A History of Reading
by Steven Roger Fischer
(London: Reaktion Books, 2019)
When nearly six hundred years ago Western Europe first began printing books, a growing body of shared facts fashioned new ways to think and analyse from diverse read sources, at which historic juncture passive compliant reading became active creative reading.
Page 7.
Command of books always meant success. Now digital devices command.
Page 7.
Reading: For most of us it will forever be the voice of civilization itself.
Page 8.
What music is to the spirit, reading is to the mind.
Page 8.
Tough reading and writing go hand in hand, reading is actually writing’s antithesis.
Page 9.
Writing is a skill, reading a faculty.
Page 9.
Writing’s history has followed series of borrowings and refinements; reading’s history has involved successive stages of social maturation. Writing is expression, reading impression. Writing is public, reading personal. Writing is limited, reading open-ended. Writing freezes the moment. Reading is forever.
Page 9.
For most of written history, reading was speaking.
Page 11.
When city-states expanded into kingdoms, demands on writing increased exponentially, necessitating ever more complex forms of written documentation - each time intended to be read aloud.
Page 11.
Writing prioritizes sound … . Reading, however, prioritized meaning.
Page 11.
Reading is not merely the attaching of sound to grapheme, which occurs only at an elementary level. Meaning is involved, and in a fundamental way. At a higher level of perception reading can even convey meaning alone, without any recourse to sound.
Page 12.
Throughout history reading has been man different things to many peoples.
Page 13.
Specialists in communications recognize five phases of information exchange: production, transmission, reception, storage and repetition.
Page 13.
Logogram (word sign), syllabogram (syllabic sign) or a combination of letters (signs in an alphabetic system).
Page 13.
Reading as we know it today did not exist before classical antiquity.
Page 14.
For the most part, ancient ‘literature’ conveyed only what could be learnt by heart.
Page 15.
Since clay token or counters of various geometrical shapes, bearing lines, crosses, circles and other designs, were read for some 8,000 years in the Middle East in a rudimentary bookkeeping system, each token representing one of the given commodity, its design identifying its kind.
Page 16.
A paradigm shift occurred when Sumerian scribes began using systemic phoneticism: that is, they systematically coordinated sounds and symbols (including pictograms) to create ‘signs’ of a writing system. A design no longer signified a real commodity, like a sheep, but stood for a specific sound value instead.
Page 17.
Reading in its true form emerged when one started to interpret a sign for its sound value alone within a standardized system of limited sings.
Page 17.
Writing was recognized to be an invaluable tool for accumulating and storing information: it facilitated accounting, material storage and transport, and it retained names, dates and places better than human memory ever could.
Page 17.
‘Reading’ entailed logically putting together bits of connected information, not reconstituting articulate speech.
Page 18.
Unlike writing, reading is not bound to language: reading is foremost visual (not oral) and conceptual (not linguistic).
Page 18.
Most Mesopotamian reading occurred in this cuneiform or wedge-shaped writing in clay, though cuneiforms were also carved in stone and inscribed on wax, ivory, metal and even glass.
Page 18.
To remain wieldy, clay tablets had to be palm-sized, obliging miniature texts.
Page 19.
A clay tablet was a large and ponderous thing, quite ill suited to leisurely reading. From this near-universal failure of Mesopotamian scribes to elaborate a more user-friendly literature, one can deduce that reading was predominantly work. That is, it was not a solitary, agreeable, silent business - but public, taxing and loud.
Page 19.
Oral and written literature were one.
Page 20.
The entire Babylonian tradition is conveyed in these two languages: Sumerian and Akkadian.
Page 20.
From the beginning, the physical form of reading material had been dictated by immediate purpose. The length of an early Mesopotamian text depended on a clay tablet’s size, format, dimensions and ‘cartouches.’
Page 21.
School tablets have emerged out of the ruins of most of the wealthier residences of Ur. Apparently an ability to read penetrated to the Mesopotamian domestic domain as well. … It is possible that the ability to read and write, already in the third millennium BC, was one of the distinguishing qualities of the aristocracy.
Page 21.
It is the act of recording that embodied the scribe’s primary role, not the act of reading-reciting. This tells us that a scribe was foremost the notary public of his and her era, the notarial stenographer of most of society’s important activities, the executive secretary, the governmental bureaucrat.
Page 22.
The vast majority of Babylon’s social knowledge was transmitted orally and was never committed to clay.
Page 23.
Unlike today, scribes were seldom their society’s creative writers: all creative literature remained oral. Such orally composed works were, however, sometimes preserved on clay by a scribe, on command or request.
Pages 24-25.
The first author in history who signed a work was a woman: Princess Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon I of Akkad.
Page 25.
True literary texts were unknown until about 2500 BC under the Akkadians who, at first, wrote only in Sumerian.
Page 26.
Akkadian literature excelled in prayers and conjurations.
Page 26.
More than 75 per cent of the 150,000 cuneiform inscriptions so far excavated in Mesopotamia are bookkeeping and administrative records.
Page 27.
Sumerians called those who catalogued libraries ‘ordainers of the universe’. Cataloguing a library means fragmenting human experience. All catalogization is subjective and arbitrary.
Page 27.
Since life itself is uncatalogued, reading should be uncatalogued.
Page 27.
‘Read’ is understood as signifying ‘read aloud, recite’. In these early societies, where the written word was the spoken word, the highest integrity was demanded of each scribal secretary.
Page 29.
Reading in ancient Egypt … was doubly oral: not only was writing understood to be visible speech, but all reading was physically performed aloud through a scribe-witness.
Page 30.
As in Mesopotamia, written correspondence in Egypt was not reading as we know it, but the official witnessing of an oral medium.
Page 31.
The era of papyrus witnessed the rapid rise of urban federations in Egypt.
Page 31.
Reading and writing are not criteria for civilization; indeed, urban activity had obtained in northeastern Syria as early as 4000 BC, shortly before complete writing emerged.
Page 31.
Because so very few ancient Egyptians could read and write, and those who did exclusively comprised the elite (or their slaves), the faculty was held in extremely high regard. Here, scribes actually occupied a social station much more elevated than that of their Mesopotamian counterparts.
Page 34.
Almost from the beginning, writing in Egypt served two main purposes: administration and monumental display.
Page 35.
What has endured the millennia, primarily architectural or monumental inscriptions, represent only a fraction of what was once written down. It is in no way representative of the majority of ancient writing.
Page 36.
Public texts were to impress, not to inform.
Page 36.
What was actually read was mountains of administrative papyri, and these have almost entirely vanished.
Page 36.
Unlike Mesopotamia’s utilitarian cuneiform wedges, Egyptian hieroglyphs, in particular, were believed to hold magical power. Reading them on sarcophagi and tomb walls and ceilings was a divine utterance, helping to bring their message into fulfilment. … Reading such things was an act of creation itself.
Pages 40-41.
Ancient Egypt never achieved a discursive or analytic history, never implemented a religious canon or exegesis (such as Judaism, Christianity or Islam were later to implement through reading). There was neither an indigenous oral epic nor scripture. Egyptians remained in a common intermediate position, their society ‘aided by literacy but not transformed by it’.
Page 41.
Aramaic writing developed from Phoenician around the tenth century BC, and by the eighth or seventh century BC Aramaic had become the main language and script of the Near East, the lingua franca of the entire region. Eventually it became the official language of the Persian Empire (550 – 330 BC).
Page 44.
Aramaic writing also replaced Assyrian cuneiform: ink on leather or papyrus was now preferred over wedges om soft clay.
Page 44.
Throughout history, one of the chief motors of literacy has been religion. Priest-scribes had been among society’s first readers. They were followed by elite scholars and then by lay celebrants, who, in turn, expanded and diversified their reading material, eventually leading to a concept of general education.
Page 45.
In Western Europe, religious literature came to dominate reading for well over a thousand years. (In other parts of the world, particularly Islamic nations, it still dominates reading.)
Page 45.
Society’s literary readers - that is, the same priest-scribes - also became commentators. In time, owing to the authority of their authors, the commentaries themselves became scripture: that is, holy writ.
