1. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Winchester, England: Faber and Faber, 1994).
2. National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, 2004, https://arts.gov/sites/default/files/ReadingAtRisk.pdf, and To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, 2007, http://arts.gov/research/ToRead.pdf.
3. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” Atlantic, July/August 2008, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/.
4. Markus Dohle, “Frankfurt Book Fair 2017: Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle’s Full Remarks,” Publishers Weekly, October 15, 2017, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/Frankfurt-Book-Fair/article/75092-frankfurt-book-fair-2017-penguin-random-house-ceo-markus-dohle-s-full-remarks.html; “Book Publisher Revenue Up for Adult Books, University Presses in 2017,” Association of American Publishers, May 9, 2018, http://newsroom.publishers.org/book-publisher-revenue-up-for-adult-books-university-presses-in-2017.
5. Michael Hiltzik, “No, Ebooks Aren’t Dying—But Their Quest to Dominate the Reading World Has Hit a Speed Bump,” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2017, www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-ebooks-20170501-story.html.
6. Andrew Perrin, “Book Reading 2016,” Pew Research Center, September 1, 2016, www.pewinternetinternet.org/2016/09/01/book-reading-2016/.
7. “Book Publishing Annual StatShot Survey Reveals Religious Crossover and Inspirational Books Supported Trade Book Growth in 2016,” Association of American Publishers, August 1, 2017, http://newsroom.publishers.org/book-publishing-annual-statshot-survey-reveals-religious-crossover-and-inspirational-books-supported-tradebook-growth-in-2016/.
8. Ibid.; “Book Formats in the U.S.—Statistics & Facts,” Statista, 2018, www.statista.com/topics/3938/book-formats-in-the-us/.
9. “Book Publisher Revenue Up for Adult Books, University Presses in 2017,” Association of American Publishers, May 9, 2018, http://newsroom.publishers.org/book-publisher-revenue-up-for-adult-books-university-presses-in-2017.
10. Alexandra Alter, “Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales,” New York Times, December 23, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/books/paper-printers-holiday-sales-books-publishers.html.
11. In the United States, book sales have declined from a height of $17.17 billion in 2007 to $10.73 billion in 2017: see “Book Store Sales in the United States from 1992 to 2017 (in Billion U.S. Dollars),” Statista, February 2018, www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store-sales-in-the-us-since-1992/. Revenues have dropped over the same period: see “Revenue of Bookstores (NAICS 45121) in the United States from 2010 to 2018 (in Billion U.S. Dollars),” Statista, November 2018, www.statista.com/statistics/249023/bookstore-industry-revenue-in-the-us/. In the United Kingdom, 259 bookstores have closed since 2008: see “Number of Specialized Stores for the Retail Sale of Books in the United Kingdom (UK) from 2008 to 2016,” Statista, May 2018, www.statista.com/statistics/295868/book-selling-books-in-specialised-stores-in-the-uk/.
12. Andrew Perrin, “Nearly One-in-Five Americans Now Listen to Audiobooks,” Pew Research Center, March 8, 2018, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/08/nearly-one-in-five-americans-now-listen-to-audiobooks/.
13. Scholastic, Inc., and YouGov, Kids and Family Reading Report, 6th ed., 2016, www.scholastic.com/readingreport/files/Scholastic-KFRR-6ed-2017.pdf.
14. Abigail Geiger, “Millennials Are the Most Likely Generation of Americans to Use Public Libraries,” Pew Research Center, June 21, 2017, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/21/millennials-are-the-most-likely-generation-of-americans-to-use-public-libraries/.
15. Brian Mead and Terra Dankowski, “The Library of Things,” American Libraries, June 1, 2017, https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2017/06/01/library-of-things/; Kristen Arnett, “An Incomplete List of the Non-Book Things You Can Get at the Library,” Literary Hub, December 5, 2018, https://lithub.com/an-incomplete-list-of-the-non-book-things-you-can-get-at-the-library/.
16. Susan Orlean, The Library Book (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 65.
17. Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (New York: Crown/Archetype, 2018).
18. Joe Verghese et al., “Leisure Activities and the Risk of Dementia in the Elderly,” New England Journal of Medicine 348, no. 25 (2003): 2508–2516.
19. “Book Reading,” Humanities Indicators, May 2015, https://humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=92.
20. David C. Kidd and Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science 342, no. 6156 (2013): 377–380.
21. Gregory S. Berns, Kristina Blaine, Michael J. Prietula, and Brandon E. Pye, “Short- and Long-Term Effects of a Novel on Connectivity in the Brain,” Brain Connectivity 3, no. 6 (2013): 590–600; Diana I. Tamir, Andrew Bricker, David Dodell-Feder, and Jason P. Mitchell, “Reading Fiction and Reading Minds: The Role of Simulation in the Default Network,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 11, no. 2 (2015): 215–224.
22. Kathleen Capriotti and Kelly Hill, “Social Effects of Culture: Detailed Statistical Models,” Statistical Insights on the Arts, Hill Strategies Research Inc., 7, no. 1 (2008): 2.
23. Christina Clark and George Dugdale, Literacy Changes Lives: An Advocacy Resource (National Literacy Trust, 2008).
24. Wim Knulst and Gerbert Kraaykamp, “Trends in Leisure Reading: Forty Years of Research on Reading in the Netherlands,” Poetics 26 (1998): 21–41.
25. Alberto Manguel, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 7.
26. On early twentieth-century duplicating technologies, see Robert C. Binkley, “New Tools for Men of Letters,” Yale Review (1935): 519–537. Thanks to Lisa Gitelman for the reference.
27. For a trenchant critique of this claim, however, see Elyse Graham, The Republic of Games: Textual Culture Between Old Books and New Media (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018).
1. Tim Harford, “How Ikea’s Billy Bookcase Took Over the World,” BBC, February 27, 2017, www.bbc.com/news/business-38747485.
2. S. D. Chrostowska, “Shelf Lives: On Nostalgic Libraries,” Public Culture 28, no. 1, January 2016: 9–21.
3. Nicole Carter, “‘Sex and the City’ Gets Wed at a Famed Public Library,” New York Daily News, November 3, 2007, www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/sex-city-wed-famed-public-library-article-1.255256; Doree Shafrir, “Yours for a Day: Eight Fantasy Venues Paired with Reasonable—but Equally Desirable—Alternatives,” New York, Winter 2010, http://nymag.com/weddings/reception/2010/winter/venues/.
4. “Consumer Attitudes Towards Books and E-books in the United States as of April 2017,” Statista, April 12, 2017, www.statista.com/statistics/707142/attitude-books-e-books/.
5. See Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48, no. 4, Fall 2009.
6. R. K. Webb, The British Working Class Reader, 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955), 306. Thanks to Lisa Gitelman for the reference.
7. Kristina Myrvold, Inside the Guru’s Gate: Ritual Uses of Texts Among the Sikhs in Varanasi (Lund, 2007).
8. For a witty critique of twenty-first-century idealization of reading, see Mikita Brottman, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008), and “The Reading Crisis,” n+1 3, Fall 2005; for the longer history of celebrations of print, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
9. Jo Piazza, “Can Instagram Keep People Reading Books?”, Forbes, May 25, 2017, www.forbes.com/sites/jopiazza/2017/05/25/instagram-bookstagrammers-selling-books/#2e6ea9d1727b.
10. Emma Kantor, “Harnessing Bookstagram: A PAMA Panel,” Publishers Weekly, May 16, 2017, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-book-news/article/73612-harnessing-bookstagram-a-pama-panel.html.
11. Danielle Braff, “Millennial, Book and Candle,” New York Times, January 11, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/style/book-candles.html.
12. Ray Bradbury, “Exchange,” Quicker Than the Eye (New York: Avon, 1996), 207–219.
13. Brett Spencer, “From Atomic Shelters to Arms Control” Information and Culture 49, no. 3 (2014): 351–385.
14. C. Max Magee, “Insidious Devices: An Introduction to ‘The Late American Novel,’” The Millions, March 1, 2011, https://themillions.com/2011/03/insidious-devices-an-introduction-to-the-late-american-novel.html.
15. Code-X: Paper, Ink, Pixel and Screen (New York: BookRoom Press, 2015), 2.
16. Susan Orlean, “Growing Up in the Library,” New Yorker, October 5, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/growing-up-in-the-library.
17. Theodore G. Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
18. Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 193.
19. Richard Nash, “What Is the Business of Literature?” Virginia Quarterly Review 89, no. 2 (2013): 14–27.
20. Striphas, The Late Age of Print.
21. Victoria Rideout, Children, Teens, and Reading: A Common Sense Media Research Brief (San Francisco: Common Sense Media, 2014), 26.
22. Marylaine Block, The Thriving Library: Successful Strategies for Challenging Times (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2007); Kay Grieves, “The Murray Library Refurbishment,” Library News 13, March 2014.
23. Sven Birkerts, “Can the ‘Literary’ Survive Technology?”, Literary Hub, April 8, 2016, https://lithub.com/can-the-literary-survive-technology/.
24. Simon Jenkins, “Books Are Back. Only the Technodazzled Thought They’d Go Away,” Guardian, May 13, 2016, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/13/books-ebook-publishers-paper.
25. Naomi S. Baron, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015).
26. Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
27. Amaranth Borsuk, The Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), loc. 2932, Kindle.
28. Customer reviews for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (New York: Penguin Classics, 2016), Amazon, //www.amazon.com/Copperfield-Penguin-Classics-Charles-Dickens/product-reviews/0140439447/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewopt_kywd?filterByKeyword=%22small+print%22&search-alias=community-reviews&pageNumber=1#reviews-filter-bar, accessed July 7, 2017.
29. Toni Morrison, God Help the Child (New York: Knopf, 2015).
30. Hannah Rosefield, “A Brief History of Oaths and Books,” New Yorker, June 20, 2014, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-brief-history-of-oaths-and-books.
31. Marc Fisher, “Donald Trump Doesn’t Read Much. Being President Probably Won’t Change That,” Washington Post, July 17, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-doesnt-read-much-being-president-probably-wouldnt-change-that/2016/07/17/d2ddf2bc-4932-11e6-90a8-fb84201e0645_story.html?utm_term=.e24317d070f1.
32. “Donald Trump’s Bookshelf,” Bookshelf (blog), January 31, 2017, www.onthebookshelf.co.uk/2017/01/donald-trumps-bookshelf.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Bookshelf+%28Bookshelf%29.
33. “Lothair,” Macmillan’s 22 (1870): 153.
34. Frances A. Koestler, The Unseen Minority: A Social History of Blindness in the United States (New York: David McKay Co., 1976), 406.
