The Influence of Reading
Rituals on the Evolution of the
Book from the 1400s to the
Present Day
Naomi Donovan
Advances in publishing, particularly developments to the
printing press, have strongly influenced the physical appearance
of books. Yet the importance of individual and collective
reading rituals in shaping the content and appearance of books
should not be understated. Therefore, this article provides a
chronological outline of reader-influenced developments
affecting the evolution of the book from the 1400s to the
present day and suggests how each change provided a steppingstone towards present day formats. These points along the
evolutionary timeline of the book include the first portable book
formats, marginalia, and the substantial influence of the
commonplace book, a type of notebook for recording an
individual’s reading habits and ideas. The most recent
development, the invention of the e-book, establishes a crucial
new stage on this timeline.
Such an analysis of historical reading behaviours
provides an insight into the patterns of reader behaviour over
time. Matthew Brown in The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals
and Book Culture in Early New England suggests that the
commonplace book supported a popular ‘discontinuous
consultation’ style of reading involving habitually alternating
between books in contrast to a solely linear, cover-to-cover
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approach. 1 However, as the novel became increasingly popular
during the eighteenth century, there was a decline in popularity
of the ritual use of commonplace books and the discontinuous
style of reading. This was perhaps due to the unbroken narrative
of many novels, which lend themselves to a linear reading
approach. This article suggests that the recent revival of specific
reading rituals and methods of reading points to a resurgence in
the popularity of discontinuous consultation. Furthermore, it
explains how readers are facilitated in this reading style through
new technologies such as the e-reader, where the rapid
consultation of a variety of texts and associated annotating
practices may now be realised within a single format. The
commonplace book fulfilled some of the same functions for
readers of the past and could therefore be seen as an early
forerunner of the e-reader. These new and revived reading
rituals combine to expedite the reader’s agency over the books
they read as well as the evolution of new texts and formats.
There are difficulties in constructing such analyses and
predictions about reading habits since reading is an area often
overlooked for serious analysis. Readers are more inclined to
study what they read than the process of reading itself since,
once learnt, the activity seems so natural, as David Allan
explains '[t]he resulting suspicion that reading, because it soon
feels intuitive, is also essentially straightforward, has meant that
attempts to probe its character and to identify its manifold
implications can more readily be dismissed as otiose.’ 2 However,
reading is a valuable, multi-layered experience and many
scholars, such as Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading and
Allan in Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England have
already successfully expanded our knowledge of the topic. It is
through their analyses and the following analysis, which begins
early in the life of the printed book, that the importance of
current and future reading habits and experiences can be better
understood.
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Accessibility to the Masses
The widespread availability of books enjoyed by readers today
was enabled by a technological advance: the production of the
first book using movable type between 1450 and 1455, a bible,
by Johannes Gutenberg. Gutenberg’s invention enabled multiple
copies of a book to be produced quickly and economically by
printers and thus affordably purchased by readers. This event set
into motion a fast dissemination of centres of print and printed
books across Europe. 3 It also enabled readers to take greater
ownership over the printed book for personal use and develop
individual and collective reading rituals.
The profusion of books produced through the
invention of movable type were manufactured according to
publishing design principles still in use today. Such principles
were first developed by reference to common reading
approaches and are still in use, although not followed as closely,
in twenty-first century books. These canons of page
construction have provided a paradigm for the manufacture of
books at least since Gutenberg’s bible and incorporate ancient
ideals of proportion such as the ‘Golden Ratio’:
They are proportions which, as the Greeks knew
when they built the Parthenon, are peculiarly easy
on the eye, and were therefore common to
architecture and art. In typesetting, these
proportions work well, because if the line is too
long the eye has difficulty in finding the start of the
next one. 4
These design practices also led to a wider lower margin on most
books. This is present on most physical books, e-books and ereaders and allows for the fact that most readers will hold the
book or device along this margin.
