Reading In America Research Articles

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911 (review)

Reviewed by: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911 Elizabeth Fekete Trubey (bio) Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911. By Barbara Hochman. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. Pp. xv, 377. $28.95 cloth) Barbara Hochman’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911 adds greatly to our understanding of both Stowe’s novel and the history of reading in America. Hochman’s book examines transformations in the cultural work done by Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the time of its publication through the centenary of Stowe’s birth. She focuses on acts of reading: scenes of readership in the novel and the experiences of actual readers. Hochman details the ways Uncle Tom’s Cabin pushed upon familiar white, middle-class tropes, challenging its first readers to reconsider assumptions about sympathy, reading, race, and childhood. Yet sixty years later, Hochman argues, repackaged editions of the novel and new attitudes about reading itself shifted perceptions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; once read as a Christian melodrama which had the power to break “down the imaginative distance between . . . white readers and . . . African American characters,” it became a racist book that told a comic story of white superiority (p. 17). [End Page 209] Hochman’s ambitious work combines literary analysis with in-depth study of Stowe’s readers to flesh out the divergent roles the novel played in the American cultural imagination. She situates Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s within multiple genres: sentimental fiction, slave narratives, children’s literature, history, and realism. Remaining mindful that readers’ “comments always trail behind the reading experience,” Hochman traces readers’ responses to the text, looking at what was both said and unsaid (p. 6). She analyzes diaries, letters, reviews, and marginalia; she studies numerous editions of the text itself from the original serialized version to the framed edition in the Woman’s Building Library at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and to abridgements for children. She pays particular attention to changes in illustrations—what moments from the story are depicted and how. Hochman first recreates the experience of Stowe’s early readers, in particular how Stowe worked within and pushed against reading conventions. She begins with the version serialized in the National Era, suggesting that Stowe’s breaks from abolitionist clichés allowed her white readers to occupy the subjectivities of black characters. She goes on to argue that Stowe’s scenes of black literacy assert slaves’ “humanity, inner life, and cumulative memory” (p. 74). She investigates the ways Uncle Tom’s Cabin challenged her contemporaries’ moral resistance to fiction by reimagining the reading process, and she devotes special attention to children’s editions, particularly the decisions of abridgers and illustrators. She argues that these “drew children in and allowed them to imagine diverse subjectivities” and to “narrow the gap between [children’s] idea of themselves and their conception of slave ‘otherness’” (p. 130). Hochman’s then investigates how differently readers after the Civil War approached Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She demonstrates convincingly that Stowe’s later readers viewed the novel as “a powerful agent of social change” that had achieved its goal—a chance for “cultural self-congratulation” (pp. 147, 148). As sentimental reading habits lost their currency and slavery became “history,” the text came to play a new role. Hochman compares later editions of the novel with earlier ones, looking at how new introductions, illustrations, and [End Page 210] abridgements reframed the plot, characters, and reading experience to “project the illiteracy and subservience of African Americans into an unending future” (p. 204). Hochman’s Epilogue focuses on African American readers’ conflicted responses to a novel which at once offered them insight into the rarely discussed history of slavery but also reinforced painful stereotypes. Hochman’s book embraces the complexities of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the evolution of its role in American culture. By working through the ways Stowe depicts readers and was in turn read by them, Hochman gives us layered insight into the history of reading as well as the history of reading this book. Elizabeth Fekete Trubey...

Dorothy Canfield, Willa Cather, and the Uncertainties of Middlebrow and Highbrow

Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember. --Willa Cather Gordon Hutner launches his study of that were than formula fiction but not as good as high What America Read, with two questions: Why are so few novels remembered while so many thousands are forgotten? Is our literary history incomplete without accounting for these books? (1). first question is impossible to answer; the processes of canonization are too complex, too variable (sometimes case by case), and too enmeshed in social patterns that may have little to do with literary merit per se--even if we assume such a thing is definable. second is easy: yes. Partly this is true precisely because of the vagaries of canonization; we cannot assume that a forgotten novel is, of was, of less moment than a remembered one. Certainly we cannot assume that the bases for making such a judgment have remained consistent over the years--they have not. Moreover, incomplete simply means incomplete. If certain novels have fallen out of remembrance, our opportunities for reading pleasure and for thinking are, to that extent, incomplete. Dorothy Canfield is one of those better novelists of the early to mid-twentieth century who have largely been forgotten. (1) What I undertake here can be seen, then, as one more effort, by no means the first, to revaluate her and restore this one, among other modern realist women (Hutner 119), to readerly attention. Much of the writing of women authors has required such reclamation efforts. But renewed evaluation and appreciation are not my central purposes here. In part, my purpose is rooted simply in biographical and literary interest in Canfield and in Willa Cather. By tracing the history of their personal and textual interactions, however, I hope not so much to shine a light on particular novels by Canfield that lie on the darkened side of literary history, in contrast to Cather's now glowingly illuminated place on the modernist bright side, as to insist on the blurriness of the line itself. More precisely, the line I refer to is that between the middlebrow and the highbrow writer. Both Cather and Canfield insistently constructed their positions on the two sides of the line, Canfield conceiving her broad middlebrow appeal (a status powerfully reinforced by her role on the selection committee of the Book-of-the-Month Club) as a function of her educationist mission, while Cather, who disparaged any sense of mission for fiction as a detraction from its intrinsic value as art, worked hard to identify herself as a writer of high quality. (2) Except incidentally, I do not propose to argue here the merits of middlebrowness itself--though it does have merits; Jaime Harker and others have demonstrated the valuable cultural work performed by middlebrow writers (see Harker, Progressive Middlebrow). I do propose to demonstrate how, in this particular instance, the middlebrow and the aesthete remained in conversation and the extent to which, ironically enough, the aesthete Cather borrowed literary ideas from her middlebrow friend. Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield met in 1891 at the University of Nebraska, where Canfield's father, James Hulme Canfield, was chancellor. Dorothy was just verging on her teens at the time, while Willa, the elder by six years, was completing a year of qualifying studies before entering the university proper. Their friendship survived the Canfields' move to Ohio State University in 1895, for Professor Canfield to become president, and Cather's more to Pittsburgh in 1896 to accept her first job. In 1905 they fell into a bitter disagreement over a story called The Profile that Cather meant to include in her volume Troll Garden. Essentially this was a disagreement about literary ethics. main character of The Profile was based on a young woman with a disfiguring facial scar to whom Canfield had introduced Cather some two years earlier. …

What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 (review)

What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 (review)

Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market

Book Review| December 01 2011 Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market. By Dowling, David. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press. 2009. 217 pp. $39.95.The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. By McGurl, Mark. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 2009. xiv, 466 pp. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $19.95.What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960. By Hutner, Gordon. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. 2009. xi, 450 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $26.95. Leonard Cassuto Leonard Cassuto Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2011) 83 (4): 863–866. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1437261 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Leonard Cassuto; Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market. American Literature 1 December 2011; 83 (4): 863–866. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1437261 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Tutoring Opened My Eyes: Tutor Experiences in the America Reads Challenge

The America Reads Challenge offers colleges and universities an opportunity to make a contribution to the community while enhancing the education of their students, employing tutoring as a service learning experience. At the same time, their efforts will help the institution develop and sustain community partnerships. This paper reports an analysis of America Reads tutors’ reactions to their experiences working with struggling readers. Tutors’ comments were collected from reaction papers written during a course associated with the program and from other sources. Tutors reported numerous benefits, including new knowledge about children and schools, new appreciation for teachers, new awareness of teaching as a potential profession, and preparation for important aspects of parenthood. Some tutors elected to change their major as a result of their experience, and others reported a greater commitment to community service and mentoring. The potential for America Reads is yet untapped.

What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel

What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel

In Werther's Thrall: Suicide and the Power of Sentimental Reading in Early National America

In Werther's Thrall: Suicide and the Power of Sentimental Reading in Early National America

What America read: taste, class, and the novel, 1920-1960

Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. Gordon Hutner describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. In presenting literary history this way, Hutner argues, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of the American middle-class's confrontation with modernity. Reading these novels now offers an extraordinary opportunity to witness debates about what kind of nation America would become and what place its newly dominant middle class would have--and, Hutner suggests, should also lead us to wonder how our own contemporary novels will be remembered. |Hutner describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. In presenting literary history this way, Hutner argues, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of the American middle-class's confrontation with modernity.

