About this item
Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated Do you worry that youve lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, youre not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the days news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the worlds great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multitasked. Print-era doctors even forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions. The evidence that books are dying proves even scarcer. In encounters with librarians, booksellers and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Price offers fresh hope to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike.Winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, 2020
About the Author
Leah Price is Professor of English and Chair of the History & Literature program at Harvard University. She teaches the novel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, narrative theory, gender studies, and the history of books and reading. Price is Humanities Director at the Radcliffe Institute; she also co-directs the faculty seminar on the History of the Book at the Harvard Humanities Center. In 2006 Price was awarded a chair in recognition of exceptional graduate and undergraduate teaching.Price's books include The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel and (co-edited with Pamela Thurschwell) Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture; she has also edited (with Seth Lerer) a special issue of PMLA on The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature. She writes on old and new media for the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, and the Boston Globe. Unpacking my Library: Writers and their Books is just out from Yale University Press; How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain is forthcoming from Princeton in spring 2012. Price is at work on a new book, The Book that Never Was: How Idealizing the Printed Past is Distorting Our Digital Future.
