The Reader in the Book
The Reader in the Book examines the history, archaeology, and sociology of the use of margins and other blank spaces in early modern books to shed light on reading practices, how books were read, and what early modern readerse wanted texts to tell them.
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The history of books is not simply a history of technology, of the change from manuscript to print; it is also a history of massive dissemination and changing forms of attention, in the largest sense a history of reading. Early modern readers left marks in their books, and these provide an archeology of reading practices and a sociology of the interaction of readers with texts, an index to what kind of repository books have been and what we have wanted texts to tell us. Milton says that "Books are not absolutely dead things": this study examines in what way, for early modern readers, were books alive?
