chocnut’s Reviews > Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World – How Marginalia Reveals Character Evolution in Adams, Lincoln, and Historical Figures > Status Update

One of the great mysteries of art is that the original somehow retains its freshness over decades and even over centuries, that we return to it and read it with great pleasure and great joy. Translations, by contrast, age very quickly. If you don't have a new translation every 20 years, the translation is dated in a way that somehow the original text seems to be able to avoid. –Breon Mitchell

We are not only the product of what we read, we are in association with others who have read the same things. –David McCullough

The history of reading is a fairly recent endeavor, [...] a cousin of sorts to histoire de livre, or the social history of the book, which was developed in France in the years following World War II. A basic premise each follows is the idea that it is readers, not just authors, who give meaning to texts, and that there is value in knowing how individuals through history respond to them.

Fortified with a comfortable inheritance upon the death of his father, [Edward] Gibbon was free to buy what he wanted. And it was from "this slender beginning," he reported proudly, that he "gradually formed a numerous and select library, the foundation of my works, and the best comfort of my life, both at home and abroad."

Long before the British physician Thomas W. Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta Bowdler, took it upon themselves to make the plays of William Shakespeare safe for innocent eyes, the wholesale editing of another author's writing so that it might be more palatable to prudish tastes was known as 'castration' to some, 'winnowing' by others.

It is largely for this reason that whenever some new theory regarding the true authorship of the Stratford playwright's works comes along, one of the chief arguments inevitably put forth by hardcore skeptics is the absence of a secondary education, and the implication that nobody could possibly have written so beautifully, so incisively, and so knowledgeably of the human condition without university instruction.

"We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic of fiction." –Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran