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"Anxieties about the fate of reading in the digital age reveal how deeply our views of the moral and intellectual benefits of reading are tied to print. These views take root in a conception of reading as an immersive activity, exemplified by the experience of "losing oneself in a book." Against the backdrop of digital distraction and fragmentation, such immersion leads readers to become more focused, collected, and empathetic. How did we come to see the printed book as especially suited to deliver this experience? Print-based reading practices have historically included a wide range of modes, not least the disjointed scanning we associate today with electronic text. In the context of religious practice, literacy's benefits were presumed to lie in such random-access retrieval, facilitated by indexical tools like the numbering of Biblical chapters and verses. It was this didactic, hunt-and-peck reading that bound readers to communities. Exploring key evolutions in print in 17th- and 18th-century France, from typeface, print runs, and format to editorial organization and punctuation, this book argues that typographic developments upholding the transparency of the printed medium were decisive for the ascendancy of immersive reading as a dominant paradigm that shaped modern perspectives on reading and literacy"--
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Benefits of Reading
1. Typeface: Disappearing Letters from the
Romain du Roi>
2. Print Runs: Tender Maps in the Marketplace
3. Format: Appropriations of the Book
4. Editorial Labors: The Typography of Intimate Texts
5. Punctuation Marks: Bringing Speech to Life on the Printed Page
Conclusion: Hybridity and Text Technologies
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Geoffrey Turnovsky is Associate Professor of French at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of
The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (2011).
