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Used Books - (Material Texts) by William H Sherman (Paperback)

Used Books - (Material Texts) by  William H Sherman (Paperback) - 1 of 1
$26.50 sale price when purchased online
$29.95 list price
Target Online store #3991

About this item

Highlights

  • In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as "rather soiled by use.
  • About the Author: William H. Sherman is Professor of English at the University of York.
  • 288 Pages
  • Literary Criticism, Books & Reading
  • Series Name: Material Texts

Description



About the Book



Based 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.



Book Synopsis



In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as "rather soiled by use." When the book was displayed the next year, the exhibition catalogue described it as "well and piously used [with] marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand [that] bring to life an early and earnest owner"; and the book's buyer, for his part, considered it to be "enlivened by the marginal notes and comments." For this collector, as for an increasing number of cultural historians and historians of the book, a marked-up copy was more interesting than one in pristine condition.

William H. Sherman recovers a culture that took the phrase "mark my words" quite literally. Books from the first two centuries of printing are full of marginalia and other signs of engagement and use, such as customized bindings, traces of food and drink, penmanship exercises, and doodles. These marks offer a vast archive of information about the lives of books and their place in the lives of their readers.

Based on a survey of thousands 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. The chapters address the place of book-marking in schools and churches, the use of the "manicule" (the ubiquitous hand-with-pointing-finger symbol), the role played by women in information management, the extraordinary commonplace book used for nearly sixty years by Renaissance England's greatest lawyer-statesman, and the attitudes toward annotated books among collectors and librarians from the Middle Ages to the present.

This wide-ranging, learned, and often surprising book will make the marks of Renaissance readers more visible and legible to scholars, collectors, and bibliophiles.



Review Quotes




"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"

"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"

"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"



About the Author



William H. Sherman is Professor of English at the University of York. He is the author of John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance and coeditor of "The Tempest" and Its Travels, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Dimensions (Overall): 8.96 Inches (H) x 6.19 Inches (W) x .74 Inches (D)
Weight: 1.0 Pounds
Suggested Age: 22 Years and Up
Number of Pages: 288
Series Title: Material Texts
Genre: Literary Criticism
Sub-Genre: Books & Reading
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Format: Paperback
Author: William H Sherman
Language: English
Street Date: September 10, 2009
TCIN: 91354720
UPC: 9780812220841
Item Number (DPCI): 247-05-0066
Origin: Made in the USA or Imported
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Shipping details

Estimated ship dimensions: 0.74 inches length x 6.19 inches width x 8.96 inches height
Estimated ship weight: 1 pounds
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