Is BookTok Too Obsessed with Aesthetics?

Thank you so much for watching and, as I say, I would love to hear your thoughts. This perspective is not meant to be new and avant-garde - so many of us integrally and intuitively know that the book-object can carry meaning - but I just wanted to resituate this thinking to look at BookTok anew... I also want to say a huge thank you to the TikTok creators who agreed to be featured in this video. I hugely appreciate their support, and would encourage you to check out their wonderful accounts: @sophi3saur @authorlianacincotti @hawthornandvinebindery @loverofpages REFERENCES “Accessory”. Online Etymology Dictionary, Bramley, Ellie Violet. “In the Instagram age, you actually can judge a book by its cover”. The Guardian, 18th April 2021, Darnton, Robert. ‘“What Is the History of Books” Revisited,’ in Modern Intellectual History 4.3 (2007), 495-508 Hackel, Heidi. Reading Material in Early Modern England. Cambridge UP, 2005. Macray, William Dunn. Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford: With a Notice of the Earlier Library of the University. Clarendon Press, 1890, p 67 and 467. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009. Ozment, Kate. ‘Rationale for Feminist Bibliography’, in Textual Cultures 13.1 (2020), 149–178 DOI: Pearson, David. English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800. British Library, 2005. Taylor, Helen. Why Women Read Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2019. Thomas-Corr, Johanna. “Without women, the novel would die: discuss”. The Guardian, December 2019, “The Instagrammable Book Covers List”. Penguin Random House. ALSO TAKE A LOOK AT... “16th-century Elizabethan embroidered binding”. . St Johns College, Cambridge, “Queen Elizabeth’s Geneva Bible”. Bodleain Library, Facebook, 1st January 2023, Find me elsewhere: instagram: @_rubygranger tiktok: @rubygranger8 Pumpkin Productivity (my stationery company): Timestamps: 0:00 intro 0:33 reading as a visual thing 2:38 our tendency to demean visuals & tiktok 6:01 booktok centralises the book-object 7:40 setting this within seventeenth-century book culture 10:45 linking this to special editions today 11:45 is this criticism gendered? 13:18 the importance of the book-object 14:04 outro