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<i>Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books</i> (review)

2009; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/scp.0.0059

1710-1166

Willis Goth Regier,

Library Science and Administration

Reviewed by: Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books Willis Regier (bio) Margaret Willes. Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. xvi, 295. Cloth: ISBN-13 978-0-300-12729-4, US$30.00. Margaret Willes ‘sets out to examine how people bought and acquired books over the past five hundred years, thus combining two of my favourite activities, shopping and reading’ (xi). With an engaging tone and brisk pace, Reading Matters addresses readers just embarking on the history of books and book collecting. Many books already compete for that readership, but few are as enthusiastic and well illustrated. It is superbly printed, well indexed, and heavily illustrated, with eighty-three black-and-white images and seven colour plates. Reading Matters is primarily a book for book collectors. Its attention to libraries features a few private libraries, and its discussion of publishing covers familiar ground. Willes takes little for granted, assuming that her readers need a definition of ‘incunabula,’ a summary of Richardson’s Pamela, and a colour reproduction of a poster for the 1994 Cheltenham Festival of Literature. Five hundred years is a very long period to cover, and existing scholarship on the topics Willes touches – reading, printing, publishing, libraries, licensing, literacy, censorship, bookshops, book clubs, book prizes, and best sellers – is already massive. Willes confines her research to books bought and sold in England (with brief looks at the United States and Ireland) and concentrates on a few case studies: Bess of Hardwick (sixteenth century), Samuel Pepys (seventeenth century), the Booth family of Cheshire and the four libraries of Thomas Jefferson (eighteenth century), Sir John Soane and Charles Winn (nineteenth century), and Edna and Denis Healey (twentieth century). These are not necessarily the most representative or the most revealing cases she could have chosen, but they do allow her frequent excursions into whatever strikes her interest. [End Page 446] Willes likes digressions. Because Charles Winn owned two books by Thomas Gent, a Yorkshire antiquary, Willes gives us Gent’s biography. Her final chapter begins with the family history of Lord Denis Healey, the reason for whose inclusion seems to be solely that his long life allows Willes to summarize British publishing in the twentieth century. From a list of books recommended by Thomas Jefferson she selects Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind and adds, ‘Reid, appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1764, had been shocked by David Hume’s argument that human beings needed to be guided through a reality that is ultimately unknowable. As Benjamin Disraeli put it a century later, “Few ideas are correct ones, and which they are none can tell, but with words we govern men.” Reid thought that this was nonsense, and what was needed was common sense’ (94) – as if Reid were thinking of Disraeli. Willes then returns to Jefferson and supposes that he ‘probably’ took from Reid ‘the idea of self-evident truths.’ ‘Probably,’ ‘possibly,’ ‘presumably,’ and ‘could have’ get a workout in Reading Matters. Scholars will find Reading Matters of modest use. Its attention to prior scholarship is loyal to books, almost entirely ignoring research journals. Its annotation is sparse: whole pages of information are provided without source or citation. Because it speeds across the centuries, its coverage is sometimes thin, spotty, or misinformed. It mentions Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer as one of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly novels (166). It says that John Bell ‘refused to join the conger of publishers’ who financed the volumes of English poetry prefaced by Samuel Johnson’s Lives (206); in fact, the ‘conger’ combined to compete against Bell, who had a substantial head start. The choice of details is sometimes quaint. Why do we need to know that Squire Blundell ‘bought a periwig in the Exchange Coffee-house in 1707’ (72)? Why itemize the ‘many ways Charles Winn does not qualify for [Isaac] D’Israeli’s definition of a bibliomane’ (190–1)? Willes mentions ‘the rather doubtful publisher Thomas Tegg’ (208) without informing us who he was or why he was doubtful. For that information readers must refer to Richard Altick’s The English Common...