Descriptive Bibliography

I chose to focus my first experiment in descriptive bibliography on a magazine called No Fidelity published each term by a Carleton student organization associated with the campus radio station KRLX. In particular, I examined an issue of No Fidelity published in Carleton’s winter term of 2022.

No Fidelity Winter 2022 is eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches tall.  Although the magazine is uncommonly large for a student publication, its size remains relatively standard for a proper magazine, and this indicates that the magazine’s readers are meant to take the publication seriously, and regard it as a piece of media on par with media produced by organizations outside of the college.

The magazine’s paper feels thicker than standard office paper.  Both the printed and non-printed areas of the magazine remain relatively matte.  The magazine’s matte texture and weighted paper strike me as odd because these textures contrast the textures usually found on magazines of this size — most magazines are printed onto lighter paper, and they are also printed in a way which makes them highly glossy.  This, I think, points to the budget and material constraints of the student organization creating the textual object.

The pages of No Fidelity Winter 2022 are held together with staples.  This, also, signals the magazine’s unprofessional production.  I’m not sure whether these staples additionally signal an intended use for the magazine.  It seems to me as if the editors of the magazine chose this method of binding due to necessity and not stylistic choice.  If the choice to bind the magazine with staples had been deliberate, it would indicate that the magazine should be used and read temporarily, and then maybe recycled.  But because it does not seem like the editors of the magazine had any choice but to bind the magazine in staples I’m not sure if I can fairly draw this conclusion about the magazine’s intended use.

Examining No Fidelity Winter 2022’s bibliographic code helped me unpack the way in which the editors of this magazine intended it to be read and understood. This analysis has also proved interesting because it revealed some of the ways in which descriptive bibliography might point scholars toward inaccurate conclusions, specifically when a textual object’s creators made material decisions based on necessity rather than stylistic preference.