Page 45.
Most religious writings failed to experience direct veneration. Only the oral tradition was truly venerated. In the West, however, veneration of the written texts themselves emerged.
Page 46.
Oral ability weakens upon accession to literacy.
Page 46.
With consonantal alphabetic writing’s diffusion form Egypt, Sinai and Canaan … reading transcended that monopoly of bookkeeping scribes serving the rich and powerful. No longer requiring many of intense study at a scribal school, reading could now be practised by all after only a few months of learning a simple alphabet.
Page 47.
Humanity’s thirst for knowledge and love of learning served as kindling to incipient reading.
Page 47.
Literacy is a response; not a stimulus. Literacy does not cause social and cognitive change (though it is probably a necessary precondition for some changes).
Page 47.
Those who read can extend their communication spatially and temporally; they can also expand their memory in compass and duration.
Page 47.
With the written word’s gifts came also its tyranny. As a result of their voluntary metamorphosis literates lost oral memory, oral culture, oral freedom. An artificial authority, the written word, imposed itself on every literate person.
Page 48.
Most non-essential reading, during nearly all of classical antiquity, was entertainment and announcement, read aloud by servants or slaves trained in the art.
Page 49.
All classical instruction had as its ultimate goal not so much the acquisition of knowledge as the perfection of eloquence. Orality, not literacy, ruled ancient Mediterranean society.
Page 49.
The great majority of everyday reading occurred in the form of waxed tablets. … But the king of surfaces was papyrus, imported form Egypt.
Page 51.
Egypt eventually produced huge amounts of papyrus for the Greek and, later, the Roman markets. The demand maintained a complete industry along the Nile, sustaining thousands.
Page 52.
Because of the ancient book’s format, a reader naturally comprehended reading as something intrinsically sequential.
Page 52.
A universal, standardized punctuation, such as may be used throughout a text in consistent fashion, only became fashionable … after the introduction of printing in Western Europe.
Page 53.
Once learnt, reading cannot be unlearnt, and so throughout antiquity tyrannical rulers who failed to prevent literacy attacked what opponents or suspected foes were reading: the books themselves.
Page 53.
In the seventh century BC writing in the West took a decisive turn when Greek law began to appear in monumental inscriptions, endowing writing with a new social status.
Page 55.
The primary purpose of the public inscription was to be seen, not necessarily to be read. Presence alone bespoke authority.
Page 55.
By the fifth century BC reading was no longer the monopoly of an oligarchy validating herein its power: it was rapidly becoming a ‘popular’ tool for accessing information.
Page 56.
Socrates believed books - the objects themselves, not their contents - were actually an impediment to learning. … Too much is lost in writing. The voice alone conveys the ‘one, correct’ interpretation. … One heard the truth; one did not read it.
Page 58.
Fiction is something to be feared, because it represents the unfettered mind, capable of anything. Knowledge is clearly something to be directed for the common good. But fiction, being directionless energy, has always aroused suspicion and invited censure.
Page 59
Only after the fourth century BC. Once large-scale importation of papyrus was aby the Ptolemies in Alexandria, did literature prosper in Greece, allowing many copies of a work, private collections, public libraries - indeed, a culture of the written word.
Page 60.
Alexander the Great’s takeover of Egypt and imposition of a Macedonian Greek administration not only opened up the North African markets to European trade but, because of papyrus, gave rise to the power of the written word and the birth of written culture in the West, with all concomitant repercussions.
Page 61.
By the end of the fourth century BC, the oral transmission of social knowledge had decisively become a written transmission. What was more, writing no longer merely documented and preserved, but legitimized and validated knowledge.
Page 61.
As important as reading was recitation, because reading always meant reading aloud.
Page 62.
Many Greeks (and later Romans) kept a specially trained slave or freedwoman/freedman whose sole responsibility was to read to them aloud.
Page 63.
The Library of Alexandria became the Mediterranean’s premier centre of learning based on the written word. All subsequent libraries were to follow the Alexandrian model.
Page 66.
Reading per se did not change the way people thought. It did, however, encourage more people to write about what they thought.
Page 67.
The Jews of the Middle East had been among the first to appreciate the manifest benefits of cultural reading, perhaps as early as the seventh century BC. Unlike the Greeks, however, they came to enshrine the very act as something sacred.
Page 67.
The very act of reading such texts became part of the holy observance, the direct transmission of the divine covenant.
Page 67.
Christianity was founded on, and quickly diffused through, the Judaic exaltation of the written word.
Page 68.
The idea of writing being the ‘Word of God’ had to be a late phenomenon, since Phoenician and Greek bookkeeping and administrative records would have been virtually all that early Hebrew scribes had comprehended from the primitive practice.
Page 68.
Law was never scripture, for Hebrew law was customary law, and this was validated only orally by town elders.
Page 69.
Yahweh’s commandments to the Hebrews to construct the Ark of the Covenant in order to enshrine the miraculously inscribed Tables of the Law occur in Deuteronomy, which was apparently composed in the late seventh century BC when the Jews were creating their identity while collating an entire library of oral traditions that comprised many, often conflicting, genres from several epochs.
Page 69.
When all temporal power collapsed in the sixth century BC, religious power filled the social vacuum, copying the mores, customs, even the script of the dominant Aramaic-speaking Babylonians. It was then, n the Babylonian Exile, that the rites of Jerusalem’s cult were written down and the authoritative revisions of the priestly code were undertaken.
Page 70.
Almost all Jews … remained illiterate in antiquity, at least in Hebrew and Aramaic. (For commercial reasons many, however, read and wrote Greek.)
Page 72.
Roman society remained fundamentally oral, still perceiving reading to be an adjunct skill, not a primary faculty.
Page 74.
Before 100 BC probably fewer than one out of ten inhabitants of the city of Rome itself could read and write, and throughout the entire empire fewer than one out of twenty or thirty women. This was not a literate society.
Page 75.
This was the advantage of papyrus, which allowed lengthier works to be put into writing in the first place; until then, skin, wood, wax, pottery, ivory, metal, stone and bark usually permitted only brief inscriptions.
Page 75.
Greeks customarily held their scrolls with one hand over each other, Romans with both h ands opposite each other.
Page 75.
The basis of all ancient punctuation was rhetoric, not logical analysis (Today, punctuation is linked mainly to meaning, not to sound, the consequence of oral reading having become silent reading.)
Page 76.
Roman reading meant Greek reading and Roman learning meant Greek learning. Only in later centuries did Latin authors, above all Virgil, achieve classic veneration. For all Roman pupils, however, learning to read and write almost entirely comprised learning to read and write Greek. Education itself meant Greek education.
Page 77.
The large demand for papyrus scrolls, and later for parchment volumes, made books merchandise. Greatest in demand were Homer and Virgil.
Pages 78-79.
A general rule for reading had been laid down int eh second century AD whereby the most recent edition of a text was acknowledged to replace the edition before it. Only the most recent edition of a work, in other words, not contained the ‘authorized’ version.
Page 79.
Only the very wealthy could possess, much less amass, entire papyrus books.
Page 79.
The ‘reader’ was a transmitter, not a receiver.
Page 84.
Most reading including public readings, took place in daylight hours, because of sight problems as prevalent as today’s and because of poor illumination in houses, making evening reading difficult.
Pages 85-86.
The first Roman libraries mainly held Greek scrolls, as ‘proper’ reading for any educated Roman was of course Greek, not Latin.
Page 87.
Among the most highly valued books of antiquity were the three Greek books of the Sibylline Prophecies. These lay stored in a chest in a stone vault underneath Rome’s Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.
Page 89.
A surprisingly strong belief in divining by text obtained in antiquity.
Page 89.
In post-Republic Rome readers preferred to use Virgil’s poems to tell the future, randomly consulting those scrolls of Virgil’ works available at temples dedicated to the goddess Fortuna.
Page 90.
Antiquity’s two favourites, Homer and Virgil, were almost exclusively learnt through dictation and recitation, not though personal reading.
Page 90.
The custom of publicly reading secular works ceased in the sixth century. This had various causes: the patricians vacating large centres, declining education, a weakening book trade, Germanic incursions and other changes.
Page 91.
As parchment gained in popularity, especially when Christians favoured texts on parchment and physicians preferred the codex format because of easier referencing, the codex of bound pages became more fashionable.
Page 93.
Parchment was not only much cheaper than papyrus, but also far more durable and resistant to insects and humidity.
Page 93.
Parchment had begun seriously competing with papyrus during the first century AD, but by the fourth century had almost wholly replaced it. (Papyrus’s complete replacement finally occurred n the early Middle Ages, when the trade routes to Egypt were disrupted by the Muslim expansion, halting the export of papyrus.)
Page 94.
Parchment sufficed as a writing material, however, only because demand for writing remained low. (Once the printing press occasioned enormous production runs a thousand years later, expensive parchment was replaced by cheaper paper.)
Page 94.
Ever increasing use of parchment accompanied Christianity’s growth: the first copies of the Bible were vellum codices, a practice that became traditional. Christianity secured the triumph of the parchment codex, indeed created the modern book.
Page 95.
The new format determined the nature of creative writing itself, in other words, opening up a new dimension of cultural expression in the West.
Page 96.
The codex’s format also prompted innovations in organizing literature: chapters now accommodated subdivision of a work, a d collations called anthologies held several works under one cover. The whole work was one compact body of information, no longer a sequential string-out of connected scrolls.
Page 96.
By the close of the fourth century AD the written word’s prestige overshadowed oral soothsaying and oracular pronouncements.
Page 96.
Reading actually declined throughout the Roman Empire in every social domain but religious practice. Christianity chiefly succeeded because, being parasitic to Graeco-Latin learning, it claimed literature as its own vehicle and thus appealed to the schooled literate.
Page 97.
Within the span of around thirty years, then, it appears the oral traditions surrounding the life and teachings of Jesus, and the subsequent activities of his disciples and other followers, became a codified collection or texts circulated among the cells of believers to spread the faith through reading and writing.
Page 98.
True ‘Scripture’ remained, for all early Christians, the Old Testament. The veneration of the New Testament, still awaiting sacred status, would come only much later.
Page 98.
The Church Fathers were insatiable readers and prolific writers. … Wealthy benefactors endowed these super-scholars with a guaranteed income, residence and small army of secretaries and scribes. Their rapid dictations were legendary.
Page 99.
With Augustine we first encounter a clear distinction between loud reading and silent reading: between the written word as the human voice and the written word as its own medium.
Page 100.
Regular word separation did not become common again until the ninth century AD; shortly after this silent reading became common, chiefly prompted by regular word separation.
Page 102.
Augustine loved Latin, his native tongue, but resented Greek. Because of Augustine’s influence on Christianity, his was the major contribution in the shift from Greek to Latin reading in the West, setting the foundation for what has been labelled the ‘Latin Middle Ages’.
Page 103.
Nearly all literate Greeks and Romans used their ability to read and write to keep accounts.
Page 107.
One certainly cannot speak of mass literacy in antiquity.
Page 107.
Classical texts seem verbose to us today, and with good reason. They are, by all modern standards, bombastic, pretentious, disorganized, repetitious, even scattered, filled with digressions and incidentals. For it is the literature of a speech-based, not a text-based society.
Page 109.
Because Chinese writing first appeared nearly fully developed - in north-central China around 1400 BC - this suggests a borrowing f rom the West where complete writing had already existed for over 2,000 years.
Page 112.
The Chinese classics essentially comprised five books:
the Yijin (Book of Changes), a book of divination;
the Shujin (Book of Documents), a collection of reputedly Shang and early Zhou (1122 - 256 BC) writings;
the Shijing (Book of Songs), an anthology of poetry and folksongs;
the Spring and Autumn Annals;
and the Liji (Book of Rites), a compilation treating of ritual and conduct.
Pages 114-115.
Each Chinese character is already a complete word in itself. So a reader of Chinese must learn a new character for every word in the language.
Page 116.
Whereas an alphabet in itself unlocks an entire lexicon, each Chinese morpheme-syllable is ‘encoded’ in the writing system and requires an individual unlocking every time it is encountered the process actually activates regions of the human brain different from those used by alphabetic readers.
Page 116.
Paper remained a state manufacturing monopoly until the eighth century, its technique a closely guarded secret.
Page 117.
Paper quickly became China’s primary writing material and, because of its relative cheapness, triggered reading’s tremendous expansion throughout East Asia.
Page 117.
Woodblock printing remained the chief printing method throughout China, Korea and Japan until the 1800s. it supplied tens of millions of pages of reading for the world’s largest audience of readers.
Page 119.
A true ‘print industry’ emerged only in the sixteenth century, signalling a growing volume and wider distribution of reading at this time.
Page 120.
It has been estimated that, at the end of the nineteenth century, between 30 and 45 percent of all Chinese males were literate.
Page 122.
Women with literate males in their household usually had freer access to education and reading material.
Page 123.
Scholarly opposition to it was fierce, and full acceptance of Han’gul came only in the twentieth century.
Page 126.
There is an important lesson to be learnt from Chinese and Korean reading. In contrast to that of late mediaeval Europe, in both countries it generated no commercial market, no guild of printers, no synergism of trade and production, no financial enrichment or advancement of society. Large-scale printing initiatives remained the franchise of the state or wealthy patrons, and this situation prevailed until relatively recently (and still does in North Korea).
Page 127.
The new Korean alphabet had been invented specifically in order to exploit printing with movable metal type.
Page 127.
In Europe, printshops were springing up everywhere, backed by investors achieving profitable returns. Increasing production, decreasing book prices and fuelling the demand, European printers encouraged even more reading, resulting in greater literacy and a concomitant social advancement. But in East Asia this failed to happen. Production of literature remained the monopoly of royalty and the feudal elite. Paralysed by rigid hierarchies, Chinese and Koreans, even more than Japanese, failed to grasp printing’s promise.
Page 127.
Japan finally established a Confucian-based central administration in AD 645, which flourished for over five hundred years. During this era Japan institutionalized Chinese writing, adapting it to convey also Old Japanese sounds. With this, the historical Japanese civilization was born.
Page 129.
Up to the end of the sixth century … Japanese reading remained Chinese reading.
Page 129.
Enormous print runs in East Asia did not necessarily betoken a high readership.
Page 130.
With no common border with China, Japan had few Chinese visitors and no Chinese invasion. Yet more than half of today’s Japanese vocabulary comprises Sino-Japanese loanwords: that is, Chinese words in Japanese phonology. China’s massive influence on the Japanese language, in other words, came almost entirely through reading Chinese, not speaking Chinese, a phenomenon that has occurred with no other language in history. ‘Traditional’ Japanese culture is, in fact, the product of Chinese reading.
Page 138.
The Japanese can boast of one of the world’s highest literacy rates (higher than the U.S. or France, with their much ‘simpler’ alphabetic writing) and the world’s highest per capita consumption of published material.
The Japanese, their very culture a child of reading, are the world’s premier readers.
Pages 138-139.
Because all known Mesoamerican inscriptions comprise only what has survived, they are doubtless misrepresentative of what once obtained.
Page 140.
The Mayan realm is ‘the only truly historical civilization int eh New World, with records going back to the third century after Christ’. The best understood of all pre-Columbian Mesoamerican scripts, Mayan occurs most frequently in monumental reliefs.
Page 141.
Only a small fraction of Mesoamerican society, the hereditary aristocrats, educated in royal schools, ever learnt to read and write. Indeed, literacy itself came to comprise one of the monopolies distinguishing the ruling class from the commoners.
Page 143.
Writing was as evident in ancient Mesoamerica as it was in the Roman Empire across the Atlantic at the same time.
Page 144.
Although exceedingly few Mayans were active readers, many, however, had to be passive readers. Prominent public inscriptions were certainly read aloud, and so locals knew what they said.
Page 144.
It was a society with literacy, but it was not a literate society.
Page 145.
