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We inhabit a textually super-saturated and increasingly literate world. This volume encourages readers to consider the diverse methodologies used by historians of reading globally, and indicates how future research might take up the challenge of recording and interpreting the practices of readers in an increasingly digitized society.

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List of Figures List of Tables Foreword; S.Eliot Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; R.Crone & S.Towheed PART I: PERSPECTIVES Altick´s Map: The New Historiography of the Common Reader; J.Rose Commodity Readers: An Introduction to a Frame for Reading; S.R.Frost PART II: METHODS AND TACTICS Between the Book and the Reader: The Uses of Reading for the Gratification of Personal Psychosocial Needs; H.Adoni & H.Nossek One Reader, Two Votes: Re-tooling Fan Mail Scholarship; B.Ryan The Mediation of Response: A Critical Approach to Individual and Group Reading Practices; D.Allington & J.Swann PART III: INTERPRETATIVE STRATEGIES Representing Reading Spaces; S.Colclough A Book of One´s Own: Examples of Library Book Marginalia; M.Dahlstrom PART IV: READING THE VISUAL Reading Ephemera; S.Qureishi Books in Photographs; K.Flint PART V: READING IN THE DIGITAL AGE Filipino Blogs as Evidence of Reading and Reception; V.Totanes Reading the Book of Mozilla: Web Browsers and the Materiality of Digital Texts; A.Galey Further Reading and Weblinks Index

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´A varied collection that contributes many interesting case studies to the rapidly growing field that is the history of reading.´ - Leah Price, Professor of English, Harvard University, USA

´Steeped in the available documentary record, unremitting in its commitment to the book in hand rather than in theory, this anthology convenes a lively symposium on reader history that any historian of reading will be eager to attend. Questions of response are freshly anchored in instance rather than principle. Including fan mail at the return end of the writer-reader circuit, book clubs at the other, and traversing in between every credible register of targeted reception and uptake from marketing copy to library marginalia, from reported oral recitation to reading´s pictorial rendering in private or social space the separate findings of this strenuously materialist approach, an approach able still to incorporate at times the energies of interpretation, are fresh, engaging, and, for all their spirited variety, impressively coherent in their methodological scope.´ - Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, author of Reading Voices, Dear Reader, The Look of Reading, and Bookwork

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