A late summer storm looming in 2009, Michael Gamer, an associate professor in the Department of English, turned off both his office desktop and his laptop, making sure both were unplugged in order to safeguard against any electrical surges.

On both computers was his nearly completed 105,000-word manuscript, a book on the collected works of British Romantic poets he had been working on for just shy of a decade.

“The next morning I booted up my laptop to work on it, but what I got was the original startup screen—the one you get when you first buy the computer,” he says. “I logged in and there was nothing on my hard drive. I ran down to the computer in my office, same thing. Same startup screen.”

He started looking for his book. “It wasn’t there,” he says. “I panicked.”

After days of investigation, it became clear that the book and other recently opened files were gone. Apparently, a software update Gamer had completed on both computers had malfunctioned. None of the book manuscript files remained. This was before common use of the Cloud and personal external hard drives.

“For about nine months I tried to rewrite the lost chapters, but I couldn’t,” he says. “It was just too hard.”

A conference on Robert Southey took him to the Romantic poet’s hometown of Keswick, England, in the spring of 2010. Gamer’s keynote address had a unique angle, focusing on the poet’s decision, when he became poet laureate in 1813, to use the laureate stipend to buy a sizeable life insurance policy of 3,000 pounds. With a large family to support, Gamer argued, Southey was hedging his bets against the value of his new station, the political nature of which might erode the future value of his copyrights.

While Gamer was at the conference, a volcano erupted in Eyjafjallajokull, Iceland, and the resulting cloud of ash closed down airports throughout Europe. Trapped in the English countryside for six days, Gamer tromped around the picturesque hills with his colleagues.

The subject of the moribund book inevitably came up in conversation.

“They said, ‘We like the Southey work. How are you going to work it into the book?’” Gamer recalls. “And so it was reconceived, among friends, on ridges and in pubs. That’s where it became a study how Romantic poets turned writing for posterity into a marketing strategy.”

Inspired, he dove back into researching and writing with this new focus. The resulting reimagining of the lost book was published in February: “Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry.”

“It’s a better book,” Gamer says.

Specifically, he focuses on what he terms “re-collection,” the act of taking previously published poems and combining them with new ones. The resulting collections are repackaged, reordered, revised, and repriced to reach new audiences.

“The activity resembles what directors do with DVD collector’s editions, or musicians with boxed sets,” he says.

His take is opposite of the traditional view of a Romantic poet: “generally aloof, usually impractical, always idealistic, probably in an imaginative lather,” Gamer says.

Actually, he argues, these poets worked closely with their publishers, and frequently wrote to pay the bills.

“If you follow the money and read the correspondence—if you look at the business dealings alongside the artistry—you often find that at the very moment poets are supposedly eschewing popular readership, they are focusing in almost an obsessive way on marketing the book now,” Gamer says. “What’s fascinating is reading the poems and the poetic collections themselves, which are stunning, alongside these concerns.”

Based on research in more than two dozen libraries, Gamer’s 330-page book tells the behind-the-scenes personal stories of several Romantic poets, starting with William Wordsworth and ending with Percy Shelley. The chapters are divided by genre: subscription editions, anthologies of newspaper verse, second editions, laureate verse, and posthumous collections.

The book is aimed toward other English literature professors, graduate students, and interested undergraduates. A Penn professor since 1994, this is Gamer’s second book, following “Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation,” published in 2000. He is already working on his third, “A History of British Theatre: Staged Conflicts.”