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Other reading rituals established during the 1400s and
still in use today are those that involve the reading of books for
editorial purposes. These readings contributed to the final
appearance and content of a book just as they do today. During
the hand-press era of printing (circa 1450 to the mid 1800s),
compositors arranged each letter of the new movable type, part
of Gutenberg’s printing system, into its correct position for
printing by reading and reference to an earlier edition of a book
or the author’s manuscript. The compositors own spellings and
amendments would often form part of the finished book. Since
it was common for more than one compositor to work on a
book, the variations in spelling and grammar could be numerous
especially between copies. Stop-press corrections also
contributed to this variation within a single text. Although
modern typesetting and editorial methods involve far less
manual work, the care and attention given to each edition of a
book in terms of re-reading and amending remains. However,
with the more refined processes of editorial practices today,
editors and proofreaders read with reference to the house style
of individual publishers and take great care to keep style
consistent and make only necessary changes. In the main,
contemporary readers and publishers seem to consider that
books should be without error: a perfect composition of the
author’s thoughts where mistakes in grammar or layout and
typography should not be tolerated. As a result of this ethos,
some e-readers now have a feature where the reader can
contribute to these ritualised editorial processes by reporting any
editorial errors to the publisher and thus readers are given
increased agency in the publishing process. Many e-book
publishers correct such errors in automatic updates of
purchased e-books rendering each edition of a book less fixed
than in the past.
The Ritual of Marginalia
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Most readers in the 1400s did not have any direct connections
to publishers. However, they did have a certain amount of
agency over their books in that they could annotate the margins
of their personal copies with personalised sentiments and
commentary. Marginalia is a collective Latin term for ‘things in
the margin’ and defines such handwritten markings in the
margins of a book or text; for example, a pointing hand to draw
attention to a particular line of text. This type of reading ritual
has been common from the medieval period onwards. The poet,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an avid annotator of books. It is
known that his friends gave him books to annotate and that he
brought the term ‘marginalia’ into common usage. 5 Peter Beal,
in A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology explains that, as a
result of the collective reading ritual of marginalia, printed books
have long been published to accommodate the practice:
Some books were published with deliberately wide
margins, as well as occasionally blank interleaves,
in anticipation of annotation by readers: for
instance, certain sixteenth-century editions of a
standard legal text, Sir Thomas Littleton's New
Tenures, first published in 1481. 6
The similar development of e-book highlighting and note-taking
functions accommodates modern readers’ ritual interactions
with texts. Nonetheless, handwritten annotation is a reading
ritual still regularly practiced today, particularly in scholarly
reading. Key theorists regard this type of annotation as an
intrinsic part of the reading process. 7 There is undoubtedly a
compelling need for some readers across the centuries to
highlight what is most important to them in a work and link it to
other knowledge.
The development of these types of personal, ritual
interactions with books that are intrinsic today were shaped by
the development of the book into smaller, more portable
formats. This allowed readers to carry their own handwritten
ideas in the form of marginalia, for example, and the printed
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ideas of others with them and undertake their reading rituals
wherever they were. Beginning in 1501, the Italian humanist,
Aldus Manutius, responded to reader demands by printing
editions of classic texts by Greek and Latin philosophers and
poets such as Aristotle, Plato, Virgil and Horace but in smaller
formats than they had been printed previously:
As private libraries grew, readers began to find
large volumes not only difficult to handle and
uncomfortable to carry, but inconvenient to store.
In 1501, confident in the success of his first
editions, Aldus responded to readers’ demands and
brought out a series of pocket-sized books in
octavo - half the size of quarto-elegantly printed
and meticulously edited. 8
Even as movable type printing and smaller formats became
widespread, handmade books retained their high status and
printers took advantage of this market. They produced
incunabula with a manuscript appearance and imposing quarto
tomes of Gutenberg’s bible for display purposes, which
mimicked handmade volumes. 9
A similar situation can be observed with the parallel
adoption of the e-reader alongside the printed book; the ereader, with its new technology, has not superseded the printed
book in the readers’ affections but instead runs alongside it and
in many ways mimics its features. In this case, however, the
printed book is still firmly in widespread, practical use and this
reinforces the power of the emotionally infused reading ritual.
Moreover, the octavo format utilised by Manutius is still
produced by many publishers and when combined with a cover
or case, an e-reader such as the Kindle Voyage is roughly the
same size as foolscap octavo format proving the early design
dimensions of books are still extremely usable.