The Mayan elite used public writing, as distinct from the almost certainly much more voluminous administrative and private writing, principally to legitimize their class’s claim to power.
Page 145.
More than 50 per cent of India’s population remains illiterate today. And hundred of minority languages there still have no script to convey them. In part, this is because of the entrenched oral imperative.
Page 150.
Unlike history-conscious China India is notorious for its death of historical writing.
Page 151.
The dominant literary classes of India have always read to transcend, not to document, the world; it was the Muslim intruders, beginning in the early eighth century AD, who first introduced the factual documentation of events.
Page 151.
The oral imperative lives on: Indian villages still orally transmit and memorize the Vedas without writing, with learners frequently failing to understand the meaning of many archaic word sand unable to access reference works.
Page 151.
With certain exceptions, mediaeval reading was mostly still a collective experience. … A university lecture was exclusively a lectio, a public reading. And, as in ancient Rome, a ‘published’ book was merely one that had been read aloud in public. Nearly all reading audiences in the Middle Ages were ‘read to’ audiences.
Page 159.
Private independent reading was never the customary way to access literature before the year 1300. At the five main types of centre where written literature found a reception - church, convent, court, university and residence - listening was part of ‘reading’.
Page 159.
Everywhere in Northern Europe, reading had diffused initially through the Roman Empire and only secondarily, though far more pervasively and enduringly, through Christianity.
Page 161.
The Church did not bring reading to the British Isles. Reading had bene practises there ever since Julius Caesar’s occupation of southeast England in 55 BC. But the Church brough a continuity of reading; it also introduced formal education, which founded and perpetuated a local literary tradition.
Page 163.
In his Admonitio generalis of 789 Charlemagne directed improvements aimed specifically at education, reading and writing. The immediate purpose of the Admonitio was neither political nor cultural but ecclesiastical: literate priests were direly needed to prevent the imminent dissolution of the Frankish Church.
Page 165.
A large number of classical works survived only through a Carolingian edition (to eventually appear in print). Carolingian scribes were the unsung saviours of Western written culture.
Page 166.
In Western Europe at this time an ‘illiterate’ was not a person who could not read, but someone who could not read Latin, the vehicle of Christendom and all learning. Only someone who could read Latin was a litteratus, one capable of accessing and sharing written knowledge.
Page 167.
A divine presence is believed to descend during the act of reading the Qur’an, its very calligraphy a part of the supernatural conveyance: message and form are thus believed to be wedded in harmonious inspiration.
Page 170.
Specific rhythms attended each line of a written text, accompanied by a rocking of the upper torso, just as the Jews had always practised with their oral reading. (The Qur’an is still commonly read in this way today.)
Page 172.
In the tenth century … Abdul Kassem Ismael, Grand Vizier of Persia, possessed a library of 117,000 volumes. (Paris at the time held about five hundred books.)
Page 175.
In the twelfth century the Cairo Library of the Fatimid Caliphate … housed more than 1,100,000 volumes, all fully catalogued according to subject matter: one of the world’s premier libraries.
Page 175.
Islamic Spain … created libraries holing up to one thousand times the number of volumes in the largest Christian libraries of the north.
Page 175.
The mediaeval Islamic experience built on the intellectual patrimony of the Greek (Roman) and Persian cultures it replaces, empowering an unparalleled dynamic of learning, one that Europe achieved only much later, int eh Renaissance.
Page 176.
By the end of the first millennium AD, principally as a consequence of its embracing reading so passionately, the world of Islam was home to the world’s leading scientists, architects, physicians, geographers and philosophers, many of them having trained at one of history’s greatest centres of learning, the celebrated al-Azhar in Cairo.
Page 176.
Before the ninth century … European scribes had either been dictated to or they themselves read aloud, word for word, the texts they were copying. The mediaeval scriptorium was a noisy place.
Page 179.
There can be little doubt that the rise in silent reading around the ninth century came as a direct result of a new, clear, even, simplified script.
Page 179.
As of the tenth century, it was word separation, above all, that awarded the eye its primacy in reading.
Page 181.
The Carolingian scribes’ eventual practice of word separation appears to have derived from translating Arabic writings.
Page 181.
The word-separated Arabic translations of Greek tests, which, in the original Greek, had been in run-together lines, now became models for the Latin West.
Page 181.
Silent reading also introduced something new to society at large: uncensored communication.
Page 182.
Within three to four centuries, silent reading had become not only common throughout Western Europe, but the scholar’s preferred method.
Page 183.
Reading - silent reading, that is, which now counted as reading per se - was even held to be a form of meditation.
Page 183.
Writing began to flourish again in the eleventh century, when increased trade placed new demands on administration. … Until then chiefly the domain of the peripatetic cleric-scholars and ruling churchmen, the written word began to return, then, to the public arena for the first time since late antiquity. Having been revived for practical purposed, reading and writing were soon reinvigorating vernacular reading, classical reading and even speculative thought as well.
Page 184.
Most reading that took lace was Latin reading. A few vernacular texts were highly admired and widely copied, for public reading, to be sure. But Latin dominated Church, school and scholarship - the domains of those who best, and most frequently, read.
Page 187.
Many of society’s highest rank, especially royalty, eschewed reading altogether. They often regarded reading as a ‘craft’ unworthy of their station, befitting only lower-ranking priests and scribes whom one hired and fired.
Page 187.
By the High Middle Ages books had assumed considerable importance as movable chattels: they had become valuable commodities in their own right.
Page 187.
Those wealthy enough to own a private chapel in a castle, manor or town residence practised secular devotions employing a personal Psalter, very frequently the property of a lady.
Page 188.
Doubtless the most-read genre of literature in the High Middle Ages, as of the twelfth century, was the personal Latin prayer-book: the Book of Hours.
Page 188.
Rich nobles, and later the wealthy bourgeoisie, presented Books of Hours as wedding gifts. By the end of the Middle Ages, the miniature illuminations that many included comprised Western Europe’s premier artwork. Most importantly, the book linked the reader immediately to the divine without the mediation of the Church, which until then had monopolized religious writing: with such a book in hand, reading itself became an intensely personal holy act. This novel perception eventually paved the way for reading Scripture in the vernacular - hitherto inconceivable - and ultimately contributed, though only peripherally, to the questioning of the Church’s supremacy.
Page 189.
In thousands of well-to-do households, a Book of Hours was the family’s only book (a Bible was always too expensive). Quite often the children of the manor, through the mother or nurse, leant their ABCs through a Book of Hours.
Pages 189-190.
What percentage of the population in the High Middle Ages could read? In metropolitan centres perhaps as high as 5 per cent - or half that of ancient Rome. And in rural areas, at best one in a hundred.
Page 190.
Although intellectual activity remained firmly a male franchise in the High Middle Ages, a surprising number of women eloquently intruded. Many of these were in religious orders, some of which stressed education for young girls.
Page 191.
When financially and physically possible, women everywhere made themselves the age’s most enthusiastic readers and writers.
Page 192.
Not so much the physical book itself threatened, but its espoused ideas. A book was no danger, a new thought was.
Page 193.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries writing still played only a secondary role in the diffusion of heresies, which remained almost entirely oral manifestations.
Page 193.
Sacred writings were not only holy of themselves, but the very act of reading them was acknowledged to be a double path, leading to divine knowledge and moral armament.
Page 194.
Fifteenth-century notebooks demonstrate that many pupils also began reading by using daily prayers (the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary) and selections from the Psalms, ,passages that the pupils already knew by heart.
Page 196.
Students did not normally use books for study as such, but primarily as memory aids.
Page 197.
In the 1300s townspeople everywhere began to seize political control from local nobles and bishops, whereupon they demanded education for their children in order to uphold and maintain the popular franchise.
Page 199.
Few today are aware of the extravagant length of time a mediaeval university education demanded. It far surpassed today’s four-year BA, five-year MA or eight-year PhD. At Paris’s Sorbonne in the twelfth century, for example, theology students were usually between 24 and 35 years of age. And the exalted Doctorate of Theology was normally conferred only on those who had already passed the age of 38.
Page 200.
In the Middle Ages, a classical text was almost universally held to be infallible. Consequently, many scholars now wrote their opinions in the guise of classical precedents, hoping with this that their readers would more easily accept them.
Page 201.
The physical act of reading was anything but easy in the Middle Ages. This discouraged many.
Page 206.
Especially fashionable lenses for reading were apparently perfected sometime in the thirteenth century, after which they became marketable, then fashionable.
Page 206.
Only after the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century did the wearing of spectacles become common.
Page 207.
Lorgnettes (spectacles mounted on a handle), for example, were especially popular in the eighteenth century, monocles in the nineteenth century. Arms hooking back over both ears appeared only in the nineteenth century.
Page 208.
Spectacles permitted squint-free reading, better reading, more reading. Once they became accessible to everyone of impaired vision and were no longer the privilege of the rich and powerful, their display took on social significance.
Page 208.
It was with Petrarch that the ‘modern reader’ … was born.
Page 210.
A book represented a repository of countless facts and phrases that could be savoured, digested, retained or discarded as each individual reader saw fit, according to her or his ability and inclination. After Petrarch, the ‘collating form of reading would become the common method of scholarship throughout Europe’. Society’s attitude towards reading was changed forever, and n a deep and fundamental way.
Page 211.
The majority of Europeans did not understand Latin at all, and so were denied access to most written literature. The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321) argued, however, that a vernacular tongue, the everyday language of the people, is actually nobler than Latin, for three cogent reasons: Adam spoke one in Eden; it is naturel (not learnt in school, like Latin); and it is universal (everybody speaks one).
Page 211.
Christendom’s richest library, that of the Sorbonne, had 1,728 books registered as works to be loaned (three hundred of these were listed as lost), and another 338 for in-house consultation - chained to reading desks. Paris’s other colleges each held no more than three hundred titles.
Page 213.
Reading aloud became a favourite pastime in domestic settings, as books became available to lower echelons of society for the first time.
Page 215.
There was no separate genre of children’s literature. (This was a commercial invention of the nineteenth century.) Children read what adults read, or listened to what adults thought they should hear.
Page 216.
Physically things were changing, to. To enable more comfortable reading, special reading furniture was invented: the lectern and desk.
Page 217.
Because most people in Western Europe form the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries slept naked - one thirteenth-century marriage contract even stipulating that the wife ‘should not sleep in a chemise without her husband’s consent’ - reading in bed almost always occurred in the nude.
Page 218.
If any single book was owned in the later Middle Ages, it was still almost invariably a book of Hours. As ever, the Christina faithful indulged in its reading three times a day, at least, and so ubiquitous was the small, portable book that some confessors expected members of their congregations to confess to a sin of they had missed a reading in it. … The late mediaeval Book of Hours held not only specific Latin prayers, but also a useful calendar and, often in alphabetical order, such practical information as popular medical advice as well.
Page 220.
Picture books encode virtually nothing. They hold little data, and thus demand a very high degree of participation by their viewer-readers in order to flesh out what little information there is.
Page 222.
A book was something ‘miraculous’ for mediaeval folk. It was from a book that the priest imparted the Word of God. It was from an open book that the Divine Office was read. A book was part of the process of God’s redemption, a channel to the Almighty.
Page 223.
Because of Church demands and secular education fuelled by a suddenly expanding international economy, book collecting had become a very lucrative trade.
Page 223.
Before the invention of the printing press mediaeval libraries were ludicrously small. The first mediaeval library in Western Europe to exceed a paltry 2,000 volumes was the papal library at Avignon.
Page 224.
Most mediaeval books had no formal title.
Page 224.
Books were normally shelved according to use, their position simply memorized by a senior attendant to whom everyone went to find a desired text.
Page 225.
In the wake of the Black Death, the mid-fifteenth century was again a time of rapid change and development.
Page 226.
The essence of ‘mediaeval reading’, passive listening-and-reading, was diminishing. Active silent reading now prevailed, which demanded engagement.
Page 226.
With increased literacy the laity no longer required the Church’s intercession, for through personal and silent reading the divine dialogue had become by and large private and solitary.
Pages 226-227.
‘Mediaeval’ reading - that communal, dogmatic, two-dimensional listening-and-reading … continued in many places well into the eighteenth century.
Page 229.
The invention of printing marks to only reading’s transformation, but all of European society’s itself, so wholly did the printed page proceed to influence nearly every aspect of life there.
Page 229.
When printing began, the written word was anything but ubiquitous. Today we are used to seeing writing in nearly every imaginable circumstance. … But in the early 1400s writing was still something quite rare, even rarer than it had been in ancient Rome.
Page 230.
Printing suddenly made the written word omnipresent.
Page 230.
The solitary physical book that before had represented class wealth now became intellectual property, something to bd ‘owned’ and shared with like-minded book possessors.
Page 230.
It was no longer the scholar’s duty merely to reveal knowledge, but to add to it.
Page 230.
It inspired a surge of intellectual innovation that, in time, eventually engendered the West’s reductionist thinking, proof-based science and the Enlightenment.
Page 231.
Within only two generations Europe’s several tens of thousands of readers had grown to several hundreds of thousands. In the last five hundred years, nothing has contributed more to society than the invention of printing.
Page 232.
Central to a history of reading is printing’s astonishing effect on, above all, the quantity of production, thus determining, in time, both audience and reading matter.
Page 232.
Printing’s appearance around 1450 is foremost to be explained by the demands of that robust literate culture that Western Europe had already attained, one strong enough to warrant and sustain the mass production of printed books.
Page 232.
A complete alphabet by movable type multiplies a text with ease and efficiency because a printer here uses only a small inventory of letters (customarily between twenty and thirty higher-order systemic ones) to reproduce any given word in the language: so a printer’s stock of cast type easily remains within physically manageable and financially affordable bounds.
Page 233.
Alphabetic writing allows movable-type printing to express a utilitarian advantage impossible for societies using non-alphabetic writing systems to emulate. So the advent of the printing press at once gave the West a cultural advantage over the rest of the world.
Page 233.
Printing only succeeded because of the availability of paper. … Printing’s chief advantage lay in inexpensive mass productions, which only paper - never parchment - allowed.
Page 233.
With the advent of the printing press only paper provided that perfect writing material for cheaply multiplying the written word. Parchment then vanished, except for ceremonial and official use: presentations, diplomas, titles, conveyances, charters and the like.
Pages 233-234.
Until around 1480 cast type simply imitated common scribal letter-shapes: typographers everywhere had intentionally designed founts (a complete set of type of one style and one size) to copy the standard hands found in contemporary manuscripts.
Page 234.
Quantity over quality became the ethos that drove the printing revolution, always a capitalistic venture.
Page 235.
A book was no longer an elaborate, prized investment, but a simple and elegant tool of scholarship.
Page 237.
By making almost unlimited copies of identical texts available by mechanical means, it brought society form limited access to knowledge to almost unlimited access to knowledge.
Page 238.
Printing actually enabled modern society. It would be no exaggeration to claim that printing has been as important to humankind as the controlled use of fire and the wheel.
Page 238.
‘Humanism’ now turned reading private, questioned received wisdom and creatively sought new alternatives. Common orthodoxy had to yield to individual opinion, as each reader became an authority.
Page 239.
Printers usually favoured the vernacular, as these commonly sold more copies and so made them more profit.
Page 240.
The rising bourgeoisie took charge of reading’s direction and introduced other tastes, much more frequently expressed in the vernacular.
Page 240.
Written national literatures were quickly filling Europe’s growing domestic and institutional libraries.
Page 240.
As the oral national epic had earlier yielded to the written courtly romance, now all orality broke before literacy. Though the wellspring of written literature had been oral literature, now written literature began drawing form itself for inspiration. Oral traditions drastically declined, then disappeared.
Page 241.
The reader, no longer the text, was the fulcrum of knowledge.
Page 244.
An immediate effect of printing … had been the production of an increasing number of vernacular works targeting the largest possible audience.
Page 245.
