Description
Book SynopsisBased on a survey of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics.
Trade Review"Sherman's work is indispensable, offering and demanding a complete revision of standard notions of reading in favor of a much more capacious concept of the 'use' of books before the modern era. . . . An essential book." * Stephen Orgel *
"Learned and lively. . . . The first comprehensive account of the ways of readers in the last age when books held, or seemed to hold, the answers to all of the most profound questions." * Anthony Grafton,
Bookforum *
"A very fine collection of essays that will prove invaluable to scholars, librarians, and book collectors. . . . This book can be read for pleasure, but it is primarily a learned, thoughtful, and theoretically adept examination of the evidence of reading and readers found in surviving English books of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries." *
American Historical Review *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Preface
PART I. OF MARKS AND METHODS
Chapter 1. Introduction: Used Books
Chapter 2. Toward a History of the Manicule
Chapter 3. Reading the Matriarchive
PART II. READING AND RELIGION
Chapter 4. "The Book thus put in every vulgar hand": Marking the Bible
Chapter 5. An Uncommon Book of Common Prayer
PART III. REMARKABLE READERS
Chapter 6. John Dee's Columbian Encounter
Chapter 7. Sir Julius Caesar's Search Engine
PART IV. RENAISSANCE READERS AND MODERN COLLECTORS
Chapter 8. Dirty Books? Attitudes Toward Readers' Marks
Afterword: The Future of Past Readers
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