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Two Distinct Reading Styles Emerge
By 1500, a successful publishing infrastructure utilising the
design and editorial principles already mentioned was well
established across Europe with Venice as its capital. 10 Two
distinct styles of reading began to develop amongst readers,
namely discontinuous consultation and linear reading as
described by Matthew Brown in The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading
Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England. 11 The two styles of
reading that Brown describes were also practiced throughout
Europe and would go on to influence the type of books
published. Laura Henigman succinctly describes the metaphor
Brown uses to describe these two distinct styles of reading:
The metaphor of the pilgrim is a central one for
the Christian life and for one way of reading: the
pilgrim travels from one point to another, with a
destination; the reader starts at the beginning and
moves through to the end of the book, as in some
forms of devotional Bible reading. But early New
Englanders also approached their books as “bees,”
[…] just as the bee hovers over a flowerbed,
moving among flowers and alighting on them in
no particular order, early New England readers
buzzed around their books, reading intensively
rather than extensively. 12
During the period of intensive and varied reading described,
reading rituals and the reading accoutrements that were
produced reflected this preferred method of reading. For
example, the bookwheel of the sixteenth century was a device
that held large, heavy books such as folios and enabled readers
to alternate between the open pages of several books while
seated.
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Out of the two reading styles described by Brown, that
of discontinuous consultation gained widespread popularity and
handwritten books known as commonplace books evolved to
support this style of reading. Their use as an extended reading
tool was a common ritualised process of the Renaissance up
until the end of the Georgian period. The following definition
of the commonplace book hints at the variety of information
contained within them and its organisation:
A commonplace book in its original form is a
manuscript book in which quotations or passages
from reading matter, precepts, proverbs and
aphorisms, useful rhetorical figures or exemplary
phrasing, words and ideas, or other notes and
memoranda are entered for ready reference under
general subject headings, these headings often
having been systematically written in advance of
the main entries. 13
Thus, the material gathered was typically arranged in a
methodical rather than a desultory manner. Since headings were
often written in advance, the ritual of reading became an
instrument for the cataloguing of specific ideas.
The Commonplace Book Evolves into Printed Format
The extended period of use of the commonplace book
eventually saw its evolution from handwritten reading tool to
printed book and consequently the author’s collection of ideas
could capture a wider audience. The use of commonplace books
informed the arrangement of material in printed books such as
Theatrum Naturae (Theatre of Nature) published in 1596 by
French philosopher, Jean Bodin. In this example, one main
argument is forgone and instead a myriad of ideas, which are
sometimes contradictory, are presented. 14 Later books
continued to draw on the commonplacing ritual including The
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Lounger’s Commonplace Book (1792); a collection of anecdotes
about the newspaper The Lounger (1785-7). 15
This classification of a broad range of existing ideas in
the commonplace book, in handwritten and then printed
format, functioned as an early information retrieval source; a
rudimentary precursor to more systematised, later mechanised,
and ultimately digitised processes. 16 These new digitised
processes include those involved in the operation of the e-book
and e-reader. The e-reader, with its functionality as a reading
record and reading notebook is analogous to the commonplace
book, which was also regularly used for these purposes. Readers
today have a streamlined method by which they can continue
the ritual of discontinuous consultation, by flicking between or
selecting pages of various books arranged on their virtual
bookshelves within an e-reading device or mobile application,
recording unfamiliar vocabulary, and searching for specific
words or phrases of interest.
The Commonplace Book Falls out of Favour
The long eighteenth century was a crucial turning point in the
evolution of the commonplace book and the discontinuous
consultation style of reading. The arrival of the Enlightenment
movement during this period resulted in a move towards
empirical thought and experimental philosophy and away from
seemingly less reliable means of gathering and establishing
knowledge such as the commonplace book. Roy Porter, building
his case for an ‘English Enlightenment’ explains how scientists
such as Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke were at the forefront
of such experimental scientific inquiry. 17 Porter suggests that the
growing array of science apparatus ‘[…] were the auxiliaries of a
new science which was not about vain and vaporous
lucubrations but the busy, hands-on probing of Nature.’ 18
Perhaps, in terms of scientific inquiry, the commonplace book
was too far removed from this new practical means of inquiry to
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retain its ritual usage. In other non-scientific areas, the growing
popularity of the novel, which signalled a return to a more linear
style of reading, may have also contributed to the decline in
popularity of the commonplace book.
