The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford Textual Perspectives) - Hardcover

This instructive study affords a compelling example of Stephen Orgel's archaeology of reading, whereby investigation of early inscriptions in the margins and other blank spaces of books contributes greatly to our understanding of the sociology and history of reading. (John N. King, Renaissance Quarterly)

good value ... a study of early modern marginalia but also ― the bit I'm looking forward to ― a reflection on our more recent idolization of the clean, unmarked page. (Hal Jensen, Summer Books selection 2016, Times Literary Supplement)

As Orgel presents his succession of case studies he shows that careful attention to how books were used can enlarge our understanding of the purposes to which earlier readers put them. (Austen Saunders, Cambridge Quarterly)

The Reader in the Book is concerned with a particular aspect of the history of the book, an archeology and sociology of the use of margins and other blank spaces. One of the most commonplace aspects of old books is the fact that people wrote in them, something that, until very recently, has infuriated modern collectors and librarians. But these inscriptions constitute a significant dimension of the book's history, and what readers did to books often added to their value. Sometimes marks in books have no relation to the subject of the book, merely names, dates, prices paid; blank spaces were used for pen trials and doing sums, and flyleaves are occasionally the repository of records of various kinds. The Reader in the Book deals with that special class of books in which the text and marginalia are in intense communication with each other, in which reading constitutes an active and sometimes adversarial engagement with the book. The major examples are works that are either classics or were classics in their own time; but they are seen here as contemporaries read them, without the benefit of centuries of commentary and critical guidance. The underlying question is at what point marginalia, the legible incorporation of the work of reading into the text of the book, became a way of defacing it rather than of increasing its value-why did we want books to lose their history?