35. Steven G. Kellman, “James Joyce for Ordinary Blokes?”, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 21, 2009, www.chronicle.com/article/james-joyce-for-ordinary/48427.
36. Flann O’Brien, The Best of Myles (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999), 22.
37. “Books in House Decoration,” New York Times, April 14, 1878.
38. William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
39. Samuel Richardson, The Paths of Virtue Delineated, or, The History in Miniature of the Celebrated Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison, Familiarised and Adapted to the Capacities of Youth (London: R. Baldwin, 1756). Held at Houghton Library, Harvard University.
40. Rowan Watson, “Some Non-textual Uses of Books,” in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden, MA: Blackwell), 485; Thomas Greenwood, Public Libraries: A History of the Movement and a Manual for the Organization and Management of Rate-Supported Libraries (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, & Co., 1890), 494–495.
41. Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself (New York: Norton, 1953).
42. H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
1. Victoria Gomelsky, “Watch Brands Looking for New in Era of ‘Smart,’” New York Times, March 17, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/fashion/watches-baselworld.html.
2. David Sax, “Our Love Affair with Digital Is Over,” New York Times, November 18, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/opinion/sunday/internet-digital-technology-return-to-analog.html.
3. D. T. Max, “The Last Book,” American Scholar, May 28, 2001.
4. Henry Stevens, Recollections of Mr. James Lenox of New York and the Formation of His Library (London: Henry Stevens & Son, 1887).
5. I owe this point to Isabel Hofmeyr.
6. Simon Eliot, “Some Material Factors in Literary Culture, 2500 BCE–1900 CE,” in Literary Cultures and the Material Book, ed. Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash, and Ian Willison (London: British Library, 2007), 119.
7. Janet Ing, “The Mainz Indulgences of 1454/5: A Review of Recent Scholarship,” British Library Journal 9, no. 1 (1983): 14–31.
8. Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 29.
9. Christopher De Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible (London: Phaidon Press, 2001), 197.
10. Ibid., 206.
11. Paul Duguid, “Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book,” in The Future of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
12. Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 58.
13. David Mikics, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
14. James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2006).
15. David Reinking, “Valuing Reading, Writing and Books in a Post-Typographic World,” in The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, ed. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
16. Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
17. Ibid.
18. Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), xiv.
19. “New and Cheap Forms of Popular Literature,” Eclectic Review 22 (1845): 74–84.
20. Honoré de Balzac, La Cousine Bette (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 109.
21. T. Bassett, “Evidence of Reading: The Social Network of the Health Book Club, Victorian Studies 59, no. 3 (2016–2017): 429.
22. Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), loc. 1445, Kindle.
23. Loren Glass, Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 30.
24. Naomi S. Baron, “Redefining Reading: The Impact of Digital Communication Media,” PMLA 128 (2013): 196; Marcus Wohlsen, “Amazon Wants to Get into the Used E-book Business—or Bury It,” Wired, February 8, 2013, www.wired.com/2013/02/amazon-used-e-book-patent/; David Streitfeld, “Teacher Knows If You’ve Done the E-Reading,” April 8, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-textbooks-track-students-progress-for-teachers.html.
25. Marie Kondo, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2014).
26. Myrvold, Inside the Guru’s Gate.
27. Baron, “Redefining Reading”; Wohlsen, “Amazon Wants.”
28. Gregory Cowles, “A Year of Living Better: How to Tap Your Inner Reader,” New York Times, n.d., https:/nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-tap-your-inner-reader.
29. Patrick Kingsley, “The Art of Slow Reading,” Guardian, July 15, 2010, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/15/slow-reading.
30. Naomi Tadmor, “‘In the Even My Wife Read to Me’: Women, Reading, and Household Life in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 165.
31. John Plotz, Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience Since Dickens, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
32. Walter Mischel et al., “Delay of Gratification in Children,” Science 244, no. 4907 (1989): 933–938.
33. Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
34. Clifford Lynch, “The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in a Digital World,” First Monday 6, no. 6 (2001): 9.
35. Ian Rowlands et al., “The Google Generation: The Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future,” Aslib Proceedings 60, no. 4 (2008): 290–310.
36. Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015).
37. Erik Kwakkel, “Medieval Kids’ Doodles on Birch Bark,” on Erik Kwakkel’s Tumblr page, posted November 21, 2013, accessed June 24, 2018, http://erikkwakkel.tumblr.com/post/67681966023/medieval-kids-doodles-on-birch-bark-heres.
38. For a forceful critique of classroom “no-device” policies, see Cathy N. Davidson, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
39. Baron, Words Onscreen.
40. For a survey of studies comparing readers’ behavior online and on paper, see Rick Rylance, Literature and the Public Good: The Literary Agenda (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016).
41. Claudia Fritz et al., “Player Preferences Among New and Old Violins,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 3 (2012): 760–763.
42. Alan Galey, “The Enkindling Reciter: Ebooks in the Bibliographical Imagination,” Book History 15, no.1 (2012): 210–247.
43. “FAQ,” Google Glass Help, Google, https://support.google.com/glass/answer/3064131, accessed March 27, 2015. See also Katherine Sellgren, “Teenagers ‘Checking Mobile Phones in Night,’” BBC, October 26, 2016, www.bbc.com/news/education-37562259.
44. Clay Shirky, “Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr,” Encyclopedia Britannica Blog, July 17, 2008, http://blogs.britannica.com/2008/07/why-abundance-is-good-a-reply-to-nick-carr/.
45. Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection (New York: Current, 2014).
