When to Read Was to Write 
Leah Price
- Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England by William Sherman Buy this book
The ideal reader is all mind. Swept up in a virtual universe, she no longer notices hunger, heat or cold. Real readers are different. They need eyes to see the page and hands to turn it. Some lick their thumbs; others, like Sheridan’s Lady Slattern, ‘cherish their nails for the convenience of making marginal notes’. Some leave distracting, even disgusting residues. Andrew Lang wrote in 1905 about reading Ann Radcliffe:
The thick double-columned volume in which I peruse the works . . . belongs to a public library. It is quite the dirtiest, greasiest, most dog’s-eared, and most bescribbled tome in the collection. Many of the books have remained, during the last hundred years, uncut, even to this day, and I have had to apply the paper knife to many an author, from Alciphron (1790) to Mr Max Müller, and Dr Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Bozzy’s Life of Dr Johnson. But Mrs Radcliffe has been read diligently, and copiously annotated.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article and the back issue are also available for purchase online. Buy this article / Buy this back issue
Leah Price teaches English at Harvard. She is the author of The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel.
print layout
tell a friend