Ironically, it was John Locke, a pioneer of the
Enlightenment movement who wrote the last printed
commonplace book. However, the legacy of the commonplace
book remained in registers such as those by Hooke called
‘matters of fact’ in which facts were recorded for rhetorical
purposes. 19 This progression towards more socially focused
commonplacing rituals was evident in the Royal Society in
London during the second half of the seventeenth century and
is described by Adrian Johns in Reading, Society and Politics in Early
Modern England:
Their kind of recording would therefore be an
aspect of social civility in action. Much more than
the commonplacing of a Bodin, it would record
the existence and character of learned conversation
[…] It is concerned not with the private act of
reading but with reading as a social gesture— and
one taking place not in a pulpit or coffee house but
amid a group of educated, privileged and (here, at
least) sober gentlemen. Sometimes this means
reading aloud to that group; on other occasions it
means an act carried out alone, but with an eye to
displaying its consequences to the group on a
regular weekly basis. In either case, social reading
of this kind was a formal, even ceremonial, act. 20
Today, social reading has developed further still, via digital
mediums including the e-reader, readers may choose to share
their reading collection with others, build ‘wish lists’ of books,
review books online and view what other readers have
highlighted as significant to them within a text.
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One consequence of new social reading rituals as seen
in the Royal Society and amongst the public in general was that
they led to a greater number of people collecting and sharing
books. Most readers seemingly prefer to ritualistically retain and
collect books rather than discarding them after one reading.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this practice of
retaining books for further readings or display led to the
creation of books advising readers how to establish a personal
library and recommending specific books to furnish it with. 21
Thus, books rarely exist in a singular sense but more often
collectively with others. It has already been discussed that a
desire for more portable books and their convenient storage led
to the popularity of smaller book formats. The practice of
forming a personal library and creating a collection of books in a
domestic setting would have further necessitated the use of
smaller formats. The aesthetic value of a book also forms a part
of the reading process since the appearance and feel of a book
may influence our perception of the text. In addition, the
reading and collection of books displayed both the wealth and
the intelligence of the aristocracy. 22 In Laurence Sterne’s A
Sentimental Journey, first published in 1768, the Count de B****
carries his books on his person as well as displaying them in his
library in an attempt to demonstrate his intellectual superiority:
‘The Count instantly put the Shakespear [sic] into his pocket—
and left me alone in his room.’ 23
From the 1750s onwards, those who could not afford
their own books or who wanted to expand their reading, had
more opportunities for borrowing books. People began to
privately read more religious books and the borrowing of books
increased with the creation of book clubs, subscription libraries,
and the opening of cathedral and chapel libraries although there
is still some confusion about how many of these borrowing
practices became popular. 24 The gifting of books in even the
most subdued of circumstances has also been a common ritual
affecting the type of books produced. In particular, during the
eighteenth century, religious devotional handbooks were often
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produced in the smaller octavo format as they served as a
convenient gift for mourners at funerals. Sharing books has led
to changes in the evolution of the book and the contexts in
which books are stored and used. For example, BookCrossing is
the contemporary practice of leaving a book in a public place for
another person to find and read and it has been both praised
and criticised. Some annotation derives from sharing practices
and can tell us a lot about the history of such books, for
example signatures of provenance on pastedowns or library
stamps and markings. The re-reading, sharing, and display of
books to others has been made far easier with digital
developments. Whether collections of books are physical ones
on a shelf or electronic ones on a virtual bookshelf, habits of
reading are often visible in such collections.
Reading Aloud
Despite the constant development of new reading practices such
as the borrowing of books, these rituals were not as inclusive
during the eighteenth century as they are today. For example,
the ritual of reading aloud appeared unfamiliar to some African
American slaves and their frustration was expressed by some
authors through the trope of the talking book, common in
African American writing at this time. The image of witnessing
somebody reading aloud and being confused about what is
taking place is described by Olaudah Equiano in his The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African first published in 1789:
I had often seen my master and Dick employed in
reading; and I had a great curiosity to talk to the
books, as I thought they did; and so to learn how
all things had a beginning: for that purpose I have
often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and
then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it
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would answer me; and I have been very much
concerned when I found it remained silent. 25
In this way, Equiano makes a link between an observed ritual
and a published product that is inaccessible to the subservient
population.
