Bibliographer: Bobby Zipp
Mary, A Fiction.
Traditional Description
Descriptive Bibliography for Wollstonecraft's Mary, A Fiction
Bobby Zipp
Wollstonecraft, Mary. MARY, A FICTION. 1st ed. London: J. Johnson, 1788.
MARY, | A | FICTION. | [Horizontal line] | L'exercise des plus sublimes vertus éleve et nourri: | le génie. [...] ROSSEAU. | [Floral decoration] | LONDON: | PRINTED FOR J. JOHNSON, ST. PAUL's CHURCH-YARD. | MDCCLXXVIII. |•|
Volume 1/1:
Pagination: i - vi, 1-187. 8mo. Collation: i2,A2, B-M12, N6.
Contents:
i: Half-title. ii: Title. iii: Advertisement. 1-187: Text.
Notes:
Published anonymously. 31 Chapters. The half-title is a signature of the fictitious name "Mary Bayley", the protagonist of the novel, top of page, centered. Translation of the Voltaire on title page: "the exercise of the most sublime virtues raises and nourishes genius". Advertisement is signed, "Mary". When dialogue is present, there are quotation marks on the right hand side of all of the text that is considered dialogue, not just the first and last lines. N6r includes the text "END" at the bottom of the page.
Sourced from the British Library. Digital facsimile retrieved from Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. Swarthmore College Lib TRICO(PALCI). 8 Nov. 2015. No blank pages included in digital facsimile. Gale Document Number CW3312951500. ESTC Number: T039008. Microfilm Reel#: Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Range 4967.
Sections of this work included in The Young Gentleman and Lady's Instructor; Or, New Reader and Speaker: Being a Choice Collection of Pieces in Poetry and Prose, Etc. Lewes: Sussex Press, 1808.
This experimental bibliography applies text from Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction to physical bodies using custom-made temporary tattoos. The project materializes the longstanding metaphor of the book as a body and opens questions around gender that traditional bibliographies are not able to articulate.
This project would not have been possible without the help of Tattify.com, an online shop specializing in temporary tattoos that custom-printed paratext of Mary, A Fiction. The creator began the project by selecting parts of the digital facsimile of the 1788 edition of the text available on Eighteenth Century Collections Online and using Adobe Photoshop to create JPEG versions of specific sections of the paratext. Tattify.com printed the tattoos from those JPEG images, and they were applied on the models similarly to any standard temporary tattoo, and will have washed away within a week of the project’s completion.
The inspiration for this project came from the reading of the text itself. Despite the fact that Mary, A Fiction is in many respects a revolutionary novel, it appears to have been thrown into the literary trash heap of the 18th century, and has not gained significant contemporary scholarly attention. It is very surprising that a novel centered on the experiences of a proto-bisexual woman in the 18th century has yet to gain attention from either the contemporary literary scene or gender and sexuality scholars. This experimental bibliography, in many ways, is attempting to reignite a discussion on the novel’s content by conveying the novel’s close relationship to gender, sexuality, and the body in a way that traditional bibliographic methods completely fail to capture.