is digitizing fourteen hundred hours of RWA conference tapes.

Sarah: Ooh.

Steve: That’ll be a, a researcher archive, so we’re, we’re not going to have a, a publicly accessible portal or anything, but people will be able to come here and access them. So doing that and preserving that costs money, as does buying books, expanding the collection, and acquiring and maintaining the manuscript collections as well. So what –

Sarah: Right.

Steve: – we would like to do is go to people and say, hey, we want to give you a stake in this. You know, you are, you are part of a passionate community that understands the history of, of what you love is important. We want to, we want to do this really well, and we want you to help us. So that’s kind of what we’re going at with that campaign, and we’re hoping to raise whatever we can, really, at that point, to help acquire new books. And you know, one of the, the categories that, that I want to get into is acquiring more LGBT, both own voices and, and not own voices books, that, you know, have just sort of, they’ve kind of floated outside of our collection for a long time, both going back, you know, pre-2005 and, and into e-books as well. I’m really, I’m hoping to grow the collection with the help of the people who love the, love this stuff.

Sarah: That’s very cool. So I always ask, do you have any books that you want to tell people about? This is a very terrible question to ask a librarian; I apologize in advance.

Steve: [Laughs] Well, one of, so one of my favorite books that’s sort of near and dear to my heart is My Reckless Valentine by Olivia Dade, because I am a librarian; my wife is also a librarian, so that, that sort of, you know, it kind of, it tugs at my heartstrings. I love that one.

Sarah: Aw!

Steve: Yeah, and obviously Courtney Milan’s Brothers Sinister series, I think, is actually a great gateway to romance for men? Because the men are, they’re not alphas; they’re kind of doofy.

Sarah: Yeah. I love doofy.

Steve: And, and kind of lovable at the same time, and they’re very relatable, I think, from a, from a, from a straight white male perspective; I find them very relatable, so I think that’s a good one for men to get into. The Duchess Deal by Tessa Dare, obviously, is amazing, and I guffawed several times, which I never thought I would do while reading a romance novel?

Sarah: Yeah, I did that this weekend, and I was delighted.

Steve: [Laughs]

Sarah: Like, my husband kept coming and being like, what are you laughing at? And I’m like, I’d have to read you this whole page; are you prepared for that?

Steve: Exactly.

Sarah: He’s like, no. Okay, then just trust me; it’s great! [laughs]

Steve: Yeah. [Laughs] And the, the last book I finished was actually A Princess in Theory, which was fantastic, by Alyssa Cole, and my, my wife got A Duke by Default before I could from the library, so I have to wait –

Sarah: [Huffs]

Steve: – until she finishes it.

Sarah: Not cool!

Steve: I’m a little sad. [Laughs]

Sarah: It’s all right; you know you’ll get it.

Steve: Yeah! But it’s, we have it for two weeks, and our, our library does automatic renewals, so.

Sarah: Nice!

Steve: Our public, our public library does automatic renewals. So yeah, anything by Alyssa Cole, obviously. One that I really love, and I forget if it was on your podcast or someone else’s that it came up, Alisha Rai’s Night Whispers? The, the –

Sarah: Might have been someone else’s.

Steve: – the zombie romance. It, not, it’s not a romance between zombies. I phrased that poorly.

Sarah: Right.

Steve: But it revolves around –

Sarah: ‘Cause that was a thing. That was a thing. There was a small period of time where zombie romances were sort of a trend, but it didn’t last very long.

Steve: It was, and, and I remember hearing her saying that she was, she wished she could get back to that series, and I really hope she does, ‘cause I love that stuff.

Sarah: [Laughs] Awesome!