Gordon Hutner: What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960

Gordon Hutner: What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960

What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 by Gordon Hutner

What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 by Gordon Hutner

In Support of Reading: Reading Outreach Programs at Academic Libraries

Encouraging pleasure reading is not traditionally seen as the role of academic libraries. Those students who take time for reading, however, are better poised to succeed in college. Declining rates in reading among young people are cause for alarm, and many libraries at academic institutions are developing programs to promote this pastime. This article will examine statistics on the state of reading in America, outline two reading outreach initiatives that New Mexico State University has engaged in, and suggest strategies for effectively reaching out to the community to encourage reading.

Becoming Successful Readers: A Volunteer Tutoring Program for Culturally Diverse Students

In 1996 President Clinton established the America Reads Challenge Act (1997), which included a commitment that every child will read independently and well by the end of third grade. This initiative was predicated on links between achievement and poverty (Riley, 1996, 2002) and that children reading below grade level in the early grades perform more poorly in subsequent grades (Clay, 1985; Juel, 1996; Stanovich, 1986). Responding to this challenge, we report evidence that a structured volunteer tutoring program successfully increased culturally diverse students' reading/writing performance in six elementary schools in Southeast Michigan. Specifically, the objectives of the volunteer tutoring program were to increase the reading performance of culturally diverse students, improve students' attitudes toward reading, and evaluate the program's overall efficacy.

The Tiger's Leap and the Dog's Paw: Method, Matter, and Meaning in the History of the Book

The Tiger's Leap and the Dog's Paw:Method, Matter, and Meaning in the History of the Book Matthew P. Brown (bio) The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation-Building, 1770–1870 Trish Loughran New York: Columbia University Press, 2007568 pp. Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America E. Jennifer Monaghan Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005504 pp. Since the turn to theory, no critic for literary scholars has resonated and endured with as much power as Walter Benjamin. His appeal is equal parts biography and thought: the urban flaneur and modernist translator; the period-hopping intellectual, as comfortable with seventeenth-century baroque drama as with twentieth-century Marxian dialectics; the journalist beyond academe, struggling with Frankfurt University over his (rejected) habilitation thesis, before writing gnomic reportage suffused with learned allusion; the independent scholar, who never finished his magnum opus; the world-historical entrapment, with its persecution, escape, and tragic end as he fled the Nazis in 1940 and killed himself in the Pyrenees. The romance of Benjamin—for certainly these anti-institutional roles appeal to higher-ed drones in the twenty-first century academy—is transmitted as well through a prose oeuvre that, while deserving a career of deep engagement, is perhaps best read for its aphoristic lyricism, rich with implication. In "Theses on the Philosophy of History"—one of his last works, written in 1940 before the fateful trip from Paris to the Spanish border—Benjamin [End Page 657] posited a historical method that unsettled the categories of both "past" and "present" typical of traditional historiography.1 If history is the writing of the relations of these categories, Benjamin questioned how we summon up the past and what that knowledge means in the present. Resisting a positivist orientation that would capture the past "as things really were" and a developmental orientation that would capture the past as it exists on a continuum with the present, Benjamin instead proposed an alternate temporality when doing history, one not as naïve as the positivist nor as progress bound as the developmentalist. Landmark restoration might be a way to illustrate these orientations and time schemes. The Thaddeus Kosciuszko house in Philadelphia features tourist signage that explains its rebuilding. On the sign, a photograph from 1975 shows the ruined house, with a caption and arrow indicating the "original historic brickwork at corner." In the same photo, another caption laments later additions, and, with arrow, directs viewers to the supposed eyesores and to the steps taken: "remove non-historic brickwork and restore original brick pattern." Such a desire for "historic" brickwork reflects both of the temporalities of traditional historical method. In its quest, it offers an authentic past based on original construction material as it really was, and, in its practice, it creates a homogenizing parade of history, from past to present. In fact, it creates this latter developmental temporality—a seamless recognition of antecedents, a Whiggish, high-fiving confirmation as we moderns look back—by slighting, dismissing, or repressing the later bricks as "non-historic." Benjamin reframed the discussion by offering a method shot through with messianism. This method would abandon the pastness of the past implicit in positivism while exploding the continuum of history presented by the developmentalists. In Benjamin's time zone, the historian would, in a fair bit of bombast, redeem the past for the present. His take on the relations of past and present was not solely an echo of Vico's tropology nor of Croce's dictum that "all history is contemporary history"—prepostmodernists who understood the mediating influence of the present on the past. In redeeming the past for the present, Benjamin called the homogeneity of traditional history "empty time" and contrasted it with what he called "now-time." "Empty time" is that narrative temporality we default to when writing up a story of the past as one of continuity and change, where we amass data and look for cause-and-effect. "Now-time" is a collage [End Page 658] temporality, where the past clutters the present. The past's traces and crystallizations sunder the developmental logic of history writing, arrest the present moment with a constellation of...

