Sylvia Beach was a woman of property. Her “passion projects,” as Melanie Micir calls the rich variety of “queer feminist modernist practice[s]” that Beach and other creative women engaged in, included the founding of her Paris bookshop and lending library; her role as publisher, seller, and distributor of James Joyce’s Ulysses; and the writing of her memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959). Beach took pride in giving the same name to her memoir that she had given to her bookshop. It was the pride of a property owner, but not one who sought to appropriate all things to herself; her phrase “and Company” signified hospitality: the variety of offerings on her bookshelves, the welcome traffic of writers and readers that flowed through her self-created space on the rue de l’Odéon, and the history of modernism as it took shape within that space. The spaces and places that Beach created were generous and collaborative, but they were also her creations, or largely so, and she was proud of her pioneering spirit and self-reliance. Property is not things, or merely things. In a basic sense, of course, Beach’s bookshop was leased real property; the books she acquired for stocking her shelves were tangible personal property; her memoir, no less than Ulysses, was a form of intellectual property. But these corporeal and incorporeal assets were only starting points for the relational webs that constitute property in its analytic sense: “the legal interest (or aggregate of legal relations) appertaining to such physical [or intangible] object[s].” A thing is property because its owner has a right to prevent others from taking or using it; those others have a duty to refrain from such taking or using. An owner may grant non-owners a privilege to use the property, whereupon, for the duration of the privilege, the owner will have no right to prevent the use. Property is thus a set of correlative positions that are adjustable and interchangeable; the more complex the property interest is, the more complicated are the relations that aggregate around it. Far from being a static binary of meum and tuum, property is inherently utilitarian and social, a vehicle for mediating and regulating peoples’ conflicting desires to own, to access, to use, and to exclude.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse famously opens with six-year old James Ramsay, “sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army & Navy Stores.” With the awkward dexterity of a young child, James carefully guides his scissors around “a picture of a refrigerator,” endowing the image “with heavenly bliss” under the loving but watchful gaze of his mother. The scene has long captured critical attention, but less so the consumerist allusion to a popular shop on the book’s first page. The Army & Navy Stores was a well-known London department store, over a quarter-century old by the time James shreds its marquee catalogue. Founded in 1871 as an officer’s cooperative, the shop supplied domestic commodities at reduced rates, including books priced at a twenty-five percent discount. By February 1872, it added a grocery wing and moved into stationery, drapery, and tailoring, with a chemist’s shop and a gun department. Catalogues propelled its products far and wide, not just to the fictional Hebrides but also to outlets in Paris, Leipzig, Plymouth, and Mumbai, until its global brand receded after 1945. Today, it is no longer possible to shop at the Army & Navy Stores at 103 Victoria Street, London. For modernist scholars and book historians, however, its unexpected role—not just as an obscure historical allusion in Woolf’s fiction, but also as a contemporary bookseller of Woolf’s own publications—is becoming newly visible, appearing as one shop name, nested amongst hundreds of others, in the holographic sales ledgers of Woolf’s private press, The Hogarth Press, founded in 1917 (fig. 1).

Recently, while sifting through a long and detailed academic book contract, I found a list of items the publisher required me to exclude. A wonderful bullet point mandated that there be “no recipes or formulae or instructions” that “if followed accurately” would be “injurious to the user.” [1] I have enjoyed hearing friends’ reactions to this mandate, several of whom have asked: but, seriously, what is this referring to? Since contracts, much like syllabi, always have ground-rules based on...

What sociological knowledge do we possess of contemporary literary culture? Very little, as Amy Hungerford points out, for the basic reason that the objects of sociological study are “virtually unreachable by the ordinary means of scholarly inquiry.” [1] The fine-grained interactions of living, breathing social actors—writers and editors, publishers and booksellers, students and teachers, all going about their business as you read this sentence—cannot be recovered from historical archives or extrapolated from literary texts. Partially, the methodological problem is one of contemporaneity. We cannot arrest the flow of the present to study it any more than we can raise the dead from their graves and order them to speak. But in the ever-expanding field of contemporary literary activity, the problem is also one of number and scale: more people are reading and writing than ever before in more socio-institutional settings and in more disparate ways. Given the massive profusion and diffusion of literary culture, how does a literary scholar select the texts and readers she will study from among the many that are available to her in any given social context: a publishing house, an MFA program, a literature classroom, a book club, an online forum? How can the analysis of a single text or reader or institution, marked by the innumerable and ephemeral contingencies of time and space, scale up into a general theory of contemporary literary production or reception.