Although reading and reading aloud was not accessible
to all, the evolution of the printed book did not usurp the oral
tradition and ritual of reading aloud as frequently performed by
clergymen from their pulpits, rather it enhanced it. In fact,
reading aloud in private and public settings formed part of the
momentum that turned reading from a largely private activity or
an activity for the upper classes and clergy alone into a social
activity for leisure and entertainment in a domestic setting.
Reading became an everyday activity for some and their reading
habits could influence the creation of completely new genres.
The popularity of the novel from the eighteenth century
onwards and the rise of the subjective literary voice must have
encouraged rituals such as reading aloud for pleasure and
entertainment.
Jane Austen tested the reception of her novels by reading them
aloud to family and friends. 26 Indeed, the reading of books and
the reading of books aloud was a common topic in her novels.
We see reading and its rituals filling the lives of the characters in
Austen’s novels where all levels of reader and various reading
rituals can be observed. In Mansfield Park (1814), Henry
Crawford is commended for his reading of extracts from
Shakespeare’s Henry VIII to a group including the protagonist,
Fanny Price. The following extract demonstrates how good
reading could be used as a form of social currency:
[…] she was forced to listen; his reading was
capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme.
To good reading, however, she had been long
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used: her uncle read well, her cousins all, Edmund
very well, but in Mr Crawford’s reading there was a
variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met
with. 27
The public’s love of the novel and the popularity of reading
aloud, which enabled readers to capture all the nuances of its
dialogue and narrative, has today evolved into audio books and
audio subscriptions on e-readers such as the Kindle Fire.
The continued popularity of the novel and its
widespread availability has inspired many more readers to not
only read for pleasure but also with the goal of writing their own
prose. Alberto Manguel dedicates a whole chapter entitled ‘The
Author as Reader’ to this topic in his A History of Reading (1996).
A huge selection of guides for the general reader on how to
become a published author has been established due to this
popular aspiration. Many literary agents and publishers
encourage new writers to publish their work via online writing
sites to get feedback and establish a readership. Books can also
emerge from online fan fiction that becomes popular and
attracts the interest of publishers. 28 Therefore, it is sometimes
readers not only authors who are the catalyst for the creation of
new books. Once publication is certain, authors form an
important part of the editorial reading process and have done
since the introduction of the printing press. They use different
reading rituals to fashion their books into publishable entities
and publishers assist in this process: ‘They [authors] are helped
through the creative development of the proposal to match
market and user needs, including filling gaps in the market
[…]’ 29 Post-publication, self-published authors and those
published by the biggest publishing companies can view sales
online easily, therefore, they know what people are reading and
which formats are popular. As a result of this online literary
domain, readers can influence more quickly than ever what an
author will write next and what their next book will look like.
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The E-Book and E-Reader
The e-reader facilitates these close links between authors,
publishers and readers. Undoubtedly, apart from the
introduction of the printing press, one of the most pivotal
moments in the history of the book has been the invention of
the e-book and electronic reading devices. The dislike of readers
for viewing books on phone and computer screens led to the
creation of e-books from their origin as mere copies of printed
books in Portable Document Format (PDF). 30 Subsequently,
e-readers were created as a more convenient format for reading
e-books. One of the most popular brands of e-reader, the
Kindle, was initially launched in the United States in 2007. 31 By
2013, e-book sales were estimated to account for nineteen per
cent of the entire book market. 32 Today, e-readers strive to
incorporate some of the best features of the printed book, for
example, by creating screens that replicate the printed page
using electrophoretic ink. These most recent e-readers combine
many of the reader-influenced developments mentioned in this
overview with facilities to incorporate reading rituals and make
them available in one ultra-portable format with the capacity to
store thousands of e-books. They combine practical design
elements with the ability to annotate or translate parts of an
e-book without cluttering the page and it is these features that
facilitate a return to the discontinuous style of reading, which
was so popular for many centuries. Thus, the commonplace
book has evolved from a handwritten reading tool of the
individual reader to printed commonplace books and ‘matters of
fact’ to be used more communally and finally, after a brief
hiatus, into the e-reader. As mentioned previously, the e-reader
does not preclude other physical formats from running
alongside it. In fact, the e-reader mimics the form of the
traditional book in many ways. E-books can be collected, shared
and annotated like physical books. Yet, due to their diverse
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functionality, the term e-book also stretches the definition of a
book, a term which is becoming more elusive in the digital age. 33
However, for all its positive features, the e-book still
lacks some of things that make the physical book great, such as
the ability to flick quickly and easily through large sections of the
book while becoming familiar with the geography of a text.
