![A diligent reader has marked off the playbooks on this bookseller list that they have bought/read (or perhaps have not bought/read).[Holk.d.29, Bodleian]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5207ed92e4b0f3bf53b55b13/1465664622995-ON4KT10SYLDMVFGTSPUV/bookseller-list.jpg)
The creation of a list ... is a familiar academic exercise: it is a traditional task assigned to dissertation students or to ambitious undergraduates, and as teachers and scholars, we often find ourselves doing the same thing. List-making gives us the illusion that we are working, and implies that academic work or scholarly work in general is incremental; it is just a matter of, say, marshalling the evidence to suggest or support whatever thesis we come up with, or in most cases doing these two things in reverse order. But for many of us, this comforting task, having been performed a few times, no longer functions as it once did. The once satisfying illusion seems to have lost its power, and the resultant list deteriorates into something else: not a coherent body of information, but rather a bunch of titles.
{Joseph Dane, Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History, 131}
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about my research and writing process in the three years since filing my dissertation—which was, for the record, finished under such pressure and with break-neck speed that it's hard to explain “how” I actually wrote it—it’s that lists are necessary illusions. There are:
❊ the to-do lists of personal and professional tasks that populate my planner;
† the master reading list for my monograph-in-progress—further organized by chapter;
‡ the table of contents for this same monograph-in-progress;
§ the detailed outlines of each chapter; and
။ the playbook typography database of almost 1500 complete entries, carefully and variously numbered (STC/Wing, Greg, DEEP, Wiggins, and my own numbering system to facilitate the paging of large quantities of books at the Folger).
As Joseph Dane rightly points out (and as many who have worked on big projects probably know from first-hand experience), lists are “comforting” because they give us the sense that we’re gathering an unwieldy enterprise into manageable proportions. We apply method to the madness. Except this is rarely what happens:
❊ I address the tasks on my to-do list idiosyncratically—sometimes privileging the most time-sensitive line-items and sometimes ignoring those for items I feel like doing (or have the resources to do at that particular moment). Some tasks, usually aspirational ones, never get done.
† The only time I can remember reading through a list almost systematically was for my PhD field exam. I’ve made every effort to approach my reading lists methodically since then, but it turns out that research—at least mine—doesn’t really want to conform to such orderliness. I’ll always opt for the research rabbit hole—pursuing a new sublist of readings with the risk of failure—over diligently ticking off the entries in my original list.
‡ The table of contents is probably the least illusory and the most likely to be realized of all the other lists listed on my list above. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t change in step with my research—chapters disappear while new ones appear, and sequencing them often feels like a chicken-and-egg problem.
§ I have learned that anything more than the most rudimentary of chapter outlines (by which I mean, here’s-roughly-what-the-three-main-sections-of-the-chapter-will-do) doesn't work for me. I make detailed outlines all the same, because they ultimately provide me something to push back against when new thinking about the topic steers me in a different direction. “Why doesn’t/don’t the original structure/case studies/sections work?” Endeavoring to answer such questions of form and content has helped me produce writing that I think is more persuasive than what I would have produced if I had followed a template that was, to be honest, obsolete the minute my pen hit paper.
။ The database is ground zero for the whole project—the ultimate list of all the printed plays that have informed (and continue to inform) my thinking about early modern playbook typography. It contains records for (of?) every edition and copy of that edition I've looked at. It can be organized chronologically, by genre, by author, by publisher, by printer, by whether or not it makes a claim about its performance history on its title page, by STC number, by whether it features scene divisions, dashes, pilcrows, brackets, dropped initials, songs in italic, &c. You get the picture. The database has yielded great riches already in terms of identifying typographic experiments and trends. But it is also kind of messy—it makes sense to me most of the time, but I'm not sure anyone else could swoop in and use it effectively at the moment. (One day, I hope it’ll be in sharable shape.) All that said, this is a list that marshals the evidence—it is indeed satisfying and a little worrying to know that all that—more than just “a bunch of titles”—is there in one file. At the same time, it isn't exactly coherent in its current form. It will only become a “coherent body of information,” like the most interesting recent work in book history, we are able to make narrative sense of the records of research it contains.
List-making allows me to feel like I’m in control of my materials and methods, but there’s always a moment when I realize (and panic) that a list won’t hold—it can never be comprehensive enough or it’s been organized all wrong or it ignores some aspect of the data or &c &c &c. What I’m realizing at this stage in writing my book is that this is the sweet spot. This is where I want to be. That my lists won't hold shape is less of a problem and more of a license to rethink old matter(s) into new forms—to shape evidence not into lists but into narrative.
Which means, friends, that it is time to abandon bullet points and to start writing in ¶s.