Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading (review)

One of the consolations for regularly missing the annual conferences on book trade history organized by Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote is the prompt appearance of the proceedings, edited by the same triumvirate, in the Publishing Pathways series — of which Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading is the twenty-fifth and most recent volume to appear. The contents of the current volume move historically from the twelfth to the mid-twentieth century, and range widely and informatively within this generous chronological span. Indeed, the cumulative index to this and all previous volumes, expertly made by Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly and introduced with a brief retrospective by Nicolas Barker, gives a clear sense of the comprehensiveness that has always characterized the series, and a clear measure of the ways in which the present volume maintains that tradition.

The book's first chapter, by Rudolf A. Elliot Lockhart, is furthest away from the periods occupying its others, and in some ways (all fully recognized by its author) also operates at an oblique angle to their concerns. It gives an account of Hugh of St Victor's Didascalicon de studio legendi — a 'handbook on reading as a part of the pursuit of divine Wisdom', as Elliot Lockhart puts it (p. 2). It offers a devotional and methodological link to Steven N. Zwicker's later chapter, on 'tracing readers in early modern England', which interrogates Rosamund Tuve's account of George Herbert's poetry. Tuve's belief in a posited body of knowledge once apparently common but now regretfully unavailable is strongly resisted by Zwicker: 'what', in her phrase, 'every literate man once knew', seems to him to be merely a fiction. Rather, he argues that we ought to emphasize the 'dissonance and difference' in any historicized act of reading, our own included: not only would such a practice make us more 'alert', he urges, but it forcefully makes us 'more suspicious, more resistant, and [...] more deeply historicizing readers of the past, and of the past of reading' (p. 88).

It is useful to have these two more theoretical contributions to balance and frame the local materiality of some others. William H. Sherman's fascinatingly provisional 'Towards a History of the Manicule' names and contextualizes the 'pointing hand' that 'may have been the most common symbol produced both for and by readers in the margins of manuscripts and printed books' from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (p. 19). A printed manicule in the margin of p. 38 delightfully extends this period of use, a typographical joke literally but entirely seriously 'pointing to a passage that someone involved in producing or using the book considered worth noting'. Alan H. Nelson's chapter on 'Shakespeare and the Bibliophiles' gives names and biographies to the owners and readers of individuals who, before 1616, 'owned at least one book by Shakespeare' (p. 49), although the richness of the paper lies partly in its refusal to exclude those who fall just outside this strictly defined category. The conclusion Nelson draws is self-aware and unexpected: that if we are to read Shakespeare's texts as their earliest owners did, then it must be 'as objects of delight, as verbal and dramatic art, as — dare I think it? — English Literature' (p. 70). This is put lightly, but not lightly dismissed, for it offers further historical support for the case made recently by Lukas Erne for Shakespeare as a 'literary dramatist'.

Two chapters — Lucy Peltz on late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century habits of extra-illustration and Stephen Colclough on the role of the manuscript book in the transmission of texts in the first half of the nineteenth century — offer a fascinating contrast. Peltz beautifully shows just how time-bound 'the once enormous popularity of extra-illustration' was (p. 91); Colclough, meanwhile, shows the under-recognized persistence of manuscript...