Quentin's Weeknotes 10/4/20-10/10/20

This Week:

• This week in Collectors and Collecting, we taught about the history of collecting in Deerfield, Massachusetts, a place I spent a lot of time in graduate school (and wrote several publications from the time). I also taught the history of comic books and collecting, which is one of my favorite classes of the entire calendar year. This year I’m trying out an excerpt from Chris Ryall and and Scott Tipton’s illustrated history of the genre.
• I finished reading John Bloom’s study of baseball card collecting, and wrote up a rather long review.
• I finished reading Annalee Newitz' “The Future of Another timeline”, a wild time-travel novel about feminists and reactionary patriarchal conservatives who edit the timeline like Wikipedia in a battle for women’s economic and reproductive autonomy. I found the characters to be a little wooden and rote, but the novel is filled with wonderfully rich historical details that span human (and terrestrial!) history and the plot and concept are really clever.