46. Nicholas Carr, “Situational Overload and Ambient Overload,” Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog, March 7, 2011, www.roughtype.com/?p=1464.
47. John Plotz, “Their Noonday Demons, and Ours,” New York Times, December 23, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/books/review/their-noonday-demons-and-ours.html.
48. Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42–79.
49. Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 18.
50. Mrs. Molesworth, “On the Use and Abuse of Fiction,” Girl’s Own Paper, 13: 452–454.
51. Bobbie Johnson, “Amazon Boss Bezos: Kindle Move Was ‘Stupid,’” Guardian, July 23, 2009, www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/jul/24/amazon-drm.
52. Will Self, “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real),” Guardian, May 2, 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction.
53. A. M. Paul, “Save the Readers!”, The Brilliant Report: A Monthly Newsletter Bringing You the Latest Intelligence on Learning, June 9, 2013.
54. Michael Harris, “I Have Forgotten How to Read,” Globe and Mail, February 9, 2018, www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/i-have-forgotten-how-toread/article37921379/.
55. Kate Kondayen, “Where Books (and More) Go to Wait,” Harvard Gazette, September 29, 2014, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/09/where-books-and-more-go-to-wait/.
56. Ben Yakas, “Thanksgiving Day Parade Confetti Made of Confidential Police Docs,” Gothamist, November 25, 2012, http://gothamist.com/2012/11/25/thanksgiving_day_parade_confetti_ma.php.
57. “Emma, Le Trefle,” YouTube video, 0:38, posted by Le Trefle, March 7, 2013, https://youtube.com/watch?=v-rf7khCkhGk.
1. St. Bergweh, “Jordan Herschel (’s Behavior) Sucks,” St. Bergweh (blog), June 3, 2015, https://stbergweh.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/jordan-herschel-instagram-influencer-rant/; Kindle (@AmazonKindle), “This summer go camping with your favorite authors,” Twitter, June 12, 2015, 12:24 p.m., https://twitter.com/AmazonKindle/status/609441246348771328.
2. On the iconography of the curled-up reading child, see the introduction to Patricia Crain, Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
3. Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks (London: Zodiac Press, 1969).
4. Charlotte Yonge, “Children’s Literature: Part III—Class Literature of the Last Thirty Years,” Macmillan’s 20, no. 119 (1869): 454.
5. David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000); David McKitterick, ed., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Stephen Colclough and David Vincent, “Reading,” in David McKitterick, ed., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1830–1914.
6. Wendy Griswold, “Glamour and Honor: Going Online and Reading in West African Culture,” Information Technologies and International Development 3, no. 4: 37–52.
7. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature: A Series of Essays (London: S. Sonnenschein & Co., 1891), 83.
8. Naomi S. Baron, Words Onscreen, loc. 4533, Kindle.
9. Mark Sweney, “‘Screen Fatigue’ Sees UK Ebook Sales Plunge 17% as Readers Return to Print,” Guardian, April 27, 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/27/screen-fatigue-sees-uk-ebook-sales-plunge-17-as-readers-return-to-print.
10. “New York Public Library Murals—New York NY,” website of the Living New Deal, accessed June 28, 2018, https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/new-york-public-library-murals-new-york-ny/.
11. On Dewey, see Jeffry T. Schnapp and Matthew Battles, The Library Beyond the Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 99–101. On the history of the bookmobile, see William Brown, Memoir Relative to Itinerating Libraries (Edinburgh: A. Balfour, 1830) and S. H. Ranck, “Forgotten Traveling Libraries,” Library Journal 26, no. 5 (1901): 261–265, both discussed in Schnapp and Battles, The Library Beyond the Book, 99–101; Kirk Johnson, “Homeless Outreach in Volumes: Books by Bike for ‘Outside’ People in Oregon,” New York Times, October 9, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/us/homeless-outreach-in-volumes-books-by-bike-for-outside-people-in-oregon.html.
12. Melvil Dewey, Field and Future of Traveling Libraries (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1901), 2.
13. Stewart Brand, “‘Keep Designing’: How the Information Economy is Being Created and Shaped by the Hacker Ethic,” Whole Earth Review (May 1985), 49.
14. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985).
15. Kenneth Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 56.
16. Quoted in Thomas G. Tanselle, “Reproductions and Scholarship” in Literature and Artifacts (Charlottesville, VA: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1998), 71.
17. “Kobo Aura H20: World’s First Waterproof eReader Launching in Early 2015, Australian Women Online, November 24, 2014, http://australianwomenonline.com/kobo-aura-h2o-worlds-first-waterproof-ereader-launching-in-early-2015/; Keither Gessen, “The War of the Words,” Vanity Fair, December 2014; Jennifer Maloney, “Is ‘The Girl on the Train’ the New ‘Gone Girl’?”, Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-girl-on-the-train-the-new-gone-girl-1421970196.
18. If, as Mark McGurl has argued, “Amazon has undertaken a series of initiatives that suggest a deeper existential commitment to the idea of literature, to getting inside literature, to being literary,” one could add that its even deeper commitment is to being bookish. Mark McGurl, “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2016): 447–471.
19. Kurt Enoch, “The Paper-Bound Book: Twentieth-Century Publishing Phenomenon,” in The Library Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1954): 4.
20. Amazon Help, accessed July 1, 2016, www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=20012748 (page discontinued).
