Read Online How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price - Free Book Online

reproducible. A matter of media, not of aesthetics—with the crucial caveat that aesthetically serious texts and aesthetically intense experience figure as limit cases of the logic that all reading post-Gutenberg is supposed to follow. Far from (or as well as) forming a sphere of heightened attention, the printed as described by Ginzburg—no less than the aesthetic as theorized by Scarry—emerges from refusals to attend. 29 The book so strongly exemplifies the contrast between superficial change and fundamental invariability that the narrator of
Waverley
can use it as a metaphor for the continuity of human character, promising to read aloud a chapter from “the great book of Nature, the same through a thousand editions, whether of black-letter, or wire-wove and hot-pressed” (Scott 36).
    By the nineteenth century, what had held since Gutenberg for all readers came to apply especially to good readers, whether that excellence was measured morally (as Ranthorpe did) or intellectually (in the manner of the New Critics). In that sense, paradoxically, the new New Bibliography could also be seen as a reductio ad absurdum of the New Criticism against which it appeared to react. The book historians whom literary critics think of as antiformalists have in fact pushed the boundaries of that term to encompass material (along with verbal) form. 30
    The opening of
Ranthorpe
echoes Carlyle’s paean—reprinted in several late-Victorian compendia of bibliophilic pieties—to “the most momentous, wonderful and worthy . . . things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them;—from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew BOOK” (
On
Heroes
142). Yet the hostility to expensive books that essay shares with the novel suggests that outward form does matter. If what Carlyle calls the “wonder” of books depends on the mismatch between the insignificance of the poor bits of paper and the (metaphorical) richness of the verbal signs that they incarnate, this may be because once object competes with language for attention—as in fine bindings—the former ceases to be available as a foil for the latter.
H OW TO R EAD H ANDLING
    Where the nineteenth-century general-interest press asked what uses of the book were acceptable, twenty-first-century scholars are likelier to ask what uses of the book are legible, and how the skills involved in reading texts (notably those possessed by literary critics and intellectual historians)differ from the skills required to describe objects (notably those possessed by all bibliographers and by some book historians). Closer to home, then, my question is how to situate literary interpretation vis-à-vis the social life of books more broadly understood—and also where different subcultures (from scholarly disciplines to religious traditions to political movements) have drawn the limits of that breadth.
    Now that “the history of books and reading” has become a catchphrase, scholars in flight from lexical monotony refer to “the history of the book” interchangeably with “the history of reading.” 31 It’s true that both demonize the same opponent: the idealism that literary history shares with the history of ideas (which should remind formalist critics that “history” is hardly the opposite term to “literature”). Yet the survey I’ve just offered of the metaphorization of “reading” and reliteralization of bibliographic terms suggests what gets lost in that lumping. Where late twentieth-century critics insisted that books are not the only thing that can be read, so early twenty-first-century scholars are rediscovering (like so many M. Jourdains) that reading is not the only thing that can be done to books. That some of those other operations can themselves be performed upon objects other than books creates a third methodological problem.
    I spoke of a turn away from metaphor, but the opposite case could also be made: that where the old historicism within literary