Despite the myriad of dropdown lists, note taking, and
highlighting features, even the modern consumer of electronic
goods may still find these functions time-consuming to use.
Information can still be difficult to quickly retrieve in a coherent
form compared to the old fashioned handwritten rituals of
notation and bookmarking and there is no function to allow for
traditional marginalia. The digital format currently works best
for novels and short non-fiction rather than larger reference
works. There is also a lack of highly illustrated e-books since
they are more difficult to transfer into the digital format. 34
Typographical devices such as italics and oversize initial letters
were originally created to help guide readers around a text. 35 It is
possible that these features could be employed more effectively
within today’s e-books.
The reading rituals belonging to the commonplace book
and those synonymous with its suggested contemporary format,
the e-reader, form a basis on which new ideas and theories can
be built, thus allowing books to evolve. Literary scholar, Stephen
Zwicker, further describes how the ritual participation in
activities such as commonplacing generated new literary ideas
on texts:
[…] how intimate the relations between writing
and reading, how implicated in the dynamic of
production was consumption, and not only
because consumption always creates a field of
expectations in which writing is imagined and into
which texts are issued but because the practices of
humanist learning made the work of
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commonplacing and annotation almost second
nature to reading itself. 36
This type of influence can still be observed today, of particular
interest to this article is the ‘field of expectations’ into which
reading and writing rituals are conceived since it is this collective
sense of public expectation that could form the key catalyst by
which reading rituals come to influence the evolution of the
book. This field may be affected by changes or developments in
the literary world or other public arenas such as the arts, science,
politics and even economics. For example, as readers develop a
taste for a new genre or sub-genre, it is assumed that more texts
will follow in that vein. Also, where there is significant political
polarity on an issue of public salience, it is assumed that texts
that support each side will materialise.
The publishing industry must deal with the
consequences of these high reader expectations, which are more
apparent as a result of the Internet. In addition to this, readers
are developing ever-increasing agency as a result of their reading
rituals, which are facilitated by advancing technology. They have
become not just consumers but also quasi-editors, reviewers,
and authors of books. However, for many readers, books are a
luxury purchase and so they are discerning in their choices. For
this reason, book publishing is a high-risk industry with large
outlays in terms of book production costs. 37 Consequently, it is
in publishers’ interests to quickly identify trends and increase
supply accordingly. The arrival of the e-book has helped to
mitigate some of the risk involved since it is cheaper to produce
and distribute an e-book than a printed book. Print-on-demand
publishing has also aided publishers in reducing costs and
keeping quality but less popular titles in circulation. Editors and
publishers’ marketing departments are keenly aware of the
rituals of the reader, which they analyse through market research
and sales figures. This information aids the editor in deciding
the overall appearance and price of each title. 38 Consumer book
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publishing is particularly affected by the rituals of the reader and
therefore must constantly reinvent itself as these evolve. This
may lead to faster evolving formats and add-on services for ebook readers perhaps allowing increasing freedom in
annotation, cataloguing, sharing and collecting for the
application of expanding reading rituals. However, the pace of
change is partly controlled by publishers who must balance their
enthusiasm for new technological developments with the need
to create quality products while still obtaining reasonable profits.
This chronological evaluation of the reading rituals that
have influenced the evolution of the book demonstrates that the
development of new technologies, such as the movable type
printing press and digital technologies, has been instrumental in
enabling new book formats and content to be disseminated
widely and in an economically viable way. However, it is also
clear that the evolution of the book is equally reliant on readers’
responses to texts via reading rituals, which influence book
design, format and content. It is apparent that such rituals do
not tend to change over time although the ways in which readers
may conduct them usually become streamlined and more rapid
thanks to advances in technology. An enduring gravitation
towards particular styles of reading such as discontinuous
consultation can see a resurgence when suitable formats are
produced to accommodate them, such as books produced with
wide margins for annotation, printed commonplace books, and
e-books with their facilities for exploring and annotating texts,
even if these still have some limitations.