21. “Google Books History,” Google Books, accessed July 29, 2015, www.google.com/googlebooks/about/history.html; thanks to Anthony Grafton for the reference. For a magisterial account of the politics of Google Books, see Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009).
22. Anthony Grafton, Books and/as New Media presentation, June 2015.
23. Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (New York: Penguin, 2013).
24. This was particularly true before (as Jonathan Grossman explains) the early nineteenth century, when “the network of ruts with 4-foot-deep holes, called the highways,” was replaced by macadamized roads and smoother suspensions. See Jonathan H. Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 17–18.
25. Arthur Lee Humphreys, The Private Library: What We Do Know, What We Don’t Know, What We Ought to Know About Our Books (London: Strangeways & Sons, 1897), 38.
26. Walter Bagehot, “The First Edinburgh Reviewers,” in Literary Studies, ed. Richard Holt Hutton (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1902).
27. Jenny Hartley, “Nineteenth-Century Reading Groups in Britain and the Community of the Text: An Experiment with Little Dorrit,” in Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace, ed. DeNel Rehberg Sedo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 53.
28. John Leech, Punch, vol. 30 (June 21, 1856), 252.
29. Anne Bowman, The Common Things of Every-Day Life: A Book of Home Wisdom for Mothers and Daughters (New York: G. Routledge, 1857), 163.
30. William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd., 1927), 323.
31. The Gladstone Diaries, Vol. 4: 1848–1854, ed. M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1974), 375.
32. Rick Rylance, Literature and the Public Good (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.
33. Albert Robida, The Twentieth Century, ed. Arthur B. Evans, trans. Phillipe Willems (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 4.
34. Harold M. Otness, “Passenger Ship Libraries,” Journal of Library History 14, no. 1: 492.
35. Matthew Rubery, The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
36. Georges Perec, “Reading: A Psycho-Sociological Outline,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).
37. E. Annie Proulx, “Books on Top,” New York Times, May 26, 1994, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/23/specials/proulx-top.html.
38. Norimitsu Onishi, “Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular,” New York Times, January 20, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html.
39. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1982), 595.
40. Philip D. Stanhope, “Letter 289,” in Letters Written by Phil. Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to His Son, Phil. Stanhope, Together with Several Other Pieces (London: J. Dodsley, 1777), 104. Thanks to Paula McDowell for the reference.
41. See also Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 48.
42. Leslie Stephen to Anne Isabella Thackeray, 24 April 1870, in Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen, Vol. 1: 1864–1882, ed. John W. Bicknell (London: Macmillan, 1996), 80. I found this passage by searching the invaluable Reading Experience Database, www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/.
43. Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
44. I’m following here David Henkin’s strategy of tracking how often documents such as letters name the day of the week.
45. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1876), 60. Available online at https://archive.org/details/lifelettersoflor01trevuoft.
46. Hartmut Rosa and Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
47. Simon Eliot, “Reading by Artificial Light in the Victorian Age,” in Reading and the Victorians, ed. Matthew Bradley and Juliet John (New York: Ashgate, 2015).
48. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History of that Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote de la Mancha (London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), 1.
49. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence: Including the Letters to Malesherbes (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 458.
50. Baron, Words Onscreen.
51. Samuel Richardson, in Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1964), 229.
52. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life (London, 1747), 35.
53. Nikola Tesla, My Inventions, first published serially in 1919 in Electrical Experimenter, www.teslasautobiography.com/, 17–18.
54. Rob Lucas, “The Critical Net Critic,” New Left Review 77 (September–October 2012). https://newleftreview.org/II/77/rob-lucas-the-critical-net-critic.
55. Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009); Patricia Crain, Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
56. “Literature and Mental Health: Reading for Wellbeing,” Future Learn, accessed March 29, 2016, www.futurelearn.com/courses/literature.
57. “New Study: 55% of YA Books Bought by Adults,” Publishers Weekly, September 13, 2012. www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/53937-new-study-55-of-ya-books-bought-by-adults.html.
58. Natasha Gilmore, “Nielsen Summit Shows the Data Behind the Children’s Book Boom,” Publishers Weekly, September 17, 2015, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/68083-nielsen-summit-shows-the-data-behind-the-children-s-book-boom.html.
59. Ruth Graham, “Against YA,” Slate, June 5, 2014, www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/against_ya_adults_should_be_embarrassed_to_read_children_s_books.single.html.
60. Sellgren, “Teenagers ‘Checking Mobile Phones.’”
61. Tristan Kirk, “Reading an iPad or Kindle in Bed May Increase Cancer Risk,” Irish Independent, December 22, 2014, www.independent.ie/world-news/americas/reading-an-ipad-or-kindle-in-bed-may-increase-cancer-risk-30854896.html.
62. Anne-Marie Chang, Daniel Aeschbach et. al, “Evening Use of Light-Emitting eReaders Negatively Affects Sleep, Circadian Timing, and Next-Morning Alertness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 4 (2015): 1232–1237. The crucial variable appears to be the wavelength and intensity of light, since the melatonin levels associated with Kindle use were closer to those associated with printed books than with a screen emitting short-wavelength blue light. The now-defunct ebook subscription platform Oyster developed a setting involving less blue light, in response to its own findings that “reading activity on the platform peaks between 9 and 10 pm,” www.digitalbookworld.com/2015/oyster-adds-light-sensitive-technology-for-easier-e-reading/ (page discontinued), accessed August 20, 2015.
63. Edward Helmore, “Barnes & Noble: Why It Could Soon Be the Bookshop’s Final Chapter,” Guardian, May 12, 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/12/barnes-noble-bookstores-retail-amazon.