Some revolutionary illiterates, resenting the literates’ preferred position in society, had already called for an end not only to printing, but to books and education, which ere perceived as tools of the powerful to subjugate the powerless.
Page 245.
Because of reading and the book trade, education, Protestantism and other causes - … the economic and intellectual fulcrum shifted from the south to the north of Europe where it has remained ever since. (The Industrial Revolution and, later, the Electronic Revolution have been direct results of this transfer of the intellectual franchise, brought about in part by restricting the freedom of reading in southern lands.)
Page 247.
The majority of Europe’s children attended no school at all. They visited catechism classes only irregularly, and remained illiterate. Hence what each new generation knew came only through rote memorization, using orally taught formulas. As a result, ignorance and superstition a bounded. This situation lasted well into the seventeenth century.
Page 250.
Although more reading was taking place because of printing, this involved mostly circulars and other shorter printed texts. Only very few people owned proper books.
Page 250.
Among those who did own books, most had fewer than ten. … Books remained rare, and reading a book was a special, indeed memorable, experience that was still out of reach of most.
Page 251.
In nearly all of Europe, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, most readers of books were physicians, nobles, wealthy merchants and the clergy, just as in the Middle Ages.
Page 251.
It was hardly accidental that, soon after printing’s invention, Germany became the crucible of the Reformation, that religious and political movement that began as an attempt to renovate the Roman Catholic Church and resulted in the establishment of Europe’s Protestant Churches.
Page 252.
The dissolution of Church land titles and their transfer to a new landed gentry distributed unprecedented wealth among England’s middle class, making the country’s rural merchants, wealthier yeomen, propertied craftsmen and especially the landed gentry a dynamic force whose like had been unknown in Europe.
Page 257.
Still quite rare, books were nearly as highly valued in the Renaissance as they had been in the Middle Ages, their theft commonly punishable by death, just as if they were horses or cattle.
Page 258.
Most books still tended to be of impressive, sometimes even daunting, proportions: folios and quartos that were about twice the size of today’s standard book, and even much larger.
Page 259.
The smaller the book, the greater the sales. It was foremost the demands of the free market that shrank the European book.
Page 259.
More affordable books also meant more books, and more books brought a diminution of their traditional respect.
Page 259.
Everything imaginable was printed, with each publisher competing though novelty to secure his share of the market.
Page 260.
Ubiquitous from the 1500s up to the 1800s, a hornbook was commonly the first thing a girl or boy ever held to read. Comprising a thin wooden board - usually as long and wide as an adult’s hand - with a small handle on the bottom, it was covered on the front side with a transparent film of horn to discourage soiling, hence the name, and the whole ensemble was cased in a brass frame. The hornbook’s single printed sheet normally displayed, form top to bottom, the lower-case alphabet, the upper-case alphabet, occasionally the first nine digits or special syllabic combinations, and the Lord’s Prayer.
Page 261.
In sixteenth- and -seventeenth-century Europe, however, the bedroom remained the favourite place to read and store books.
Page 262.
If a person wished to read privately, then one had to retire elsewhere with a candle or, if day, outdoors, where a great amount of reading still took lace, just like in the Middle Ages.
Page 262.
Russian print-shops flourished in the eighteenth century, but were subject to severe prior censorship, something which has characterized Russian book and periodical production up to the present day, precluding those benefits a free press can bestow on society. An indigenous Russian literature only became popular in the eighteenth century, and blossomed in the nineteenth with Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov and many other luminaries. Up until the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian elite still preferred, however, the fashionable French, Italian, German and, increasingly, English works in the original.
Page 265.
Nearly all Islamic lands failed to share in the Western innovations in culture, science and technology. The rejection of printing marginalized, then fossilized Islamic culture.
Page 265.
When printing arrived, Jews embraced it immediately as a ‘holy work’.
Page 266.
For the liturgical chanting of the Torah in the synagogue, Jews insisted on reading from traditional leather or parchment rolls, just as Arabs insisted on manuscript Qu’rans. But all other Jewish writings were printed and found wide distribution.
Page 267.
In contrast to Christianity’s superseding literature … whereby each new text replaces the one before it, Talmudic literature became accumulative: each new text included all previous texts.
Page 268.
The use of Latin as the language of scholarship internationalized the book trade. Dealers from all over Europe converged at annual book fairs to trade in a shared commodity: the Latin book, eminently readable from Dublin to Moscow. But then the demand for vernacular books demolished this borderless commerce, fragmenting the trade by ‘nationalizing’ production.
Page 268.
Many … publishers, in order to reduce costs and lower list prices, began drastically diminishing quality, chiefly by eliminating expensive bindings, fine paper and elaborate illustrations.
Page 269.
Novels now sold in unprecedented numbers, for the genre appealed to many different levels and tastes.
Page 269.
Oxford and Cambridge accepted a growing number of students in the first half of the seventeenth century: every year between 1620 and 1640, for example, each university enrolled over a thousand ‘new boys’, who then still averaged fourteen years of age. By 1640 England’s higher institutions of learning were teaching a volume of students not to be attained again until the early 1800s. in this case quantity produced quality: for from this generation came many of England’s greatest parliamentarians, legal experts, clerical intelligentsia - but at the price of thousands of jobless graduate, as the land’s traditions, administration and professionals were not yet prepared for a truly educated elite.
Page 271.
Book pirating … supplied most books to those who otherwise could not afford to own one. Pirating greatly increased the number of books in circulation, promoting more reading than ever before.
Page 273.
Men of science and letters, having discovered that their circulated communications in Latin no longer sufficed to reach the majority of their peers, turned to publishing their theories, opinions, scientific findings and book reviews in Europe’s first periodically printed scholarly journals.
Page 276.
The book pedlars had played an important role in the circulation of literature about the Protestant Reformation, as well as that about he Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Page 277.
London provided nearly all the stock for the English tradesmen, and so as a result London reading - and London tastes, culture and vocabulary - began homogenizing and standardizing English provincial society.
Page 277.
The King James Bible was a masterpiece of written English, one of the finest works of literature ever to appear in the language.
Page 279.
The over-riding complaint was that - to preserve one’s wealth, power and social standing - reading was far too dangerous a gift for those one had to keep suppressed.
Page 280.
Like faith itself, reading can nowhere be truly suppressed.
Page 281.
The development of a market economy of course favours those who can read and write. It is therefore no accident of history that readers came to occupy what were now becoming the globe’s wealthiest lands. (In contrast, feudalistic peasant societies kept a large majority of illiterate at the mercy of a small minority of literate.)
Page 284.
Above all, it was the ability to read that created the Modern Human, and it was no coincidence that its emergence occurred at the intersect of the most-frequented land, river and sea routes that bore printed books and other reading material: widespread literacy is everywhere foremost a geo-economic occurrence.
Pages 284-285.
The escalating ability to read brought about the Enlightenment, which gave to the world, among other things, the three crucial concepts of the free use of reason, empirical method of science and universal human progress. For where there was wealth, there were schools; where there were schools, there was greater literacy; and where there was greater literacy, rapid advances occurred in all human endeavours.
Page 285.
Only industrial societies institutionalized literacy for a majority of both women and men. And because ‘culture follows money’, the new industrial powers - in particular France, Germany, Britain, Italy and, later, the U.S. - determined the course of cultural development.
Page 285.
Nearly all nineteenth-century libraries in English-speaking countries had been founded by private societies and thus mainly reflected the specialized interest of a respective trade, profession or denomination.
Page 291.
For many the noel provided their only access to a larger experience. Others derived form it the satisfaction of a deep personal need for ‘a philosophical; or moral guidance, not set out in rules, but worked out, experimentally, in conduct’.
Page 292.
A bedchamber of 1800 was still very much a social place, somewhere to receive guests and hold conversations. It boasted chairs, window seats and very often two or three small shelves of books. This was soon to change during the nineteenth century, when the bedroom became instead a place of refuge form the social noise, to address one’s toilet, to rest in peace and to read to oneself in privacy. Other rooms then came to fulfil the function the bedchamber had once fulfilled: the reception room, the lounge the corridor. Only the wealthiest houses maintained a private, separate library.