Steve: That, that’s my plug. That, that’s what I want to see happen. [Laughs]

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this episode. I hope you enjoyed my conversation. If you would like to find out more about the Browne Popular Culture Library – eventually I’m going to be able to say this without stuttering – I will have links to the library and to some of the cool pictures on the library Instagram, which you should definitely follow if you like nifty, cool, geeky, nerdy, nifty popular culture stuff.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Wedding the Widow by Jenna Jaxon. Historical romance author Jenna Jaxon continues The Widows’ Club, a new Regency romance series centered around a group of women widowed by the Napoleonic Wars. With the tragedy behind them, one by one the widows of Lyttlefield Park are getting restless and ready to embrace the future. Of all the widows, Elizabeth Easton seems least likely to remarry. She is devoted to the memory of her late husband, which is why she’s so shocked to be overtaken by passion during a harvest festival, succumbing to an unforgettable interlude with the handsome Lord Brack. Wedding the Widow by Jenna Jaxon is on sale now wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

Today’s podcast transcript is brought to you by Going Down Easy by Erin Nicholas. Hot fling or real thing? There are no Big Easy answers in Going Down Easy, the first in New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Erin Nicholas’s sultry new Boys of the Big Easy series. As far as flings go, single dad Gabe Trahan is pretty sure that Addison Sloan is his best bet. Once a month, Addison comes to New Orleans and then It Is On. Until Addison returns to New York, it’s just hot, happily-no-strings-attached sex. And jazz. And beignets. But lately for Gabe, it isn’t nearly enough… Sure, maybe Addison’s gotten a bit hooked on Gabe. After all, who can resist a guy who’s so sexy, so charming, and so available? But maybe he’s too available for her right now. Addison’s just moved to New Orleans, and relationships are definitely off the table. Besides, guys always bail when they learn her secret: that she’s a single mom. Only Gabe’s not running. Worse, he’s thrilled. But Addison never signed up for an ever-after romance, and Gabe won’t settle for anything less. Now it’s a battle of wills, and when it comes to the woman he’s falling for, Gabe isn’t above playing a little dirty. Readers who love New Orleans, hot dads, and sexy romances will love Going Down Easy. Going Down Easy by Erin Nicholas is published by Montlake Romance. It goes on sale August 28th and will be available wherever books are sold.

We have a podcast Patreon, and if you would like to have a look at it, I would appreciate it! Patreon.com/SmartBitches. After every episode I see a new pledge come in, and it is so exciting, so thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you for that. I am so honored that you have supported the show. You are helping me keep the show going, helping me commission transcripts for older episodes, and as part of the Patreon community, I will be asking for questions and suggestions for upcoming guests and interviews that I have scheduled.

Are there other ways to support the shows that you love? Absolutely. Leave a review however you listen, tell a friend, subscribe, but always, if I’m in your eardrums, I’m very grateful to be here. Thank you for hanging out with me each week!

The music you are listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater. This is called “Percolator,” and it by the Hanuman Collective. It is from their album Pedalhorse. I will have links to the music and the books that we discussed and of course some of the cool items in the pop culture library in the podcast show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

And of course I have a really bad joke, but before I have the bad joke, I’m going to tell you what’s coming up on the website, ‘cause I know you’re curious! Tomorrow is Saturday; put your wallet in the freezer in a big bag of water, ‘cause it’s time for our most addictive and entertaining thread of the month, Whatcha Reading? We tell you what we’re reading, and then we ask you what you’re reading, and then you tell us, and then we all buy many more books. Sound good? It’s always fun. Next week we also have some excellent reviews of books that we recommend, plus Cover Snark, Help a Bitch Out, and, of course, Books on Sale, so if you like hanging out with romance readers, there’s lots of us over at smartbitchestrashybooks.com.

Okay, now it’s joke time. You ready for the joke? This is so great. This is from the Brentwood Library and from Jacqueline, who sent it to me. All right, you ready? [Clears throat]

What building is the tallest?

Give up? What building is the tallest?

The library: it has the most stories!

[Laughs] I love it so much! [Sighs]

So on behalf of Steve Ammidown and all of the cool things in the library and everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have an excellent weekend, and we will see you here next week.

[intricate music]