reading & readership
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Vanessa Warne. By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture.
This volume explores blindness and culture in the nineteenth century predominantly in English-speaking contexts through the reading and writing habits of blind authors and literary characters.
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Renske A. Hoff. Involving Readers: Practices of Reading, Use, and Interaction in Early Modern Dutch Bibles (1522–1546).
Drawing on dozens of annotated, amended surviving copies, Hoff offers a richly textured account of how early modern readers engaged with their Bibles on multiple levels.
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David Pearson, Speaking Volumes & Nicholas Perkins (ed.), Gifts and Books
Taken together, these two books provide insightful and illustrative examples of the centrality of books in social history.
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Passports as Books and Books as Passports
Even though there is, of course, no easy definition of what a book is exactly, a passport is an object that is very much like a book, without being usually…
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Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman, eds. American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History.
American Contact is a collection of object biographies that takes seriously the epistemological aliveness of its subjects.
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Nir Shafir. The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire.
This book traces why early modern Ottomans prioritized manuscripts as the desired form of social communication and explores their multifaceted and complex effects on the public sphere.
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Beth Driscoll. What Readers Do: Aesthetic and Moral Practices of a Post-Digital Age.
This book offers a rich and concise overview of different facets of post-digital reading, skillfully unlocking the black box of ordinary and everyday practices.
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Life’s Mini Pleasures
In early 2024, I came across a miniature replica of a bookshelf situated in a recycled Altoids tin on my Instagram “explore” page. It was impossible to pass this over.…