Disclosure: I'm friends or friendly with about half of the contributors to this book, for which I also wrote a chapter. I think I'd have loved it even if that weren't the case, but then again it couldn't have not been the case because the world of feminist archivists isn't as big as you might imagine--or hope!
The first section is all about zines, where New School professor Kate Eichhorn applies her brilliance to the Riot Grrrl collection at Fales/NYU. I love how she is critical, yet appreciative of Lisa Darms's vision for the archive. No non-archivist academic gets archives and special collections better than Kate.
In the second section on LGBT Archives, Alana Kumbier's analysis of the movie The Watermelon Woman's engagement with archives was particularly enthralling. I am not the most enthusiastic consumer of academic writing, but Alana manages to pair her smarty pants with enough femme finery to make it easy and satisfying to read.
As someone who is struggling at work to figure out preserving born-digital documents, I'm going to suggest Amy Benson & Kathryn Allamong Jacob's piece on preservation at the Radcliffe institute to Barnard's archivist as a DIY guide.
I'd been told by the series editor, Emily Drabinski, how good the last essay in the book, written by Seal Press co-founder Barbara Sjoholm, is, and of course Emily was right (she always is). "She Who Owns the Press" is about the hard work of producing feminist materials and how important--and physically challenging--that work can be, especially in the 1970s and 80s. You finish the book wanting to cheer for Sjoholm and her contemporaries, and for the work that all of us feminist archivists are doing to make sure queer and feminist cultural contributions are part of history.
I also finished wanting to cheer for the editors, especially my zine librarian soul sister Kelly Wooten, for putting the book together over three arduous years. You go girls!