Page 300.
Among Napoleon’s troops … learning to read and write was now a prerequisite to promotion from common soldier to corporal.
Page 301.
During the French Revolution the great libraries of the aristocracy, many of them several hundreds of years old … were plundered and stored en masse to rot, be devoured by vermin or be sold off by civic auction to mainly English and German collectors. Some of France’s greatest book collections passed into foreign ownership at this tumultuous time.
Page 301.
Hardly anyone in Russia read in Russian. Apart from the Russian |orthodox Church, reading was effectively still a Western European novelty.
Page 304.
The enormous social changes that took place between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries were marked foremost by the three revolutions: the political American Revolution, the industrial English Revolution and the social French Revolution.
Page 304.
Social life was being increasingly defined by a widening middle class of mainly literate city dwellers, with uprooted masses of illiterates threatening social instability. Better integration of such potentially dangerous populations was hoped through public education.
Page 304.
If in the eighteenth century literacy had conquered society’s middle levels, in the nineteenth it infused the levels below.
Page 304.
In early nineteenth-century Britain and North America, it was still considered unseemly for a female to be observed reading … as reading was yet a male prerogative.
Page 305.
Authors’ public readings of their works flourished in the nineteenth century to a degree that had not been experienced in Western Europe for nearly 2,000 years.
Page 308.
With Charles Dickens, public reading int eh modern age attained its pinnacle.
Page 308.
Since printing’s invention in the fifteenth century, market forces had always steered book production; now they overwhelmed it. Though some publishers still remained loyal to their elite clientele, most opted for greater volume and higher returns. A hitherto ignored segment of society became the new target of the book trade: the masses.
The result was the ‘book industry’. Books now became products of mass distribution. As incomes rose, even more books were bought and read. Reading proliferated everywhere. If most homes earlier had housed one or two devotional texts at most, now almost every home had its Bible, dictionary, weekly periodical, several novels and various school textbooks.
Pages 309-310.
Only with the Restoration, the re-establishment of the monarchy in 1815, did the book trade begin to revive in France. The palaces, châteaux and residences needed their plundered libraries restored, and so commenced the age or publishing fast collections of complete works.
Page 310.
A book’s intrinsic virtue was now perceived to lie in its contents - although, at the same time, the fine art of bookbinding was reaching its historical zenith, just as it was being marginalized.
Page 311.
With the advent of rail travel the general public’s increased mobility created a demand for another type of book quite apart from that for the domestic bookshelf: the cheap travelling book of particular subject matter, size and length.
Page 311.
French publishing enjoyed something unique: throughout the world French-language books were fashionable, and so they were guaranteed larger print-runs than comparable volumes in English, German, Italian or Spanish.
Page 314.
By the time of the American Civil War (1861-5) a complex network of printing establishments had made the newspaper, periodical and book common objects of daily life there.
Page 316.
The United States in the nineteenth century had 90 per cent of its books sold by subscription, mail or itinerant booksellers. (In contrast, nearly all books in Europe were sold at bookshops.)
Page 316.
In utility and importance books in America were regarded by most as inferior to newspapers and magazines, and later also to radio, television and the personal computer, whereas in most of Europe the book maintained its primary status.
Page 316.
Reading itself now constituted a pillar of the new ‘egalitarian’ society.
Page 317.
Low-cost illustrated periodicals (the first magazines) were made possible by the use of wood engraving, which technique permitted printers to put text and illustrations on the same page.
Page 319.
The eighteenth to twentieth centuries comprised the ‘Golden Age’ of the newspaper proper, however, often the most read item in any nation. … Bringing the world’s events immediately to their readers’ dining table, these could make and break governments, wielding enormous political power as they daily influenced tens of millions throughout Europe.
Page 320.
Newspapers and weeklies had not been designed to be read quickly. Indeed, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers had more time to devote to such ephemera. There were no large, bold headlines to grab the reader’s attention: the attention was already there. Articles could therefore be argued in detail with a wealth of supporting evidence and claimed several columns, even pages. Journalists appealed to reason, not emotion and in return the average reader deliberately and slowly thought through what she or he was reading.
Page 320.
By the mid-nineteenth century most developed nations no longer held the written word to be an elitist accessory, but an integral part of one’s daily existence.
Page 321.
Isolated objects no longer monopolized reading. Everywhere one looked it seemed there was something to read.
Page 322.
New literary subgenres emerged. The novel, for example, further branched into the criminal novel, the science fiction novel, the horror novel and several others, each responding to a changing society.
Page 322.
The nineteenth century also heralded the emergence of children’s literature as a separate commercial market.
Page 322.
Immediate relationship was now perceived to exist between author and audience.
Page 322.
By this time reading also comprised an elemental part of what it meant to grow up in Western society. Many children’s most intimate and memorable experiences came not from events but from books.
Page 323.
As few Russians read, the larger audiences for the masterworks of Gogol, Lermontov, Pushkin and Turgenev actually lay outside Russia.
Page 325.
In 1865 the French scientists Marc Dax and Paul Broca demonstrated, for example, that most people are born with a left cerebral hemisphere ‘predisposed’ for encoding and decoding language. … In other words, all of us are born with the ability to understand language and to speak, but this innate ability must be ‘jump-started’ by direct exposure.
Page 325.
Every society is potentially capable of reading even before it knows what reading actually is. Just as every child is born with the potential to read, even before that child experiences reading for the first time.
Page 326.
At first, most preliterate generally mistrusted and misunderstood foreigners’ writing. The very concept of putting human speech into graphic signs had first to be integrated into the local oral domain in order to win legitimization.
Page 327.
With the borrowing of the Latin alphabet, ancient oral traditions and their accompanying paraphernalia, which had still attended the local reproduction or imitation, were discarded wholesale for the genres, formats, styles, values and ethos conveyed by the West’s Latin alphabet.
Page 328.
Religious law dictated that lines form the Qur’an were not to be altered or tampered with in any way, even to simplify reading for children. Of course, this has greatly impeded the process of teaching children how to read in most Islamic regions, where illiteracy has generally remained high. (Developed Islamic nations have since adopted Western pedagogical practices, using texts other than the Qur’an.)
Page 328.
The chief means of communication with the world beyond one’s town before the First World War (1914-1918) remained the periodical: the newspaper or magazine.
Page 330.
In the West the 1930s became the great age of the paperbacks. The first ten Penguin Books were published in London in 1935.
Page 333.
Today’s public readings are held for the same reasons that concerned Pliny the Younger: to generate a market for one’s book, to achieve and maintain an author’s celebrity, and to foster reading and publishing in general.
Page 334.
The Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition ceased publishing its Index of prohibited books in 1966, rightly judging censorship by the Roman Catholic Church to be a social anachronism.
Page 335.
The main target of twentieth-century censorship … was political writing.
Page 335.
Communist countries censored capitalist reading; capitalist countries censored communist reading, though with less (obvious) vindictiveness.
Page 336.
Paradoxically … the liberalization of reading in Eastern Europe has caused its concomitant devaluation, as the uncensored book, no longer cherished contraband, is now a commonplace.
Page 336.
Throughout literate history, dictatorial regimes have always believed that restricting reading and destroying books will gain power and win time, that nullifying history will create a new destiny. But each campaign has failed, for the regime was only targeting itself. An enlightened society appreciates that true strength lies in individual freedom, of which uncensored reading is the first expression.
Page 336.
By the mid-nineteenth century in most developed countries the ability to read had become an expecting thing, its lack a social stigma. By the end of the twentieth century, however, citizens of developed nations could no longer even function in their respective society without an ability to read. By this time, illiteracy was worse than a physical handicap: it was internal exile. Reading had become our union card to humanity.
Page 337.
What makes the novel, at present the world’s bestselling literary category, so appealing in every country is that it combines the power of prose with the excitement of drama.
Page 337.
Reading is actually the main occupation of white-collar workers, and these finally outnumbered blue-collar workers in developed countries by the last decade of the twentieth century.
Pages 337-338.
