In The Nature of the Book , a tour de force of cultural history, Adrian Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture and its many arenas—commercial, intellectual, political, and individual. ''A compelling exposition of how authors, printers, booksellers and readers competed for power over the printed page. . . . The richness of Mr. Johns's book lies in the splendid detail he has collected to describe the world of books in the first two centuries after the printing press arrived in England.''—Alberto Manguel, Washington Times ''[A] mammoth and stimulating account of the place of print in the history of knowledge. . . . Johns has written a tremendously learned primer.''—D. Graham Burnett, New Republic ''A detailed, engrossing, and genuinely eye-opening account of the formative stages of the print culture. . . . This is scholarship at its best.''—Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor ''The most lucid and persuasive account of the new kind of knowledge produced by print. . . . A work to rank alongside McLuhan.''—John Sutherland, The Independent ''Entertainingly written. . . . The most comprehensive account available . . . well documented and engaging.''—Ian Maclean, Times Literary Supplement
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THE PHYSIOLOGY OF READING
The experience of reading is extremely difficult to describe in words. If Collins's and Polanyi's arguments about the ineffable character of skill are correct, then capturing it may even be impossible.1 2 The place of a reading practice, and its consequences as expressed in subsequent writings, are often traceable, being preserved in textual, pictorial, and material archives; but the immediacy of reading itself is not. Nevertheless, we may still hope to arrive at a useful understanding of how particular appropriations of books could come to be articulated in particular circumstances (and why others could not), why they had an impact, and why that impact was as it was. 13 The conventions adopted in the Stationers' court, which were investigated in chapter 3, and those developed at the Royal Society, which are the subject of chapter 7, are examples. Both could be assessed in terms of conventions of reading pursued in particular social spaces. The history of reading aims to trace and account for such dynamic processes, by appreciating the different practices by which readers in various times and places attribute meanings to the objects of their reading. It explains the global by rigorous attention to the local. One approach to the subject lies through what Roger Chartier calls "object studies." This involves tracing the different appropriations accorded a single book as it traverses a number of distinct social spaces. Such studies combine attention to the book itself, with its format, layout, and typography-the cluster ofcharacteristics connoted by the term mise en page-with research into the diverse conventions of reading in operation in its places of use. 14 An alternative is to concentrate not on one object, but on one reader. The opportunity to do this arises when such a reader has left traces of his or her reading, generally in the form of annotations on, or about, a set of books. The most impressive claims for the history of reading in Anglophonic historiography have probably been those based on the study of such annotations. 15 These traces are not necessarily rare. In the seventeenth cen