When Simon Eliot was 13 years old, he had a crush on the local librarian. Naturally, Mr. Eliot, now a professor of literature at England’s Open University, haunted the library. Hoping to impress, he stood by shelves of weighty philosophers, absorbed in thought; he checked out Hume and Kant. But he never read them.
That’s the kind of problem scholars face when they try to make sense of records about what and how people read in the past.
The history of reading is one of the fastest growing -- and most debated -- areas in the new interdisciplinary study of the history of the book. Book history explores the context in which printed matter circulated. But while scholars are digging into archives to document how many books were published, sold, borrowed, or owned, they are still trying to define methods to approach reading.
They are looking at the files of lending libraries and at inventories of private libraries; at references to reading in autobiographies, diaries, and confessions. They are exploring the relationship between genre and social class or gender, and asking whether women read differently from men. They are using textual interpretation to speculate about the meaning of changes in literary form: Did the shift in literary journals from reprinting book selections to providing subjective book reviews indicate a change in theories about the objectivity of the written word?
The problems are numerous, however. Just because people bought books, or even quoted from them, doesn’t indicate that they read them. Nor does the fact that people read books illuminate how reading affected them.
Often-cited signature counts are not always a good gauge of literacy rates, because children in Colonial America, for example, were taught to read before they could write. Confessions of blasphemous reading -- such as those extracted during the Inquisition -- can tell as much about what people thought their tormentors wanted to hear as what they actually read. Further, textual criticism sometimes substitutes theory of interpretation for the experience of actual readers.
“There are lots of areas of book history for which the evidence and methodology are a lot clearer,” Mr. Eliot said at a recent meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. “But we have no alternative. The history of reading makes sense of all other aspects of book history. The books people read determine the intellectual and political context of the next generation of readers and writers.”
David D. Hall, a professor of American religious history at Harvard Divinity School, says that “assertions about changes in reading are assertions about changes in culture and society.”
For example, Mr. Hall has argued that a “reading revolution” took place in late 18th-century America, with a shift from reading intensively a small number of books such as the Bible to reading many books quickly. That says a lot about the transition from a religious culture to a secular and commercial culture, Mr. Hall says.
But the nature and timing, even the existence, of a reading revolution is hotly debated today. Some scholars say that a major shift in reading practices occurred when a growing number of female readers turned to the new genre of the novel; others have explored the relation between the commercialization of book and newspaper production and literacy rates.
Robert Darnton, professor of history at Princeton University, says he’s a non-believer. “There were shifts in the late 18th century and in the 19th century in the practice of reading, but they were hardly revolutionary,” he says. Moreover, he adds, there are indications that reading in the modern period actually became more intensive, not less.
“For the last 10 years, we’ve been hitting our heads against a wall. We have a few really good studies of individual readers, but we don’t know where to go from there,” he says.
To pull together some of the scattered work, scholars at the British Library and the Open University are starting a pilot project, trying to create an electronic data base of sources about reading. They will ask scholars to contribute anecdotes, statistical data, quotations, and any other materials that shed light on what people read, how (silently, aloud, in company, or alone?), and what the experience meant to them.
“In 10 years’ time we may be able to type in a country, a time period, genre, and information about the social class, race, or gender of readers, and get a print-out,” says Jonathan Rose, a professor of history at Drew University. “That will help us crack the history of reading.”