Finally, this article has demonstrated that readers value
and make use of the co-existence of formats across centuries.
For example, the co-existence of handmade and printed books
in the 1500s compared with that of physical and e-books today.
Indeed, books and reading experiences are now difficult to
catalogue since the choice and variety of formats on offer are so
great. Consumers of books have become like the librarians and
inquisitors in Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel (1941);
readers are searching the hexagonal galleries, not for the perfect
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book that might unlock the mysteries of a vast array of other,
seemingly nonsensical, books but for the book in its ideal form.
How the plethora of ways in which books are read
today will affect the evolution of the book in the future can only
be guessed at since it is also so much affected by readers
changing interactions with texts and the ‘field of expectations’
alluded to by Zwicker. 39 However, reading rituals seem most apt
to significantly affect the evolution of the book when
technological change combines with new ways of thinking,
changes in literary trends, or changes in wider society. Dramatic
changes in society, for example, in political governance, may
lead people to seek new means of expression and this may
involve broadening or reshaping their reading rituals as
individuals and as groups. In difficult or extreme situations,
reading may be the only way to express the true self and assert
one’s right to individual and independent thought. Reading and
reading rituals are by no means passive acts, they are an active
engagement with texts, authors, other readers, and potentially,
by way of annotation or authorship, with future readers. Every
time we resume our usual reading rituals or decide to change
them and read differently, read aloud, or share and collect books
in new ways, we are subtly influencing the evolution of the
book.
Notes
Matthew Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book
Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 50.
1
David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 5.
2
128
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (London: HarperCollins
Publishers, 1997), pp. 133-35.
3
4 John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution, (London: Bantam Books,
2009) Kindle edn loc. 1957-1964
Peter Beal, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology 14502000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p.
65.<http://www.oxfordreference.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/view/1
0.1093/acref/9780199576128.001.0001/acref9780199576128>[accessed 28th March 2015]
5
6
Ibid., p. 65.
7
Allan, p. 19.
8
Manguel, p. 137.
9
Ibid., p. 135.
10
Man, loc. 2726.
11
Brown, p. 50.
Laura Henigman, 'Reviewed Work: the Pilgrim and the Bee:
Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England by Matthew
P. Brown'. The New England Quarterly, 81 (2008), pp. 148-50
12
13
Beal, p. 20.
Heidi Hackel, Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 246.
14
15
Allan, p. 29.
William Katz and Bill Katz, Cuneiform to Computer: A History of
Reference Sources (London: The Scarecrow Press, 1998), p. 59.
16
Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern
World. (London: Penguin Books, 2001). Kindle edn loc. 28653329.
17
18
Porter, loc. 3211-3216.
129
19
Hackel, pp. 246-47.
20
Ibid., pp. 247-48.
21
Allan, p. 17.
22
Manguel, p. 137.
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) Kindle edn p. 72.
23
24
Allan, p. 13-14.
25 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African. (London: Penguin Books,
2003) Kindle edn p. 68.
John Mullan, ‘Are you Elizabeth Bennet, or her mother?’ The
Guardian Online, 24 November 2007
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/nov/24/janeauste
n> [accessed 28th March 2015]
26
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, (London: Amazon, 2012) Kindle
edn p. 352.
27
28
Giles Clark and Angus Phillips, Inside Book Publishing,
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), Kindle edn loc. 1439.
Giles Clark and Angus Phillips, Inside Book Publishing
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p. 69.
29
30
Clark, Giles and Angus Phillips, 2014, loc. 1472.
31
Ibid., loc. 321.
32
Ibid., loc. 2391.
33
Ibid., loc. 473–84.
34
Ibid., loc. 1495.
Michael Twyman, The British Library Guide to Printing History
and Techniques (London: The British Library, 1998), pp. 30-31.
35
130
36
Hackel, pp. 297-98.
37
Clark and Phillips, 2008, p. 51.
38
Ibid., p. 102.
39
Hackel, pp. 297-98.
131