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“The pieces of the puzzle come together seamlessly; better still, Kendrick’s investigation informs and enriches the Humourist essays, illuminating their historical and literary contexts.” —Publishers Weekly

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I knew the review was scheduled to appear. I’d marked the date. I’d even ordered copies in advance.

Still, nothing quite prepares you for the moment when the work arrives by weight.

Nineteen pounds, to be exact.

The box from Fry Communications sat innocently enough at the door, but when I lifted it, I laughed—an unguarded, surprised laugh. This wasn’t an email notification or a discreet PDF link. This was paper. Ink. Volume. Evidence that something quiet and patient had crossed a threshold into the world of objects.

Inside were stacks of Publishers Weekly—the December 15-22 issue, fresh from the press. And there it was: the review of Unmasking The Humourist, resting calmly among other books, other arguments, other claims on a reader’s attention. No fanfare. No special lighting. Just…there. As if it had always belonged.

That may sound small. It isn’t.

For writers—especially those of us who work in literary recovery, archival research, and historical attribution—most of the labor happens far from spectacle. It happens in libraries and databases, in footnotes and marginalia, in moments when you are unsure whether the trail you’re following will narrow into clarity or vanish altogether. There are no crowds for this kind of work. No applause when you discover one more corroborating detail, one more pattern that holds.

Unmasking The Humourist grew out of precisely that kind of sustained attention. The essays at its center—satirical, incisive, mischievous pieces published pseudonymously in the South-Carolina Gazette in the early 1750s—had long been admired but never convincingly attributed. Their author hid in plain sight. The work demanded patience: weighing tone against context, tracing bureaucratic fingerprints, listening carefully to what language reveals when you stop rushing it.

And patience is not fashionable. We live in a moment that rewards speed, certainty, and hot takes. Literary recovery is none of those things. It is slow, provisional, and often lonely. You work without knowing whether recognition will ever arrive—or whether it even should. You work because the work matters.

That’s why seeing the review in Publishers Weekly mattered to me—not as a trophy, but as confirmation that the argument held. That it made sense beyond my own desk. That it earned its place in the broader conversation about early American literature and satire.

What struck me most wasn’t pride. It was scale.

Here was my book, not elevated or isolated, but contextualized—surrounded by other studies, other voices, other claims. This is where scholarship belongs: not shouted, but situated. Not proclaimed, but tested.

There’s something grounding about that.

I spread the pages out on the table. I read the review again, this time with the odd sensation of distance—as though I were encountering the project for the first time. The reviewer understood what I had tried to do. Better still, they understood why it mattered. That’s the quiet victory every researcher hopes for.

And then there was the sheer physicality of it all. The stacks. The heft. The knowledge that these copies would travel—to libraries, to colleagues, to readers I’ll never meet. Work that had lived for years in notes and drafts now had mass. It could be lifted. Shared. Passed hand to hand.

Research takes time. Recovery takes patience.

But sometimes—blessedly, unexpectedly—the work becomes something you can actually lift.

And when it does, you pause.
You hold it.
You let it be real.