The novel I chose for my descriptive bibliography is Emma; Or the child of sorrow, written by an anonymous author. This novel, however, is barely hanging onto its existence. It is documented in by The British Museum, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, where a digital facsimile is available, and it can be custom ordered to print. The physical book has, in a sense, disappeared, and even the memory of it is fading. We talked in class about realism, and many of the theories of the novel we read claimed that the essential quality of the novel is that it attempts to reflect reality. Ironically, however, it is the novels like Emma; Or the child of sorrow, that most truly capture reality. While a novel may be wonderful to read-even if its popularity lasts for several generations-most novels, like most people and events, will eventually fade from memory.
I wanted to capture this in my experimental bibliography.
All that is left of Emma; Or the child of sorrow is obscure and digital. The novel no longer has a physical essence to capture, and even though the words still exist online, they have lost their salience in the world. To reflect this, I decided to keep my experimental description entirely digitalized, it is typed rather than handwritten and set over a photograph. The poem is not just about Emma; Or the child sorrow, but about forgotten novels in general, because this novel has become just one of millions of forgotten novels. In congruence with this idea, the photograph the poem is placed on top of is a faded out image of the novel. The novel itself is no longer important, and neither is its physicality, its importance lies in the millions of forgotten novels it represents.

My experimental bibliography attempts to capture that the novel, Emma; Or the child of sorrow, has lost its physicality, and that the memory of this novel, as a whole, has faded almost entirely.