How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain Read Online Free PDF Page B

uses of books and identify themselves with others. In the end, the most interesting question to ask of these hands now quiet may be not what they felt about the book but why they felt so much. To grope our way back into their intellectual and emotional and ethical investment in paper; their urge to cast written matter in etiological narratives and interpersonal dramas; the leaps of faith and logic that pressed trivial decisions about to whom to hand a tract, or on which shelf to stick a volume, or at what angle to hold a newspaper, into the service of hopes and fears and theories and hunches—this exercise may provide a chance to work through the contradictions of our own media theory and practice.

CHAPTER 1
Reader’s Block
H OW TO H ANDLE R EADING
    Bought, sold, exchanged, transported, displayed, defaced, stored, ignored, collected, neglected, dispersed, discarded—the transactions that enlist books stretch far beyond the literary or even the linguistic. Frustration first made me wonder where that range begins and ends, for among all those uses, reading elicits the most curiosity and leaves the least evidence. There’s a reason that book historians have gravitated toward tearjerkers and pornography: like dolls that cry and wet their pants, past readers come to life through secretion. 1 Yet with the exception of the happy few who work on genres that elicit a measurable somatic response, any reception historian will sooner or later be maddened by the low proportion of traces left in books that are verbal. For every pencil mark in the margin, ten traces of wax or smoke; for every ink stain, ten drink spills.
    The book can be used as a napkin for food, a coaster for drink, a device for filing, or (especially in eras where paper was expensive) a surface on which to scribble words only tenuously related to the print they surround. As late as 1897, a manual titled
The
Private
Library
still needed to sneer that “books are neither card-racks, crumb-baskets, or receptacles for dead leaves” (Humphreys 24). In earlier eras, traces of the hands through which a book had passed formed an expected and even valued part of its meaning; over the course of the nineteenth century, that practice gradually retreated to particular subcultures: botanists using encyclopedias as devices to store and organize pressed flowers; hobbyists “Grangerizing” texts with carte-de-visite daguerreotypes, or, less systematically, books—and not only cookbooks—bearing, Hansel-and-Gretel-like, a trail of crumbs (H. J. Jackson,
Marginalia
186; Garvey).
    Mental actions prove harder to track than manual gestures, human traces that are not intentional, let alone textual, let alone literary. From evidence of reading to nonevidence of reading to evidence of nonreading: those bodily acts that both accompany and replace reading, whether licking a page or turning down a corner, should provide historians of the book with more than a consolation prize. Like the dog that didn’t bark in the night, the book with uncut pages constitutes evidence too. As we’ll see in chapter 4, such negative evidence can carry forensic weight, as when a bible’s pristine condition “bears witness” against its owner. It was precisely in order to stave off such testimony that Flann O’Brien proposed (tongue in cheek) a “
Buchhandlung
” service to break in libraries bought by the yard.
    The spines of the smaller volumes to be damaged in a manner that will give the impression that they have been carried around in pockets, a passage in every volume to be underlined in red pencil with an exclamation or interrogation mark inserted in the margin opposite, an old Gate Theatre programme to be inserted in each volume as a forgotten book-mark . . . , not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter or whiskey stains. (22)
    In my nightmares, these are the books I’m studying.
    Scholarly populism leads logically enough to inverting the traditional focus on