Free How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price

texts are somehow more “book-historical” than others: the fact that a text is not aesthetically pleasing does not necessarily make it bibliographically significant, and book historians might do better to analyze the category of the “literary” than to flee it. But for a book historian drawing on a corpus defined by textual parameters (title, keyword, generic form, theme) as much as for a cultural historian drawing on a corpus defined by literary parameters, means will never match perfectly with end.
    I mention these inconsistencies and trade-offs as symptoms of dilemmas that face many scholars today—and not just card-carrying literary critics. Even when book historians choose objects that stand outside of the literary, the language in which they describe their own scholarly practices remains parasitic on a literary canon in which reading gets tirelessly thematized. Chapter 4 argues that a particular corner of that canon, the bildungsroman, has both generated and limited the stories scholars tell about reading. I attempt to test those limits not only by finding countermodels in other genres—notably the it-narrative—but also, in the opposite direction, by tracking sweeping generalizations and unspoken pieties back to the tropes and leitmotifs of the particular bildungsromans in which they originate. Like most literary critics (and indeed like most readers), I go to past texts seeking origins for, as well as alternatives to, my own models. I hope this casts my sources as sibyls rather than ventriloquist’s dummies.
    Or, perhaps, as mirrors. Book history differs from most scholarly disciplines in that its object of study is also its means of transmission—the message is also the medium. For all its interest in marginalia and marginalized persons, the history of books is centrally about ourselves. It asks not only how past readers have made meaning (and therefore, by extension, how others have read differently from us); but also, closer to home, where the conditions of possibility for our own reading came from. Self-referentiality generates self-knowledge at the price of blind spots. The book historian too easily finds herself in the position of Thoreau (the son of a pencil manufacturer) forgetting to list his own pencil; or of the Reverend Alfred Hackman, who died in 1874 after spending thirty-six years as a sublibrarian at the Bodleian:
    During all the time of his service in the Library he had used as a cushion in his plain wooden armchair a certain vellum-bound folio, which by its indented side, worn down by continual pressure, bore testimony tothe use to which it had been put . . . When after Hackman’s departure from the Library it was removed from its resting-place of years, some amusement was caused by finding that the chief compiler of the last printed Catalogue had omitted from his Catalogue the volume on which he sat, of which too, although of no special value, there was no other copy in the Library! (Macray 388)
    Shortly before Hackman’s death, the magazine founded by the original of Mr. Brocklehurst reprinted an American anecdote from half a century earlier:
    Some gentlemen of a Bible Association lately calling upon an old woman to see if she had a bible, were severely reproved by a spirited reply. “Do you think, gentlemen, that I am a heathen, that you should ask me such a question?” Then addressing a little girl, she said, “Run and fetch the bible out of my drawer, that I may show it to the gentlemen.” They declined giving her the trouble; but she insisted upon giving them ocular demonstration that she was no heathen. Accordingly the bible was brought, nicely covered; and on opening it, the old woman exclaimed, “Well, how glad I am that you have come; here are my spectacles that I have been looking for these three years, and didn’t know where to find ‘em.” . . . My child, which have you: a
dusty
or a
well-worn
bible? (“The Two Bibles”)
    We think of spectacles as a tool for reading