How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain alternates between a dense critical unpicking of the ways in which books, reading and writing feature in Victorian fiction and non-fiction, and a strong cultural history of texts, writing and reading in social contexts. The long introductory section offers a detailed study of Victorian novelists' depictions of actions done to or with books, newspapers, or pamphlets. (David Finkelstein
Times Literary Supplement)
Leah Price's point--very cleverly made--is that Victorians did many things with their reading matter other than read it. One of her more striking examples is of fashionable ladies selecting a book to carry on the basis that its binding (silk-board, preferably, never calf) would match their dress that day. . . . Price is very entertaining on men's use of newspapers to create little zones of domestic, noli-me-tangere privacy. . . . Price asks extraordinarily good questions with wider import [and] has uncommonly brilliant things to say about the things Victorians did with their bookish things. (John Sutherland
Literary Review)
Price's work perches at the leading edge of a growing body of investigations into the history of reading. (
Chronicle of Higher Education)
[H]ighly enjoyable, well researched and referenced. (Julia Peakman
History Today)
Leah Price has challenged every book historian, librarian, and reader of secular or spiritual scripture to think through the object we fondle or maul and the ways in which it circulates in whole and in pieces through our home and global economies. . . . [T]here's no doubt in my mind that this is a potent intervention in the study of material culture. No one who cares about books should miss handling and reading it. (Robert L. Patten
Review of English Studies)
If you are a literary scholar or a historian whose turf is Victorian Studies . . . you are probably aware of Price's book already. If not, you should add it to your must-read list. If you are interested more generally in the history of the book and reading, especially in connection with current talk about the state and fate of reading--if, for example, you enjoyed Alan Jacobs'
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction--you should read Price. And if you have noted the revival of 'materialism'--as a creed, so to speak, in which the writer explicitly affirms his or her faith--you will certainly want to get this book. (John Wilson
Books & Culture)
Price's writing is clever and her tone accessible. (Jillian Mandelkern
Library Journal)
[T]ells a compelling 'it-narrative' of its own about the ideological ways in which we handle books and impose them on others. (Valerie Sanders
Times Higher Education)
The printed book, certainly, will always be part of our media environment, although perhaps in unexpected ways. This lends particular interest to
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, by Leah Price, a Harvard English professor. Her study is set in an era when mass production of books had not yet quite eliminated a sense of the book as a peculiar object in its own right, quite apart from its content, or as we say now, the 'text.' The book, Victorian readers knew, had more uses than simply conveying that text. (Philip Marchand
National Post)
Price does an excellent job in explaining the how and why of books during the era by discussing how the readers perceived themselves (men read newspapers to learn world events while women read novels that kept them away from their daily chores), the economical and social status of owning, reading or reciting books and how printed paper was mostly thrown away during the era. (Conny Crisalli
BookPleasures.com)
A most unusual book, one not to be taken lightly. (Frank Shaw
Electric Scotland)
While referencing the works of Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens in particular, Price pays substantial attention to noncommercial, completely disposable popular literature, especially religious tracts. . . . Price makes print's non-reading or un-reading as meaningful as reading. (
Choice)
Sheer originality. (Sarah Murdoch
Toronto Star)
Though rigorously academic, Price's book is also disarmingly humorous, a veritable goldmine of puns and linguistic whimsy. (
Los Angeles Review of Books)
Price casts herself as an ethnographer setting out to discover what people and books actually did in the nineteenth century. (Paul Duguid
Threepenny Review)
Each of Price's seven case-studies is as illuminating as it is fascinating. (Simon Calder
Berfrois)
Engaging and incisive . . . constantly entertains the reader with new and surprising material. . . . Price raises a host of questions that reach beyond the Victorian period to contemporary reading practices and values . . . a delight. (Charlotte Mathieson
Open Letters Monthly)
Price opens up fresh avenues of thought about both the history of the book and the history of the novel in the 19th century. . . .
How to Do Things with Books is a wonderfully rich work. Written with Price's customary verve and eye for the telling detail, it is a pleasure to read. . . . It brims with intellectual energy, studded with insights to provoke further thought. (Ina Ferris
Wordsworth Circle)
"Beautifully written, this superb book gives us a magnificent study of the social lives of books and texts in the Victorian period: their uses as missiles, doorstops, food wrapping, spouse-ignoring devices, and vehicles for individuation, spiritual development, and childlike wonder and delight. A joy to read."--Elaine Freedgood, New York University
"This timely and witty book is more than a shrewd look at the social lives of book-objects and their users, and a reconstruction of the protocols organizing that use. It also provides, gloriously, a new interpretation of the Victorian novel."--Deidre Lynch, University of Toronto
"Price has written an exceptional book of literary history that stretches the boundaries of what literary history means and does. Making her argument through an astonishing range of evidence about the uses of books, paper, and printed material in the nineteenth century, she shows that reading is not the only thing to do with books, either as objects or as historical evidence. A remarkable work."--Nicholas Dames, Columbia University
