Erin McGuirl
BOOK+PAPER WORK
About Me
The short version
I work with books and paper artifacts: I care about the stories that they have to tell as artifacts of humanistic culture. Most of the time I am the full-time Executive Director of the Bibliographical Society of America, the oldest scholarly society in North America dedicated to the study of books and manuscripts as physical objects. As a complement to my work as an administrator, I work with Robert M. Rubin and his collection of screenplays.
A librarian by training, I have worked in libraries and with private collections of rare materials in New York City and elsewhere since 2008. The Harry Ransom Center, Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Bibliographical Society of the UK have supported by research and training with fellowships. I've published in Printing History, Atlas Obscura, the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, and in Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton University Press, 2021).
The results of my recent work, "Women's Work in Film Production & The Documents of Film History" is forthcoming in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies in September 2025.
A Little Bit More...
I graduated from Middlebury College with a BA in the History of Art and Architecture in 2007, and hold an MLIS from the Palmer School of Information Science with a concentration in rare book librarianship. From 2008 to 2016 I worked at Columbia University's Avery Art & Architectural Library's Classics Collection and then at the New York Society Library (NYSL) as Special Collections Librarian. At the NYSL I lead a project to redesign and launch City Readers, a digital humanities tool for the study of reading and readers at the Library, New York City's oldest cultural institution (founded in 1754). In 2016 I left to Society Library and began working as a consultant to institutional and private collections, and it was then that I began working with Robert M. Rubin and his collection of screenplays and cinema paper. I continue to assist Mr. Rubin in acquiring, describing, and preserving materials in the collection. (I am no longer taking new clients.)
My research focuses on the labor of the secretaries and typists who produced and edited screenplays in 20th century Hollywood movie studios. I also collect Whole Earth Catalogs and what I call its "offspring" – books put together following instructions printed in the last Catalog, or otherwise published by and for people living in rural areas and on communes in the latter half of the 20th century. Last but not least, I am also pursuing a Masters in Literature from the Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton, Vermont with a focus on critical writing and modern American literature.
