Inspired by the process of creating a library for his home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. "Libraries have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic." In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a meditation on the meaning of libraries. Manguel, a guide of...

Steven Roger Fischer's fascinating book traces the complete story of reading from the time when symbol first became sign through to the electronic texts of the present day.

"From Pierre de Fermat to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Graham Greene, readers have related to books through the notes they write in the margins. In this pioneering book--the first to examine the phenomenon of marginalia--H.J. Jackson surveys an extraordinary range of annotated books to explore the history of marginalia, the forms they take, the psychology that underlies them, and the reactions they provoke. Based on a study of thousands of books annotated...

What happens to books as they live in our long-term memory? Why do we find some books entertaining and others not? And how does literary influence work on writers in different ways? Grounded in the findings of empirical psychology, this book amends classic reader-response theory and attends to neglected aspects of reading that cannot be explained by traditional literary criticism. Reading arises from a combination of two kinds of mental work: automatic...

How did this nineteenth-century novelist change the way we think? What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Looking at literary history in relation to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways in which Dickens's serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and...

The Myth of Print Culture is a critique of bibliographical and editorial method, focusing on the disparity between levels of material evidence (unique and singular) and levels of text (abstract and reproducible). It demonstrates how the particulars of evidence are manipulated in standard scholarly arguments by the higher levels of textuality they are intended to support. The individual studies in the book focus on a range of problems: basic definitions...