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Reading Childishly? A Codicology of the Modern Self 7 155 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 Patricia Crain “my BOOK and HEART / shall never part” goes the alphabet rhyme for the letter H in The New England Primer, a crucial late-seventeenth-century literacy manual, in print in the United States through much of the nineteenth century and an object of conservative nostalgia to this day (Figure 7.1). 1 By “book,” the primer rhyme means the Bible, of course, as it exhorts the reader to bind it to her heart. This “book” is a synecdoche for the Bible’s important words, but the book (the Book) as an object has an equal presence in the rhyme and its accompanying image. 2 In another sense, though, by conjoining“book”and“heart,”the rhyme situates the reader’s heart out there, stored in the book, where she must go to find it. These two notions of bookness, as they relate to the codex form, are long-lived: the book as a sacred or quasi-sacred object and the book as a container for something that one must go to the book to acquire in order to fill the heart—or, in a sense, to have a heart at all, to become, that is, a self. These aspects of bookness, suggesting a codicology of the modern self, are rooted in an important movement in the history of print: the emergence of books for children. In the long life of the printed and bound codex form of the book, a kind of revolution occurred in the West, a little before 1800, that brought books, not only like the dourseeming Primer but also like the ones that purvey what we now call “children’s literature,” into the hands of children. 3 While this, of course, had consequences for children, in this chapter, I will be interested in the consequences for the book. The little revolution (for it was also a revolution that found an expanding market in littleness) in publishing had a lasting effect on the cultural 156 PATRICIA CRAIN meaning of the codex form itself. This chapter explores how a format became a value. 4 By 1800, when positioned in the neighborhood of children, book was a byword for virtue: “A good child will do as he is bid; he will soon try to read good books: he need not be afraid when it is dark, for God will take care of him by night as well as by day” (Road to Learning 1803). This commonplace assertion, joining divine supervision with good books, is everywhere in the nineteenth century, often posed negatively, as in Noah Webster’s long-lived“blue-back speller”description of a“bad boy” as one who not only “is undutiful to his father and mother, disobedient and stubborn to his master, and illnatured to all his play fellows” but who also “hates his book, and takes no pleasure in improving himself in any thing” (Webster 1800, 101). As this and other such texts insist, the parting of book and heart leads more or less inevitably, if hyperbolically, to the gallows. The capital B“Book”to which one’s heart was supposed to stick in the opening example, became, during the nineteenth century, the little b“book”and a plural“books.”While reading, especially by women and the young, was ringed round with admonitions of all kinds, books retained a splash of the sacral in the precincts of the lively print marketplace associated with children and, by extension, with the constellation of attributes that children had begun to represent: innocence and imagination, docility and domesticity among them. 5 If hating books opened onto the slippery slope, loving them turned you toward the tower of virtue. Though such ancient allegorical geographies lingered into the nineteenth century, they shared the moral landscape with a new site.The by-now industrialized...

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