Publishers’ time-honoured strategy of allowing the one bestseller to finance nine other works of merit almost wholly vanished in the 1970s: as a rule, only the one ‘sure winner’ now found a publisher.
Page 338.
As a result of the new global marketing strategy, the largest circulation for the smallest list, a disquieting homogenization of world literature has occurred.
Page 339.
In the past, communication was slow, faulty, limited and dear. Now it is instant, mostly reliable, unlimited and cheap. It is also drowning us in information.
Page 341.
Multiplication, diversification, proliferation and acceleration of written matter characterize the present ‘information pandemic’. And as it is a reading-based phenomenon, reading-based strategies comprise the present response.
Page 343.
The bookstore as a human experience is currently our planet’s perceived ideal for the macro-accessing of printed information. (Public libraries have begun copying this new strategy.)
Page 343.
Many people today perceive the bookstore to be a place not only of refuge and solace, but also of personal discovery and growth. For many, it is what the local church used to be.
Page 343.
Globalization has progressively meant fewer titles from fewer countries: most recently, English-language ‘supersellers’. Society’s present dynamic indicates the end of ethnic and linguistic diversity and the beginning of the global monoculture, not only in reading but in most facets of daily life.
Pages 344-345.
Devotional and ritualistic reading (the Bible, Qur’an, Torah, Vedas and other sacred writings) is flourishing as never before.
Page 347.
Some peoples - most Africans, many Central and south Americans, Pacific Islanders, Aborigines, Inuit and others - still need to develop such a culture, whereby learning through reading becomes a personal need as urgent as breath. For literacy is, above all, ‘an enabling factor, permitting large-scale organization, the critical accumulation, storage and retrieval of knowledge, the systematic use of logic, the pursuit of science and the elaboration of the arts’. Those missing the need to read ignore its many strengths … and so lose their place in the race.
Page 347.
There are always religious readers demanding only scripture be read, factual readers demanding only non-fiction be read, and even non-readers demanding nothing be read. In their own way each attempts to limit reading and, in so doing, halt society’s advance.
Page 347.
Religious texts were the primary reading of most people in the West up to the end of the nineteenth century when, as a result of the introduction of general education, secular literature began to predominate. Now devotional reading is rebounding, because of a reawakened religiosity, booming Third World literacy, the availability of inexpensive printed scriptures and other factors.
Page 348.
The phenomenon … results from a want of proper education and mature discernment. … Finding audiences of tens of millions, these fundamentalist writings now hold an implicit threat to civilization, for they undermine our hard-won processes of knowledge.
Page 349.
Perhaps Islamic countries’ greatest impediment to intellectual emancipation and international connection is that most reading there still involves the Qur’an. Though a spiritual comfort and society cement, the Qur’an has become a developmental handicap for these peoples.
Page 350.
Translating is a unique mutation of the written word. One can convey the general sense of an original text, but never its uniqueness or ethnic essence.
Page 350.
Because of simple economics publishers judge a book proposal according to its potential circulation appeal.
Page 351.
As food is with the body, so is reading with the mind. We become what we read.
Page 352.
More than a person usually appreciates, reading is egalitarian and principled, appealing to some higher order of the social woman and man.
Page 353.
Conventional books will endure for centuries. They will always be collector’s items, their bindings cherished work of art, their physical unity a timeless ‘seal’ of quality and tradition. Like Sumer’s clay tablets, physical books will continue to make writing tangible and present in a way no electronic text can ever do.
Pages 360-361.
Today’s society measures a child’s progress primarily in reading ability. Reading therefore comprises not only the main focus of educational research, but the very foundation of the school curriculum.
Page 361.
There is no prime age for learning to read, nor exact criteria for measuring a child’s ‘readiness’.
Page 362.
A child first learning to read should command several linguistic skills, such as sound discrimination, an incipient fluency and ability to talk about language and to follow instructions.
Page 362.
Children are no longer told how to read, but, using an active approach, shown ow to unlock the meaning of an unfamiliar word or phrase for themselves.
Page 362.
Since the early 1800s educators have generally stressed either the one or the other of the two main pedagogical approaches: phonics or whole word.
Page 363.
Reading strategies are constantly being altered and adapted. Because of this, reading actually encompasses at once a multitude of different processes and activities. Each situation, and our personal attitude towards this situation, will determine which reading strategy we consciously or unconsciously choose.
Page 365.
Expert readers normally see whole words and even entire phrases instantaneously as conceptual units of ‘word pictures’.
Page 365.
English happens to be the most difficult European language in which to learn to read. Though children normally master literacy’s basics in one year, British children require two and a half.
Page 365.
It is one of history’s ironies that the world’s most important language at present is also one of the most difficult not only in which to learn how to read, but also to learn to read. This very difficulty has more English readers being diagnosed as dyslexic than anyone else.
Page 366.
Some of the most helpful insights into processing reading have come form those who have suffered brain damage and those who are dyslexic.
Page 369.
Words correctly read but incorrectly spelt are those like ‘egg,’ ‘light,’ ‘train’ and ‘school’; that is, words whose spelling is unpredictable on the basis of pronunciation. Words correctly spelt but incorrectly read are those like ‘leg,’ ‘burn’, ‘mat,’ ‘pat’ - phonographically regular words that are too short to contain visually salient pronunciation clues.
Page 371.
Many people who spell excellently read only poorly, while many who read excellently spell poorly. This is because these processes involve different learning strategies in the human brain.
Page 372.
‘Unnecessary’ letters of written language are almost always necessary. Proponents of spelling reforms tend to ignore this basic characteristic of reading: that it is sight-based, not sound-based.
Page 373.
Writing is so recent a human acquisition that, unlike the focal organs for speech, for example the st5ructures of the eye and hand do not appear to be biologically adapted. We have taken in writing, and put out writing, with no alteration to our species.
Page 374.
All readers frequently miss typographic errors. Such routine phenomena evidence a higher order of cerebral activity transcending the mere linking of individual signs.
Page 375.
The skilled reader of an alphabetic text reads not by sequencing the individual letters, but by sequencing the much larger conceptual units: entire words and phrases.
Page 376.
Reading empowers humankind in often unsuspected ways. Reading memory, a sort of cerebral filing system, helps many people, for example to retain and organize knowledge. The ability is encouraged by all Western-style educational systems. Earlier, the aurally talented - those who could remember well by hearing - were society’s most favoured. Since the introduction of writing, however, visual learners have increasingly been advantaged over aural learners.
Page 378.
Globalization will homogenize the written word into meaninglessness.
Page 379.
One of the advantages of the Latin alphabet is its unparalleled compactness. Its sheer simplicity lends it a flexibility and strength that will ensure survival and encourage sustained growth.
Page 379.
Today, the Latin alphabet is not only Earth’s most important writing system: it is the principal medium, in the English language, of the planet’s most contentious and significant event - globalization. With the Net, the Latin alphabet is already global communication’s lifeblood. Soon it will be reading incarnate.
Page 380.
Literacy is everywhere on the increase, promising no end to reading. … New readers will open new markets, generate local employment, increase buying power and global spending in general, enabling greater universal affluence and, most importantly, awareness. The entire world will be a richer place … literally.
Page 381.
Those who have read widely and wisely, who command the written word and thus their language and culture, as a rule enjoy their society’s greatest esteem.
Page 381.
There has always been only one ‘end’ of reading: Knowledge.
Page 381.
Fictional reading is actually nothing like day-dreaming, because it is the wilful and focused suspension of disbelief.
Page 382.
The act of categorization contradicts readings’ very purpose: to channel life itself.
Page 383.
The wonder in reading is that the writer is never in control.
Page 383.
A written text lives its own life, f rom century to century and millennium to millennium, discovered or rediscovered for what it says differently to each changed society and each changed individual. No reading is ever definitive, as a reader reinvents herself or himself with each reading.
Page 383.
Focused information management alone leads reading to its ultimate end: knowledge. Information that does not serve knowledge is sand on the shore.
Page 384.
The electronic revolution is first and foremost a reading revolution.
Page 384.