Reading this book is an exquisite experience for connoisseurs of book history, archives, Black history, and the organization of information. The author, Laura E. Helton, a white historian who also formally trained and worked as an archivist for many years, has produced a text that is meticulously researched and tightly woven. Although each chapter covers a different influential Black bibliophile, librarian, or archivist, the narrative is whole. In chapter 1, the reader follows Arthur Schomburg, the respected Afro–Puerto Rican bibliophile as he searches for, bids on, and relishes in all books Africana. He amassed a dynamic collection of books on global Black culture and history over several decades, which was eventually bought by the New York Public Library in 1926 for US$10,000. The sale of the collection coincided, serendipitously, with the establishment of Negro History Week (later Black History Month) in the United States and was an important symbolic and affective action that demonstrated the historic and monetary value of a Black collection. In chapter 2, the reader sits with L.S. Alexander Gumby in his Gumby Book Studio as he uses craft paper and homemade adhesive to preserve ephemera in the creation of a “History of the Negro in Scrapbooks” (p. 56). Gumby saw himself as a “vandal,” crafting history from scraps that others might discard (p. 56). His scrapbooks focused on different personalities and events in Black history and eventually made their way to an academic library at a predominately white institution toward the end of his life. In chapter 3, we leave Harlem Renaissance–era New York City to learn of the risks Virginia Lee, a Black librarian, took to collect, defend, and hide, when necessary, the “collection of works by and about the Negro” (p. 95) she built at the Gainsboro public library in Roanoke, Virginia, in the 1920s. In chapter 4, Dorothy Porter, a librarian at Howard University, intervenes in the anti-Blackness of the Dewey Decimal system by creating her own taxonomy while also creating prolific bibliographies that locate and document Black presence throughout a myriad of academic subjects. In chapter 5, we go to Bronzeville, a neighbourhood in Chicago that received large flows of Black migrants from the American South in the 1930s. Here, Vivian Harsh, the first Black woman librarian to head a branch of the Chicago Public library, established a reading room where everyday people were able to learn and quench their thirst for Black history and culture. Some notable patrons of the library included the girl who would grow up to become Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks and the boy who would grow up to be John H. Johnson, the founder of the Johnson Publishing Company and publisher of Jet and Ebony magazines. Finally, in chapter 6, we return to New York City, where L.D. Reddick became the curator of the Schomburg Collection after the death of its namesake. Reddick took up an ambitious project, which the author refers to as “call and response” archiving (p. 156): soliciting letters soldiers wrote to their family and friends to document genuine Black experiences in the US military during World War II. At a talk Helton gave about Scattered and Fugitive Things in Chicago, a member of the audience prefaced a question about the author’s interest in the topic by commenting that “these are not the kind of things we learn in library school.” Indeed, the passionate information work described in this book is a powerful and needed intervention in the world of library, archival, and book history and in the field of information and library science. The profiles presented in this book allow us to …
