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How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

By turns patient and polemical, both deeply researched and light on its feet, this book mounts a sustained challenge to literary-historical conventional wisdom and business as usual. Working at the crossroads of book history and textual interpretation, Leah Price begins with a basic, indisputable fact--books are physical objects--and asks: so what? (I must add that Price restricts this statement to the nineteenth century and is quick to address the contemporary resonances of her historical project.) Showing just how much weight the materiality of printed matter was made to carry in Victorian Britain, Price anatomizes the meanings that were ascribed to the things people did with books other than reading them. This wideranging analysis is fascinating in its own right, but in making it, Price also throws down a gauntlet. Calling for more scholarly attention to "the wide range of nontextual . . . uses to which the book is put" (20), she aims to dislodge "the primacy of reading itself" (21) in current book history and literary criticism alike.