Companionship

C18-L is currently conducting a rather desultory conversation about the glut of "companions" (Cambridge, Oxford, Blackwell, Continuum, Greenwood...) and series (Pickering & Chatto, Thoemmes...), thanks to an inaccessible-to-me review essay by Paula Backscheider.  Backscheider wonders how the boom in companions affects scholarly practice more generally: a help? a hindrance? an annoyance (especially when nobody reads your essay)?

I've now written entries for four companions, and it is an odd scholarly genre.    The two entries I wrote for this book, for example, were article-length essays intended as original scholarly work, whereas my most recent endeavor involved simply explicating a critical text and briefly situating it in the context of other work on the same subject.  And the entries for this thing were somewhere in-between.  In other words, some companions encourage writers to Think Deep Thoughts, and others encourage them to Think Other People's Thoughts (or, er, not think at all).  The difficulty with Thinking Deep Thoughts, however, is that it may compromise the companion's actual usefulness; I'm not sure that I would send a neophyte to the Cambridge Companion of Victorian Poetry, given how difficult some of the entries are.  All of the projects I've been involved with have had some sort of target audience--sometimes clearly delineated, sometimes not--but I've felt on occasion as though I was supposed to be all things to all people.  Still, I've never minded receiving a mandate to write in English, as opposed to Englishese. 

I might be more things to more people, however, if the companions weren't so expensive.  The people who least need some of these books--i.e., the faculty--are best able to purchase them [1].  A few years ago, I pondered assigning some of Blackwell's companions to my graduate students, but faltered at the expense.  (Of course, some of these books outweigh the Riverside Shakespeare and the Norton Anthology of English Literature put together; assigning them might constitute cruel and unusual punishment.)  As one of the contributors to the aforementioned C18-L conversation noted, though, the Pickering & Chatto and Thoemmes reprint series effectively constitute a stick-'em-up operation, especially for smaller libraries.  $750 for five or six books? Come again? I've authorized my department to purchase a couple of these sets when our library budget has proven unexpectedly flush, but "unexpectedly" is the operative term here.  Individuals, of course, can hardly hope to acquire any of the goodies on offer (unless they've been lucky enough to win the lottery).  Not even I am willing to fork out quite that many Benjamin Franklins. 

[1] Always excepting those companions aimed at the folks like myself, of course.