(My home away from home for two weeks in February.) Photo courtesy of UVA.

Excuse this newsletter's quiet start to 2026. I spent the beginning of the year getting ready to spend another couple of weeks with Rita Mae Brown's archives at the University of Virginia. And now I'm back from an incredibly useful trip.

I must admit, I didn't mumble, "OH MY GOD!" quite as often this time around, but you only see, for example, your subject's mother's response to her most famous work once. In the recent visit, I was also mostly focused on "unprocessed" papers--bigger boxes that have gotten just a quick once over from the archivists--material that is, by definition, less organized and categorized. (Last September, I could look at the finding aid and think, "Oh, I don't care about [topic the librarians had carefully separated out and arranged into folders]," and skip them guilt-free; this time, I had only a general sense of the contents of each box.)

For all that, I learned a lot from my first visit, which meant several things went better, or at least more efficiently, this time around. I have been surprised at how hard it is to find practical advice about using archives, so just in case anyone reading this needs it, here are a couple of tips from me.

I'm going to get the most annoying thing out of the way first: If you can afford to replace hardware that is ailing, do so. I am ridiculously profligate when it comes to computer hardware--if Apple makes it, there's a good chance I have at least one of them--but I feel a bit differently about phones. The idea of replacing a phone before it's really necessary (decided by me!) is anathema. In September, I was working with an iPhone 13, which was fine except that its battery was going and the charging port was really moody. (Too much pocket lint, or too many bits of Scotch tape stuck into the port to try to remove all that lint? Who knows!) This meant I was constantly fighting a very low battery and felt like I had to grab whatever I could as fast as possible and sort it all out later. So, I would leave the reading room with a load of randomly named files on my phone, and when I got back to my hotel room, I did my best to organize them. In part this daily sorting was for good file hygiene, but mostly it was to clear space on my phone, which was (naturally) way too close to capacity. This was fine--it worked for the most part--but it caused a lot of extra work once I'd left the library, and I did lose a few files. (Fortunately, i knew I was going back and could grab them again--but this cost me some time in the "new" boxes.)

In February, I had acquired a newer phone, with much more storage and very good battery life. It's just silly how much easier this made pretty much everything. (I know, I know, them that's got shall have.)

In September, I used the Notes app to grab scans of any documents I wanted to capture. In February, I worked directly in my phone's Files app, and this was much easier and more efficient. I started a folder for UVA-Feb 26, then I made subfolders for every box and folder I looked at. I also took the time to give each scan a name, so I don't have to do that when I'm processing all this material. I also found it a lot easier to "fix" the scans--if the camera grabbed more than I wanted, I used the "Adjust" button to set the bounds of what I wanted. (Here's a video about using the Files app for this purpose.)

I still had some work to do at the end of every day--I copied everything I'd scanned to Google Drive and also moved it into DEVONthink, my document manager. It's a bit belt and braces, but a soupçon of paranoia about losing files/scans seems smart.

What I cannot fathom is the "old days" before digital/phone cameras. I'm old enough to have spent a fortune on library photocopy machines when I was at university and later when I was a fact-checker for Encarta, but I'm pretty sure that back in the day special collections reading rooms only permitted users to take physical notes using pencil on (provided) paper. What took me a couple of weeks to capture would've taken months--at least--just a few years ago.

A RANDOM NOTE: I will admit that I have had my eye on the Goodreads' ratings and reviews of A PLACE OF OUR OWN ever since it was published in June 2024. This week there was a big jump--after months of getting a dozen or so new ratings per week, there were suddenly more than 100--and the book now has more than 1,000 ratings, which feels like a milestone. The influx did send the average rating down a tad, but I'm really proud that even with more than 1,000 people having had their say, the average rating is still 4.11 stars. (The reviews--of which there are 216--are generally very positive, though I must admit I laughed when the most recent addition, a mere three stars--said, "it didn't really cover my era and read more like ancient history." You're talking about my life, young 'un!)

LISTEN TO ME: I had great fun joining Steve Metcalf and The New Yorker's Michael Schulman on this week's Slate's Culture Gabfest. We talked about Baz Luhrman's EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (shockingly good); Peacock sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins (unsurprisingly great, given its pedigree), and Neflix's Famous Last Words, aka the talking dead (I still don't know what to make of it).

RECOMMENDATION I was absolutely blown away by Izabella Scott's The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial, but it isn't available in the U.S. until September, so I'll wait for a while to sing its praises. In recent months, I've been reading a lot about the 1970s--or "ancient history" as that APOOO reader would have it. I just finished Jason Burke's The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, which was great (though massive). As with Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage, which was a reminder of how many bomb-making radical groups flourished in the United States in that decade, I had forgotten quite how many young Europeans had chosen "urban guerrilla" as their career. (It's hard to complain that a 768-page/25-hour book leaves things out, but Burke's justification for ignoring the IRA and ETA--that they were nationalist groups--was a bit undercut by all the time he quite rightly dedicated to the PLO.)