64. “Devices Used for Reading E-books by Consumers in the United States as of April 2017,” Statista, April 2017, www.statista.com/statistics/707465/e-book-reading-devices/.
65. Paul Greenberg, “In Search of Lost Screen Time,” New York Times, December 31, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/opinion/smartphones-screen-time.html.
66. Lloyd Shepherd “The Death of Books Has Been Greatly Exaggerated,” Guardian, August 30, 2011, www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/30/death-books-exaggerated; Katie Arnold-Ratliff, “Soft Target: Have Reports of the Paperback’s Death Been Greatly Exaggerated?”, Slate, June 20, 2013, https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/declining-sales-of-paperbacks-are-e-readers-killing-the-softcover.html; Christopher Mims, “The Death of the Book Has Been Greatly Exaggerated,” MIT Technology Review, September 21, 2010, www.technologyreview.com/s/420881/the-death-of-the-book-has-been-greatly-exaggerated/.
67. Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2008): 148–171.
68. “Sunday Reading for the Young,” Public Opinion, 21, no. 26 (1896): 836.
69. William Morris, The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 65.
70. Frederick G. Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3.
71. Jonathan Lazar, “Accessibility,” in Further Reading, ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019).
72. Jerome J. McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 74; see also Aaron Donachuk, “After the Letter: Typographical Distraction and the Surface of Morris’s Kelmscott Romances” in Victorian Studies 59, no. 2 (2017): 260–287.
73. Tim Wu, “The Tyranny of Convenience,” New York Times, February 16, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-convenience.html.
74. John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 158; Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
1. Rayomand Engineer, “Kids Weighed Down by School Bags? Here’s What the Future of Education Can Look Like,” The Better India, December 14, 2017, www.thebetterindia.com/124442/heavy-school-bags-children-health-problems-solution/. Thanks to Priyasha Mukhopadhyay for passing this along.
2. See also Matthew Brown, “Book Reviews: Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books,” Openings: Studies in Book Art, no. 1 (2012): 80–83.
3. Craig Mod, “A Simpler Page,” A List Apart, January 11, 2011, http://alistapart.com/article/a-simpler-page.
4. Lucy Helen Muriel Soulsby, Stray Thoughts on Reading (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898), 6.
5. E. R. Hudders, Indexing and Filing: A Manual of Standard Practice (New York: Ronald Press, 1919), 59. Thanks to Craig Robertson for the reference.
6. Vladimir Nabokov interview with Playboy, January 1964, transcribed at http://kulichki.com/moshkow/NABOKOW/Inter03.txt.
7. Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42–79.
8. Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books,” Scribner’s, July–December 1894; Matthew Rubery, The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 46–54.
1. Neil Frude, Book Prescription Wales 2011—A Strategy for Enhancing Treatment Choice for Mental Health: Prescriber Information Booklet, Wales National Health Service, 2011, www.wales.nhs.uk/sitesplus/documents/829/BPW%20Prescriber%20Information%20booklet%20.pdf.
2. Ibid.
3. Mark Brown, “GPs to Prescribe Self-Help Books for Mental Health Problems,” Guardian, January 31, 2013, www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jan/31/gps-prescribe-self-help-books.
4. “Reading Well Books on Prescription Reaches over 100,000 People in First Three Months,” The Reading Agency, n. d., https://readingagency.org.uk/adults/news/reading-well-books-on-prescription-reaches-over-100000-people-in-first-three-months.html. A total of 75,654 copies of Fifty Shades of Grey were borrowed from UK libraries in 2012–2013: “Which Were the Most Borrowed Library Books in 2012–2013?,” Guardian, February 14, 2014, www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/14/most-borrowed-library-books-2012-13. The figure is from the Public Lending Right’s “100 Most Borrowed Books 2012/2013 UK,” www.bl.uk/britishlibrary/~/media/bl/global/services/plr/pdfs/mostborrowedtitles2012-13/uk.pdf.
5. Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009), 124 and 48.
6. Pamela Duncan and Nicola Davis, “Four Million People in England Are Long-Term Users of Antidepressants,” Guardian, August 10, 2018, www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/10/four-million-people-in-england-are-long-term-users-of-antidepressants; National Center for Health Statistics, “Antidepressant Use Among Persons Aged 12 and Over: United States, 2011–2014,” NCHS Data Brief No. 283, August 2017, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db283.htm.
7. Catrin Lewis, Jennifer Pearce, and Jonathan I. Bisson, “Efficacy, Cost-Effectiveness and Acceptability of Self-Help Interventions for Anxiety Disorders: Systematic Review.” British Journal of Psychiatry 200, no. 1 (2012): 15–21.
8. “What is new in this treatment modality is not the content, because bibliotherapy usually uses a cognitive-behavioral approach. Only the form in which it is presented is new,” according to Pim Cuijpers, “Bibliotherapy in Unipolar Depression: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 28, no. 2 (1997): 139–147.
9. Frude, Book Prescription Wales 2011.
10. NICE Technology Appraisal, “Computerised Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Depression and Anxiety,” in Review of Technology Appraisal, February 22, 2006; Pim Cuijpers and Josien Schuurmans, “Self-Help Interventions for Anxiety Disorders: An Overview,” Current Psychiatry Reports 9, no. 4 (2007): 284–290; University of Zurich, “Psychotherapy via Internet as Good as If Not Better Than Face-to-Face Consultations,” Science Daily, July 30, 2013, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130730091255.htm.
