An excerpt from a paper presented at the conference Material Culture of the Atlantic Region, Dalhousie University, 14-16 May 2025. A heavily revised version will appear in a collection from McGill-Queen’s UP in the spring of 2027.
“When I get down in my shop amongst my books and materials of various kinds I feel it to be a great happiness indeed”. 30 May 1880
My project is not a material culture project, but it has a dimension of the field that I think worth exploring. I’m writing a biography of a very ordinary, but highly literate man, a miller, a printer, and a curmudgeon – a man who lived in a small rural community in Nova Scotia but who wished to live a modern life. Objects – both ones still available in museums and archives, or ones described in the diary – offer additional and sometimes powerful evidence that can help us interpret James Barry’s life. Often historians turn to material forms of evidence – things – when their textual sources are weak. But I have LOTS of textual sources – notably, a five volume, 56-year-long daily diary, an account book (not nearly as complete as the diaries, but still useful), two books of transcribed fiddle music, and a small cache of documents across several archives – but I have very few objects. What we do have is Barry’s library, and so this essay explores books as sources for understanding Barry, and more particularly for understanding his volatile moods, that is, how objects (and the making of objects) offer interpretative ground for understanding emotion in his world.
The diary suggests to us many objects that might help us. Most of these are missing but many offer suggestive possibilities for analysis. While in the act of writing that diary, for example, we might consider his pen – what did it mean, every night, when in his strict disciplined manner, he sat down, picked up that steel-tipped pen, dipped it in ink, and began to write? Did the day shape how he held the pen, how the pen then eased or scribbled its way across the page? Or, did the pen and its associated disciplined routine, offer comfort, remedy, control, to his busy, complicated and often painful days? That pen produced text but it also produced distinctive design elements such as we saw in the opening slide, playfulness with the print stylings he used to head pages, some poetry, and some art, some of which is suggestive of a world view, some of which spells out an emotional state. The diaries are, properly speaking, not part of his book collection, but he referred to them as “my book”, and he bound the five volumes as carefully as any other. To him, the diaries were books.
While today I’m focussing on his books and his role as a printer, he was a miller by trade. So, also among the missing objects is the mill itself– where he spent at least some time almost every day for the vast majority of his life; here we find numerous expressions of pride in his skilled work and the difficulties he encountered, entries which often cross the line between craft pride and arrogance – as well as occasional narratives of workplace dangers:
“The two kilns going steady, and my poor self doing the whole thing! What do you think of that?! I think you are a clever fellow indeed”, 22 Dec 1877
To be clear, Barry did a truly impressive amount of work, and most of it required skill, strength and endurance – if he occasionally seems defensive or conceited, I am continually amazed at just how much he accomplished in the run of a day. This narration of skill, of his self, of boasting of his superior ways, is telling. Here the diary serves as a tool of self-fashioning, offering explanations of his actions, his “way of being” (as he said on one occasion) to the diary’s imagined, sympathetic audience to whom he could detail his triumphs and difficulties. In many ways, skilled work and its associated tactile experiences defined his world, and his self.
The diary offers several key clues how books acted in this context. One relates to community: In Six Mile Brook, Barry was an outsider, an irreligious freethinking and often difficult figure, an exile within his own world. As a miller, he was a hub of the community, but also one who was sometimes mistrusted – a person who personally profited from the labour of farmers. Paid in toll – that is, in taking a cut of the flour he ground – millers were sometimes suspected of having a thumb on the scales. He also antagonised many of his neighbours by refusing to attend church, and by his poor relations with the McLennans, the family into which he had married. With such an unwelcoming community against which to situate his self, he created one in his diary – a community for whom he could narrate his life, and in so doing create/fashion, his self. This part of the argument is premised on evidence developed elsewhere in the book manuscript that he lived what I’m calling “a textual life” – that is, a life where his desired community was elsewhere, and so where books and magazines (i.e. textual engagements) formed that community, and his diary (and his imagined audience) offered itself as a mirror for his self-fashioning exercises.
The core of my biography presents Barry as a man striving to be a part of the liberal-secular world of modernity that he saw emerging around him. That world, however, was emerging elsewhere, in London and New York much more so than in Six Mile Brook. But books, widely disseminated in the circuits of trade and empire across the north Atlantic world, meant that Barry lived on a brook, off a river, that flowed into a harbour, then a gulf, and then only an ocean away from those centres of modernity. Early in the diary – when he’s in his 30s and 40s – his local community and his textual community was composed of varying degrees of dissenting Presbyterians. Later in life, and more powerfully, most of his community (that textual community) were liberal-secularists, Free-thought writers and activists, people who lived in places like New York, Boston and Toronto. Reading Charles Watts’s critique of the fall and redemption in 1883, Barry celebrated the Toronto-based writer’s dismantling of Christian orthodoxy as a “whole jumble of incoherent nonsense … [a view that] that ordinary people are coming fast to see”. Few of those “ordinary people” lived in Six Mile Brook – though there were some, and several more in the County, particularly among the craft/skilled workers of Westville and New Glasgow. But most of Barry’s experience with that Freethought community was through reading.
By 1883, he was doing his part in spreading the word, in this case reprinting Watt’s essay in his first collection of free-thought pamphlets. Barry printed three collections of free-thought writers, an edition of Ingersoll’s short book, A Lecture on Orthodoxy (1885) plus the uncompleted edition of Paine’s Age of Reason, plus two other titles. Books then provided Barry with a connection to, and an immersion in, an emergent modernity, and moreover to a community of like-minded liberals and secularists. Books brought the intellectual content [that is, a meeting of the dissenting/Infidel minds] and their materiality [his making and holding of the objects of that community in his hands] – and this allowed him proximity, allowed him what Gillian Silverman terms a “fantasy of communion”, the shared experience of holding and indeed producing those works with his hands, forming a connection to a world quite unlike the one of the mill and his superstitious Highland neighbours.
