The History of Reading, Volume 3

'A varied collection that contributes many interesting case studies to the rapidly growing field that is the history of reading.' - Leah Price, Professor of English, Harvard University, USA

'Steeped in the available documentary record, unremitting in its commitment to the book in hand rather than in theory, this anthology convenes a lively symposium on reader history that any historian of reading will be eager to attend. Questions of response are freshly anchored in instance rather than principle. Including fan mail at the return end of the writer-reader circuit, book clubs at the other, and traversing in between every credible register of targeted reception and uptake from marketing copy to library marginalia, from reported oral recitation to reading's pictorial rendering in private or social space the separate findings of this strenuously materialist approach, an approach able still to incorporate at times the energies of interpretation, are fresh, engaging, and, for all their spirited variety, impressively coherent in their methodological scope.' - Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, author of Reading Voices, Dear Reader, The Look of Reading, and Bookwork