A History of Reading

"This is the book with which general readers who are curious about the history of reading should start, because of its very accessible essayistic narrative. It offers a sweeping overview of the history of reading. One of the issues that comes up in it is the shift from reading aloud to silent reading. In classical antiquity, silent reading was more or less unknown. There is an anecdote from the fourth century of someone watching another person looking at the page without his lips moving and not understanding that the person was reading, because it was assumed that the only way you could read was to voice the words. Writing worked differently until the Middle Ages, beginning with the fact that words were not separated. You didn’t have spaces between words, and if you are looking at a page where the words are all run together it’s quite hard to decipher it until you read it aloud. Tryityourselfandyouwillseehowharditis. Also, all the punctuation until the Middle Ages indicated vocal rhythm – where a reader would pause for breath – rather than grammatical structure. So early texts are pretty much impossible to read unless you read them aloud. That said, Manguel is also very interesting about the ways in which reading aloud persisted. One of the loveliest examples he has of this is his account of professional readers who were hired to read stories aloud to workers in cigar factories in Cuba at the end of the 19th century, while they were rolling cigars. This is, of course, in the days before radio! So the first audiobooks were human beings. Manguel was writing before e-readers that offer a robotic-sounding text-to-speech option, but not that much has changed. Politicians are still using teleprompters, and professors like me are still reading our lectures from notes, which students turn back into notes of their own. “Early texts are pretty much impossible to read unless you read them aloud.” I wrote this book because I was curious about what people can do with books besides read them. If you think about it, most books spend most of their lives sitting on the shelf unopened. Some never get read. What I argue in my book is that even when books are lying on the shelf, they still mean something. A book could mean one thing to someone who is reading it and making furious notes in the margins, another thing to someone who puts it on their coffee table in order to impress their visitors with their good taste, another thing to someone who hides behind it on his morning commute, and something else again to the lady who matches the binding of the book to the ribbon on her bonnet – not to mention to the servants who dusted the books but weren’t supposed to open them. Then you had the tradesmen who would have bought old books from richer people and used them to wrap butter and cheese in. Until new technologies made paper cheaper in the 19th century – which is the first time that anyone thought of making toilet paper or paper bags – even people who were illiterate often had a very intimate relationship with books, and used them in all sorts of ways in their daily lives. People knew which daily newspaper worked best to stuff up the chinks of windows, and which one was better to use in the privy."