Heugh. You're right about the cover. It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month display. It feels out of place among other Black Studies titles from U. of Chicago in "seriousness" relative to the significance of its subject. [1]

> "...it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed."

I think that stories like this represent what's going to be the new normal for discovery practices in the humanities.

Although I understand your disappointment, all that's changed is that physical discovery has gone digital and had that not been the case in this instant the likelihood of Jacob's narrative being resurfaced is altered.

This is an example of it working out well, as far as I can tell. It couldn't get any better than how it turned out.

Who else but a middle-aged post-graduate, in the middle of the first Trump administration, trying to get his dissertation published, looking for work, applying exercising his academic know-how to scratch his own itch, taking advantage of open source intelligence, corresponding with colleagues, transforming "from an interpretive literary scholar into an old-fashioned archive hound", could have pulled this of?

(Because we know there's no way he'd even think about financing a trip to Australia to kick the research off the old fashion way)

What better way for this to return to the fore in 2024?

You say the plot of the beat has been surgically removed, nay, I say beat goes on!

We used to bang on papyrus, and pass credentials for access to microfilm. White-gloved hands daintily turn delicate pages...tired eyes glean call numbers scrawled onto hastily sheared scrap paper.

The same beat carries on my friend...

[1]: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/subject/su10.html

> It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month display.

Or not to stand out, but to blend in. :) ...Ah, but the cover design on the actual publisher's website is different! And indeed more "serious"-looking.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo213795...