Archives and Research: Situating the Reading Experience

The main premise of this article is that research conducted on site in archival reading rooms is influenced by the architecture of an archive and the interior design of its reading room. A subjective account of the study of the publication, editorial, and material histories of early-American literature at the American Philosophical Society and the Library Company in Philadelphia illustrates how the engagement with books in an archive is marked by an arrest of time. An empty sense of history in reading rooms as well as ritualized procedures of entry into library spaces and a supervised reading experience, in addition to a calming environment, inform this temporal suspension. A comparable sense of arrest marks the archival document itself, which is shielded from accumulating marks or additions that would bear evidence of its history after it entered the archive. A similar bracketing of time informs the archive as an institution, which provides a nation with a moment of origin.