Reading women: literacy, authorship, and culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800

List of Illustrations Introduction -Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly PART I. PLEASURES AND PROHIBITIONS Inventing the Early Modern Woman Reader through the World of Goods: Lyly's Gentlewoman Reader and Katherine Stubbes -Mary Ellen Lamb Engendering the Female Reader: Women's Recreational Reading of Shakespeare in Early Modern England -Sasha Roberts Crafting Subjectivities: Women, Reading and Self-Imagining -Mary Kelley PART II. PRACTICES AND ACCOMPLISHMENT 'you sow, Ile read': Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers -Bianca F.-C. Calabresi The Female World of Classical Reading in Eighteenth-Century America -Caroline Winterer Reading and the Problem of Accomplishment -Catherine E. Kelly PART III. TRANSLATION AND AUTHORSHIP 'Who Painted the Lion?' Women and Novelle -Ian Frederick Moulton The Word Made Flesh: Reading Women and the Bible -Janice Knight 'With All Due Reverence and Respect to the Word of God': Aphra Behn as Skeptical Reader of the Bible and Critical Translator of Fontenelle -Margaret Ferguson Female Curiosities: The Transatlantic Female Commonplace Book -Susan M. Stabile Reading Outside the Frame -Robert A. Gross Notes on Contributors* Acknowledgments Index

Reading Trade Books in a Freshman Biology Course

Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 report sponsored by National Endowment for Arts, depicts a clear but bleak picture of current status of reading. The survey sampled more than 17,000 adults and covered many demographic areas including age, gender, education, income, religion, race and ethnicity. Some specific findings of study include: the percentage of adult Americans reading literature has dropped dramatically over past 20 years, the decline in reading parallels a decline in total book literary reading is declining among whites, African Americans, and Hispanics, literary reading is declining among all education levels, and the steepest decline in reading is in youngest age groups. Reasons for decline in reading are many, but several sources point to television and rise of Internet use, which is taking away from reading audience. The importance of reading is rarely questioned. Why read? is usually answered by educators as a method to both expand a person's vocabulary and to introduce new ideas (i.e., learn). Reading researchers point to use of words in cognition; development of thoughts and ideas require use of words and thus more words that are available, more thoughts that can be developed. These claims, and many more advocating importance of reading, have been reinforced hundreds of times by studies examining role of reading and early childhood education (e.g., Bowman, Donovan & Burns, 2001; Shonkoff ST Phillips, 2000). Clearly, children who read, and read in large quantities, perform better in school than children who do not. Many college courses have historically been associated with large amounts of reading. For example, many biology courses required students to read trade books such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Carson, 1962), or James Watson's The Double Helix (Watson, 1980), but now most instructors elect to focus students' reading on course textbooks and study guides. As instructors know, these different kinds of books tell very different stories and elicit different responses from readers. For example, whereas Silent Spring was a bestseller that helped launch environmental movement, textbooks are often little more than massive, and very expensive, compendiums of facts that students seldom read, much less study. This has been documented by Burchfield and Sappington (2000) who found an overall decline in reading compliance in assigned textbook reading over a 16-year span. Despite fact that reading levels are in decline, but merits of reading remain in high regard, we designed and implemented a reading assignment for college freshman science students. The objective of this research project was to evaluate assignment in terms of student opinions and its influence on overall course performance (i.e., course grades). Background This study took place at University of Minnesota within General College (GC), a unit that provides developmental education to a wide array of students, including first-generation college students, students with disabilities, students of color, and non-native speakers of English. GC tries to improve students' academic skills to a point where they can transfer to other colleges within university. Students in this study were enrolled in GC 1135: Human Anatomy and Physiology, a freshman-level class involving both lecture and lab. The course used universal design (Bowe, 2000; Johnson 8z Fox, 2003) as its foundation in that important curricular topics, such as muscle contraction or action potentials, were presented to students in a variety of instructional modes (e.g., lecture, cooperative groups, lab, on-line activities). Instructional methods such as cooperative quizzes (Jensen, Moore 8z Hatch, 2002) and art projects (Jensen, Moore, Hatch 8z Hsu, 2003) have been used in course. In 2000 we decided to implement a reading project in our course that required all students to read a trade book. …

