Please pardon the obtuseness of this post’s title, but much of the discussion at our last meeting  was about physical as well as temporal fixity of texts. When is a book a book? When did people in the past begin considering it a book? Is a book permanent or is it mutable? Among many other questions with which book historians struggle daily, these quests for rootedness fascinate me! In the English Library for the meeting–coming, going, eating, writing, reporting, listening–we personified the more fleeting, ephemeral aspects of book history. Some of us had accessed the materials on iPads, some computers, and some as printouts. In discussing the fixity of the book, we were in flux. Perhaps it is just that time of year, midterm spring quarter, but…