Professor Andrew Stauffer of the University of Virginia, one of the two co-principal investigators for Book Traces @ U.Va., recently gave an interview about the larger Book Traces project on the radio show With Good Reason. When interviewer Allison Quantz asked about the origins of the project, Stauffer explained how a class exercise in the library led to a more methodical search:

I began looking systematically through the books of poetry in Alderman Library at the University of Virginia and finding all sorts of amazing things. It was as if no one had ever looked for this before but as soon as you started looking for it, it was everywhere. People wrote in their books all the time in the nineteenth century. It was a way to keep journals, to establish reactions to reading. I mean we still write in books now, but I think the practices were different in different historical periods and we learned a lot from that.

You can listen to the interview here (it will be the first segment when you press play).