Offprinting Bibliotherapy: Sadie P. Delaney's Interventions in Media Infrastructures

Abstract

"Offprinting Bibliotherapy: Sadie P. Delaney's Interventions in Media Infrastructures" investigates how librarian and bibliotherapist Sadie Peterson Delaney's circulation of offprinted journal articles enclosed in personal correspondence intervened in mid-twentieth-century infrastructures of knowledge. Halfway between the private letter and the published journal article, enclosed offprints turn up everywhere in Delaney's archive. Focusing on the material transmission of the discourse of bibliotherapy in the letters Delaney (1889–1958) sent across the United States from the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Medical Center, this article looks to the bibliographic object of the offprint in order to reconstruct the print mechanisms and maneuvers for sharing information that Delaney deployed to establish bibliotherapy as a viable discursive object. Bibliotherapy stood in for the set of wide-ranging book-centered activities Delaney developed for the veterans in her charge at Tuskegee, and in turn confirmed her position as a crucial but stressed figure in the rise of therapy culture in the United States. Through her use of the offprint, Delaney, a Black woman and leading thinker in her field, was able to meaningfully engage in the media infrastructures of her time from a geographic, institutional, and subject position peripheral to contemporary sites of intellectual production and distribution.