Porch Reads

Leisure reading in America has declined in the last 20 years, especially among 18 to 24 year olds. Studies show, however, that a positive relationship exists between college students' academic achievement and the time they spend in recreational reading. Reading for pleasure improves reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development. Librarians at the Roesch Library, University of Dayton (OH), collaborated with colleagues in Residence Education on a yearlong pilot recreational reading program to address this cultural shift on a small scale. Porches, informal gathering places familiar to students, served as an appropriate theme for the program's goal of bringing people together to talk about books. This project found that with just a little bit of motivation and encouragement, students are willing to read for fun.

The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (review)

Reviewed by: The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 Patricia S. Kruppa The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880. By Candy Gunther Brown. (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 336. $59.95 clothbound; $19.95 paperback.) Candy Gunther Brown, an assistant professor of American Studies at Saint Louis University, in The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880, investigates how book cultures work and specifically how the evangelical print culture of the nineteenth century sought to transform American society. Her book covers the period from the establishment of the first evangelical printing house, the Methodist Book Concern in 1789, to the publication of Lew Wallace's evangelical best-seller, Ben-Hur, in 1880. In her interpretation of the evangelical experience, she argues that conversion is the beginning, and not the end, of that experience and that the evangelical impulse that motivated religious groups to enter the commercial marketplace did not become the secularizing experience that recent scholars have suggested. Evangelicals saw themselves as set apart from Roman Catholics by their reliance upon the Bible as sole religious authority and by their belief in the priesthood of all believers. These views united evangelicals into a Church Universal even though they were separated by denominations and doctrine. More important than their differences was the evangelical conviction that they were a community of pilgrims moving through the world together toward eternal life. The growth of print culture in the nineteenth century was made possible by the spread of literacy, technological innovations such as the steam press, and improvements in transportation and the postal system. By 1850 there were 400 publishing firms in the United States, and virtually every major firm had a denominational affiliate. Evangelicals entered the world of publishing because they recognized the significance of print culture, and they hoped, by joining it, to sanctify that culture. Brown defines this process in terms of presence and purity: evangelicals were determined to establish a presence in the publishing world, but equally determined to maintain their purity in it. She refers to this effort as "a balancing act," as she describes the efforts of evangelical editors, most lacking editorial or commercial experience, to reach a market of consumers without being contaminated by the marketplace. Perhaps the most interesting sections of this book are those which deal with two issues still critical to publishing: editorial control and copyright. [End Page 709] Most evangelical editors were ministers who saw their publications as extensions of their pulpits. Many readers, however, regarded themselves as participants in the discourse, empowered by the belief in the priesthood of believers to challenge editorial control. These tensions were largely missing from Roman Catholic publications, which numbered sixty by 1850, because of a tradition of hierarchical control of doctrine. Prior to the 1840's, no journal exercised copyright, and there was no international standard until 1891. Evangelicals believed that religious writing belonged to the whole community of believers rather than to individual authors, and editors freely appropriated texts, altered, condensed, and added to them as they chose, rarely paying a royalty or even recognizing the author. Brown cites the case of the English evangelical Edmund Bunny, who happened upon the writing of the Jesuit, Robert Parsons, in 1585, and finding it "too good to be lost," proceeded to "cut the Popery out," and reissued the work in his own name (p.79). His example set the tone all the way to the end of the nineteenth century when some evangelicals were still arguing against copyright. In the end, evangelicals transformed neither the world nor the print culture, though they left their mark on both. As Brown concludes in her well researched study, the evangelical sense of identity as a band of pilgrims set apart ultimately removed them from the world they hoped to transform. Patricia S. Kruppa Austin, Texas Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. (Studies in Print Culture.). E. Jennifer Monaghan

<i>Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. (Studies in Print Culture.)</i>. E. Jennifer Monaghan

The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880

The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880

E. JENNIFER MONAGHAN. Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press in association with the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 2005. Pp. xiii, 491. $49.95

E. JENNIFER MONAGHAN. Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press in association with the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 2005. Pp. xiii, 491. $49.95