11. Frude, Book Prescription Wales 2011.
12. A PLOS One study acknowledges “the exclusion of people with low energy, concentration difficulty and tiredness. The rationale was to focus on people who could use the materials—but this excluded a small number of people with some ‘core’ symptoms of depression.” See Christopher Williams et al., “Guided Self-Help Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Depression in Primary Care: A Randomised Controlled Trial,” PLOS One, January 11, 2013, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0052735.
13. Susannah Fox, “The Social Life of Health information,” Pew Research Center, January 15, 2014, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/15/the-social-life-of-health-information/.
14. Prem Ramaswami, “A Remedy for Your Health-Related Questions: Health Info in the Knowledge Graph,” The Keyword (blog), Google, February 10, 2015, https://blog.google/products/search/health-info-knowledge-graph/.
15. Mary Giliberty, “Learning More About Clinical Depression with the PHQ-9 Questionnaire,” The Keyword (blog), Google, August 23, 2017, www.blog.google/products/search/learning-more-about-clinical-depression-phq-9-questionnaire/.
16. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, and Co., 1884).
17. Ibid.
18. William Kite, “Fiction in Public Libraries,” American Library Journal 1, no. 8 (1877): 278.
19. Francis X. Clines, “Indie Bookstores Are Back, with a Passion,” New York Times, February 12, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/opinion/indie-bookstores-are-back-with-a-passion.html.
20. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 186.
21. James Henry Clark, Sight and Hearing: How Preserved, and How Lost (New York: C. Scribner, 1859).
22. Isaac Ray, Mental Hygiene, in American Journal of the Medical Sciences 47 (1864).
23. Ibid., 56.
24. Ibid., 243 and 56.
25. Ibid., 376.
26. American Female Guardian Society, “Education of Women,” Advocate and Family Guardian 30, no. 17 (1864): 199.
27. Anonymous, “Novels as Sedatives,” Spectator 73 (1894): 108.
28. Rich McManus, “Professor Traces Nation’s ‘Drinking Age Debates,’” NIH Record 63, no. 19 (2011), https://nihrecord.nih.gov/newsletters/2011/09_16_2011/story1.htm.
29. Quoted in Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents; Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1998).
30. Anonymous, “Reading Dissipation,” Journal of Education, April 4, 1901.
31. Angelo Patri, “Too Much Reading is Harmful,” St. Petersburg Times, June 29, 1938.
32. Samuel McChord Crothers, “A Literary Clinic,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1916.
33. Robert Haven Schauffler, The Poetry Cure; A Pocket Medicine Chest of Verse (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1925), xxxv.
34. Ibid, xxxi.
35. Sadie Delaney, “The Place of Bibliotherapy in a Hospital,” Library Journal 63 (April 15, 1938): 305.
36. D. Pehrsson and P. S. McMillen, “A Bibliotherapy Evaluation Tool: Grounding Counselors in the Therapeutic Use of Literature.” The Arts in Psychotherapy 32, no. 1 (2005): 47–59.
37. Quoted in the film James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, directed by Karen Thorsen (1989).
38. John Duffy, Jo Haslam, Lesley Holl, and Julie Walker, “Bibliotherapy Toolkit,” March 2010.
39. Gina McOuat, “The Librarian as Rehabilitator,” Bibliothecha Medica Canadiana 7, no. 3 (1985): 4.
40. Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
41. Brian A. Primack et al., “Using Ecological Momentary Assessment to Determine Media Use by Individuals with and Without Major Depressive Disorder,” JAMA 165, no. 4 (2011): 360–365.
42. “Reading Well Evidence Base,” The Reading Agency, http://readingagency.org.uk/adults/impact/research/reading-well-books-on-prescription-scheme-evidence-base.html. The Reading Agency explained in 2012 that “our Mood-boosting Books promotion is aimed at adults, particularly those who might have experienced mild to moderate mental-health conditions linked to stress, anxiety and depression” (emphasis mine). See also “Mood-boosting Books 2012,” Reading Groups for Everyone, http://readinggroups.org/news/mood-boosting-books-2012.html.
43. Avni Bavishi, Martin D. Slade, and Becca R. Levy, “A Chapter a Day: Association of Book Reading with Longevity,” Social Science and Medicine 164 (2016): 44–48.
44. Associated Press, “NYC Hospitals to Offer Veggie ‘Prescriptions,’” Fox News, July 25, 2013, www.foxnews.com/health/2013/07/25/nyc-hospitals-to-offer-veggie-prescriptions.html#ixzz2aI9IcxmP.
45. On the rise of therapeutic culture, see Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis, eds., Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
46. Sarah Sloat, “‘Book Doctors’ Say What You Need Is a Good Read,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2016, www.wsj.com/articles/book-doctors-say-what-you-need-is-a-good-read-1482091512.
47. http://biblioconcierge.com/, accessed February 10, 2014.
48. Susan Elderkin and Ella Berthoud, The Novel Cure: An A–Z of Literary Remedies (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2013), 266.
49. Birkerts, Changing the Subject.
50. Beth Blum, “The Self-Help Hermeneutic: Its Global History and Literary Future,” PMLA 133, no. 5 (2018): 1099–1117.
51. Compare Boris Kachka’s observation that “today, every section of the store (or web page) overflows with instructions, anecdotes, and homilies. History books teach us how to lead, neuroscience how to use our amygdalas, and memoirs how to eat, pray, and love,” in “The Power of Positive Publishing: How Self-Help Ate America,” New York, January 6, 2013, http://nymag.com/health/self-help/2013/self-help-book-publishing/.
