The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces, by Stephen Orgel

Abstract

On page 158 of this marvellously compact book, Stephen Orgel delights in the snobbish but ‘wonderful reading’ of letters between Bernard and Mary Berenson and Edith Wharton, adding ‘they wrote each other constantly’. Many of Orgel’s page 158s on shelves around the world (always so, when viewed digitally) will remain unblemished—but this reader-reviewer has inserted (in alterable pencil) a ‘to’ after the ‘wrote’; added in the margin ‘query—not simply American but dependent on the placing of the comma after “constantly”?’; and elsewhere has circled a few ‘theaters’ and ‘behaviors’ with the scribbled ‘why US sp. if published in Ox?’ Textual and marginal annotation is the subject of a study that critiques more than thirty years of reading history scholarship on markings in books, and then presents five concise chapters: on humanist education in action, reinterpretations of playbooks, readings of Spenser, on scurrilous comment attending political and religious protest, and the marginalia of Lady Anne Clifford. In each of these chapters, Orgel wrestles with small, only partly legible, scrawls, baffling contractions of Latin, and ancient vernacular and dialect musings. He does so to offer revealing insights into what individual readers learned from books, how they reacted to particular passages, and how they misread or eccentrically interpreted others. One of his best analyses considers the mediation and quality of pedagogic practice, with an especially telling account of a teacher’s interpolation of homoerotic passages in Vergil that contested contemporary humanist attempts to explain away the unacceptable.