Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America

Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

by Michele Moylan (Editor)

This collection takes as its point of departure the proposition that one can, in fact, tell a book by its cover. The contributors examine the ways in which the material qualities of books―including typography, paper, bindings, layout , and promotional copy―as well as their editing, production, and distribution profoundly affect how they have been read and understood.

The volume includes essays on the publishing history of Melville's early novels, Twain's The Innocents Abroad , the Tauchnitz edition of Hawthornes's The Marble Faun , and Jackson's Romona . Other chapters examine the reception of Dante's works in America, Houghton Mifflin's biographical series, the binding styles of Ticknor and Fields, and the packaging of literature for American high Schools., reviewing a previous edition or volume

304 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1997

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was good as anthologies go, though it was more than a little surprising to see how the novelty of studying a book's material aspects as a way of interpreting its meaning --so important to the premise of this collection-- has grown de reigeur. The introduction does a nice job of giving a broad brush strokes to the earliest of book history approaches, and is accessible and comprehensive in accounting for many of the early moves in the field (probably something that gets left out of many accounts today, but worth knowing nonetheless). Other chapters are interesting and all do a nice job of using textual evidence alongside more traditional literary analysis as interpretive tools. In this way, the essays are nice models of how you might take a specific case study and material evidence as part of your interpretive strategy. However, as most of the essays in question use fairly obvious examples of material texts, none of them truly go beyond common interpretations of texts. Rather, they manage to successfully add materiality to the ways of analyzing a previously circumscribed canon.