52. Shirky, “Why Abundance is Good.”
53. Edward L. Deci, Intrinsic Motivation (New York: Plenum Press, 1975).
1. Sara Nelson, So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading (New York: Berkley, 2003); Seth Lerer, “Epilogue: Falling Asleep over the History of the Book,” PMLA 121, no. 1, (2006): 229–234; Mikita Brottman, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008); Rick Gekoski, Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoir (London: Constable, 2009).
2. Yusuf Kassam, “Who Benefits from Illiteracy? Literacy and Empowerment,” in The Challenge of Illiteracy: From Reflection to Action, ed. Zaghloul Morsy (New York: Garland, 1994), 33.
3. Carolyn Miller et al., “Parents, Children, Libraries, and Reading,” Pew Research Center, May 1, 2013, www.pewinternet.org/2013/05/01/parents-children-libraries-and-reading/.
4. David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 259.
5. Michèle Petit, L’art de lire, ou, Comment résister à l’adversité (Paris: Belin, 2008), 114.
6. Thomas Greenwood, Public Libraries: A History of the Movement and a Manual for the Organization and Management of Rate-Supported Libraries (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1890).
7. Marie Corelli, Free Opinions Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct (London: Archibald Constable, 1905), 9.
8. Wayne A. Wiegand, Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 239.
9. Sarah Dudek, “Refugees Welcome: Library Membership Cards for Refugees in Berlin—First Numbers After Four Months,” IFLA Public Libraries Section Blog, February 7, 2016, https://blogs.ifla.org/public-libraries/2016/02/07/refugees-welcome-library-membership-cards-for-refugees-in-berlin-first-numbers-after-four-months/. For a similar program in Cologne, see Ross Davies, “Cologne Library Opens Its Doors to Refugees: ‘You Fill This Room with Life’”, Guardian, February 21, 2017, www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/feb/21/cologne-library-opens-doors-refugees-you-fill-room-with-life.
10. Deborah Brandt, Literacy and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 19.
11. Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 84.
12. Lady Bradshaigh to Samuel Richardson, 16 December 1749, in Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, Author of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison: Selected from the Original Manuscripts, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), 305.
13. Interview with Jane Davis, London, September 11, 2013.
14. Howley, “In the Ancient World,” Further Reading, forthcoming.
15. On modern devotional reading, see Paul J. Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). On print culture in Alcoholics Anonymous, see Trysh Travis, The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 11–14, 107–108.
16. Maggie Downs, “How the Silent Book Club Gave Back My Reading Life,” Literary Hub, August 16, 2017, https://lithub.com/how-the-silent-book-club-gave-me-back-my-reading-life/.
17. Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 165.
18. Philip Oltermann, “Hannibal Lecter Saved My Life,” Guardian, March 31, 2007, www.theguardian.com/books/2007/mar/31/featuresreviews.guardianreview1.
19. R. K. Dent, “Introduction to a Discussion on the Blacking Out of Sporting News in Free Libraries,” Library 6, no. 1 (1894): 127–129.
20. Arthur E. Bostwick, The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses (New York: Wilson, 1920).
21. Julie Hersberger, “The Homeless and Information Needs and Services,” Reference and User Services Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2005): 202.
22. Amir Efrati, “Google’s Brin Gives Los Altos a Lift,” Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2012, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444506004577615261807454988; Judith Rosen, “Judy Blume, Bookseller,” Publishers Weekly, April 14, 2016, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/69960-judy-blume-bookseller.html.
23. “About Us,” Concord Free Press, www.concordfreepress.com.
24. Stona Fitch, “Free Books,” Publishers Weekly, March 8, 2010, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/42343-soapbox-free-books.html. See also Piper, Book Was There, 83.
25. Simone Murray, The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing and Selling Books in the Internet Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
26. Marie Lebert, Project Gutenberg (1971–2008), Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27045.
27. Interview with Davis.
28. Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, 2004); Merve Emre, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
1. “Readmember,” HackDash, https://hackdash.org/projects/56929c4d62b2cc5d050af727.
2. https://github.com/mailbackwards/litcity, accessed September 1, 2018.
3. Interview in New York Dramatic Mirror (July 1913), quoted in “Books Will Soon Be Obsolete in the Schools,” Quote Investigator, February 15, 2012, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/02/15/books-obsolete/.
4. Arundell James Kennedy Esdaile, Autolycus’ Pack, and Other Light Wares: Being Essays, Addresses and Verses (London: Grafton & Co., 1940), 182; Jane Howard, “Close-Up,” Life, February 25, 1966: 92; thanks to Geoff Nunberg for this point.
5. Balmer, R. “Whispering Machines,” Nineteenth Century 17 (1885): 496–499, 497.
6. Stanislaw Lem, Return from the Stars (New York: Harvest, 1961), 79.
7. Henry T. Coutts, Library Jokes and Jottings: A Collection of Stories Partly Wise but Mostly Otherwise (London: Grafton & Co., 1914), 149.
8. Esdaile, Autolycus’ Pack, 140.
9. Ray Bradbury, “Pillar of Fire,” in Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451, ed. Donn Albright and Jon R. Eller, (Colorado Springs, CO: Gauntlet Press, 2006), 113.