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Reading and Readerships
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What We Talk about When We Talk about Books: The History and Future of Reading by Leah PricePublication Date: 2019
Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multitasked.
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A History of Reading by Steven Roger FischerPublication Date: 2019
Tracing the complete story of reading from the age when symbol first became sign through to the electronic texts of the present day, this text offers a sweeping view across time and geography of our evolving relationship with text.
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Book Matters: The Changing Nature of Literacy by Alan SicaPublication Date: 2016
Scholars have been puzzling over the "future of the book" since Marshall McLuhan's famous maxim "the medium is the message" in the early 1950s. McLuhan famously argued that electronic media was creating a global village in which books would become obsolete. Such views were ahead of their time, but today they are all too relevant as declining sales, even among classic texts, have become a serious matter in academic publishing.
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The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces by Stephen OrgelPublication Date: 2015
The Reader in the Book is concerned with a particular aspect of the history of the book, an archeology and sociology of the use of margins and other blank spaces. One of the most commonplace aspects of old books is the fact that people wrote in them, something that, until very recently, hasinfuriated modern collectors and librarians. But these inscriptions constitute a significant dimension of the book's history, and what readers did to books often added to their value.
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Thinking Outside the Book by Augusta RohrbachPublication Date: 2014
In Thinking Outside the Book, Augusta Rohrbach works through the increasing convergences between digital humanities and literary studies to explore the meaning and primacy of the book as a literary, material, and cultural artifact.
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The History of Reading by Alberto ManguelPublication Date: 2014
At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning, and at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist and editor Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the six-thousand-year-old conversation between words and that hero without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader.
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Around the Book: Systems and Literacy by Henry SussmanPublication Date: 2011
Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, Around the Book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. What, it asks, are the book's current prospects?
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A History of Reading and Writing in The Western World by Martyn LyonsPublication Date: 2010
Martyn Lyons surveys the changing relationships enjoyed by men and women with the written word, from early times to the present day. He provides a highly-readable account of the social history of reading and writing, relating it to key historical moments such as the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
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The Library at Night by Alberto ManguelPublication Date: 2008
Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. This personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.
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Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading by Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (editors)Publication Date: 2005
Reading, and the manifold signs of reading, have become one of the most dynamic areas of research in book history. The reader as consumer and owner, as well as participant in the construction of new meanings, is the subject of these original essays. Specialists in literature, art history and book history investigate the annotations, marginal marks, extra-illustration and other forms of evidence left by readers.
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Understanding Women's Magazines: Publishing, Markets and Readerships by Anna Gough-YatesPublication Date: 2003
Understanding Women's Magazines investigates the changing landscape of women's magazines. Anna Gough-Yates focuses on the successes, failures and shifting fortunes of a number of magazines including Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Frank, New Woman and Red and considers the dramatic developments that have taken place in women's magazine publishing in the last two decades.
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After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text by Brian StockPublication Date: 2001
Augustine of Hippo was the most prolific and influential writer on reading between antiquity and the Renaissance, though he left no systematic treatise on the subject. Using Augustine as the touchstone, Brian Stock considers the evolution of the meditative reader within Western reading practices from classical times to the Renaissance. He looks to the problem of self-knowledge in the reading culture of late antiquity; engages the related question of ethical values and literary experience in the same period; and reconsiders Erich Auerbach's interpretation of ancient literary realism.
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Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading by Paul H. SaengerPublication Date: 1997
Reading, like any human activity, has a history. Modern reading is a silent and solitary activity. Ancient reading was usually oral, either aloud, in groups, or individually, in a muffled voice. This book explains how a change in writing--the introduction of word separation--led to the development of silent reading during the period from late antiquity to the fifteenth century.