The extant library, also housed at the Nova Scotia Archives, gives us a good sense of the books he owned and the range of his reading. We know there was more because the diary mentions purchases that we don’t see in what remains. There’s also the books he printed himself, with a press he built himself. The press is housed at the Nova Scotia Museum of Industry in Stellarton, if somewhat hidden ignominiously in the warehouse. Barry loved books and so for him, as an artisan, as a craftsperson, making books – typesetting them, even casting his own type, printing them, binding – the planning of the book, its symmetries and dissymmetries, was a completely satisfying exercise. If we think of the tactile experience of printing – the hands-on multiple actions of laying out the type, of inking, of pressing, of lifting and cutting and reassembling, before eventually binding it into that final form – we can see the disciplined pursuit of achievement.
“I was extremely busy in my shop all day setting type and many other things that no one knows anything about but myself”. 7 May 1882
“When in my shop I feel great contentment”, 9 March 1884
In his “little shop” [the print shop], as he explained in his diary several times, in this place, in the actions of making something he believed powerful and meaningful, was the place he was happiest. The press, then, was not simply a hobby, or an object that fulfilled a need or performed a function. It was something that offered satisfaction, accomplishment and self-esteem. The mill was his livelihood, and he was certainly fond of the money it brought in and he was proud of that skilled work. But in Barry’s mind, the press, the printing of intellectual books, the connection it gave him to the dynamic modern world which he saw emerging around him – of science, liberalism and societal improvement, of important writers he was reading like Darwin, Huxley, and American free thinkers like Robert Ingersoll and Annie Bessant. Others might read such works, but he was producing such works, making them available for his neighbours – most of whom he had little patience for, but some (again in his estimation) were eager to learn more than what the “lying preachers” told them. Much more so than the mill, which made food and money, the press made ideas and marked Barry as a skilled knowledge worker, a prophet of modernity among his superstitious Highland neighbors.
As a printer – that is, as a manufacturer of books – Barry’s relationship with those books was intellectual (most of the books he chose were because of his own interest in the subjects, most evident in the freethought books, but also the two medical books), aesthetic (the choice of fonts, of decorative elements, binding cloth, the gold foil for spines), and tactile (the actual printing, cutting, and binding of the book). Even the fonts – the types for which he sometimes cast himself – came in for aesthetic assessment.
“I was in my shop all day casting type – Borgeoise [sic] … but it does not please me, and I am manufacturing a new fount [sic]”. 21 December 1884
We don’t know why this “Bourgeois” font did not please Barry, but whether it was a pure aesthetic [he didn’t like the form] or an assessment of its suitability [that it not suit the book’s content], we see a clear sense of purposeful design, as well as pleasure in its successful accomplishment, or displeasure when not.
Look too at his name-plates, the many experiments with fonts, colours and forms, and look especially at the clear efforts at projecting something both refined and aesthetically pleasing. Look at his use of gold foil on his books’ spines, and the numerous decorative printed illustrations. This is design, and while it may not be “art” it is creative, aesthetically thoughtful, playful and rooted in craft and his experience. It’s impossible (I think) to imagine that crafting these insentient objects didn’t give him pleasure, or somehow eased pain, loneliness, or social isolation. And in that sense, these were objects that talked, objects made by human hands which articulated emotions ranging from pleasure to pain, and from satisfied achievement to frustrated failures.
If we treat seriously Barry’s designed books, we can see that he thought aesthetically, and that the proper book was a beautiful book. Perhaps he understood Rousseau’s Aristotelian emphasis that “the beautiful” was also “the good” (and this is not entirely far-fetched – he owned a copy of Emile). Here the tactile, even sensual, role of books seems understood: that the feel of the cloth, the firm yet pliable structure of the binding, the awareness of the gold-foil letters on the spine, that all of these create a “wordless intimacy” between book and reader, an intimacy underlaid with emotion that helps shape meaning. Of course, Barry also wished to sell these books, and attractive packaging was undoubtedly helpful there. But given his intellectual bent, and his aesthetic sensibilities, perhaps too we can see a realisation on Barry’s part that book design enhanced the book’s content – that the feel of a book [and here I mean both tactile and emotional] shapes the reader’s understanding of the content.
In thinking about this issue of the tactile place of the book, we (and I’m looking at you room!) we know we have a close, familiar relationship with the form of a book (of how print is presented, the columns, the margins, the front matter), and with the feel of a book (of turning pages, of the texture of pages, of the feeling of high-quality [and poor quality!] binding). When we read, we touch, and we feel, and thus through the materiality of the book reading creates an intimacy, and an imagined bond or communion in which fuller relationships with other people, communities, and ideas can be felt. In reading, Barry felt and thus experienced alternatives to the lived social relations of his day-to-day life. In reading about books in Barry’s diary, in handling these books myself in the reading room of the Nova Scotia Archives, I felt a fuller picture of his aspirations to freedom and modernity, and of how the combinations of aesthetic pleasures, craft pride, intellectual stirrings, and (ultimately) emotion shaped the life of this obscure man who lived at the centre of modernity on Six Mile Brook, Pictou County, Nova Scotia.
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In lieu of notes, I’ll mention two books I found helpful in writing this, Gillian Silverman, Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-century America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012; and Jonathan Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-century American Literature. University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. Ingrid Makus taught me everything I know about Rousseau.
