reading

     literacy and development 

Among writing on literacy and development we recommend Carlo Cipolla's classic Literacy & Development in the West (Harmondsworth, Penguin 69). 

Jack Goody's The Interface Between the Oral & the Written (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 87) and The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 77) and David Olson's The World on Paper (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 94) are also suggestive.

The 'revolutions' page of this profile pointed to major studies by Febvre, Eisenstein, Darnton and others. For something left of centre explore 'The Uncommon Reader' in George Steiner's No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-95 (New Haven, Yale Uni Press 96).
  

     consumption 

Collecting: An Unruly Passion - Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 94) by Werner Muensterberger considers the nature of collecting, from the sublime (Dr Freud's antiquities collection) to the ridiculous C19th century loon Sir Thomas Phillipps, who just wanted "one copy of every book!" (Why, we cry, why stop at one?)

The Cultures of Collecting (Melbourne, Melbourne Uni Press 94) is a collection of essays edited by John Elsner & Roger Cardinal which also deals with the Freud collection among others. That is more insightfully examined in Peter Gay's introduction to Sigmund Freud & Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities (Binghampton, State Uni of New York 89) edited by Lynn Gamwell & Richard Wells.

The definitive novel of bibliomania remains the stunning Auto-da-Fe (London, Cape 62) by Elias Canetti, friend of Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka and Gershom Scholem. For a gentler, although ultimately as tragic, account of obsession turn to Benjamin's Unpacking My Library in Illuminations (New York, Schocken 68) translated by Harry Zohn.

Henry Petroski's The Book on the Shelf (New York, Knopf 99) provides an engineering and social history of that most useful of devices, with detours into publishing and retailing over the past five hundred years. Regrettably it's more discursive and less entertaining than past masterpieces such as his The Pencil (Knopf, New York 90) and John Ellis' Social History of the Machine-Gun (London, Croom Helm 80).

Nicholson Baker, John Updike's pale shadow, in The Size of Our Thoughts: Essays & Other Lumber (Vintage, New York 97) collects essays on book production, reading and collecting, including the mordant Books As Furniture, aka the props you see in upmarket furniture, clothing and 'lifestyle' catalogues. Dora Thornton's The Scholar In His Study: Ownership & Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, Yale Uni Press 98) is a sumptuous exploration of the room and the furniture. 

William Gilmore's Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material & Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835 (Knoxville, Uni of Tennessee Press 89) and Sandra Hindman's Printing & the Written Word: The Social History of Books c1450-1520 (Ithaca, Cornell Uni Press 92) are both suggestive.

Tom Raabe's Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction (Golden, Fulcrum 91) and the heftier Casanova Was A Book Lover (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State Uni Press 00) by John Hamilton are anecdotal collections about the book disease.

     reading 

The definitive study of readership is A History of Reading In The West (Amherst, Uni of Massachusets Press 99) edited by Guglielmo Cavallo & Roger Chartier. Canadian novelist Alberto Manguel turned to non-fiction in the entertaining and widely researched A History of Reading (New York, Viking 96), ranging from cork-lined rooms and book thieves through to medieval scholars who could read - gadzooks - without moving their lips.

The altogether drier Australia Council for the Arts report Books- Who Reads Them? A study of borrowing & buying in Australia by Hans Hoegh Guldberg (Redfern, Australia Council 90) remains of value.

Sven Birkets' romantic The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in An Electronic Age (Boston, Faber 94) is merely the latest in a long line of tracts about the death of quality, the reluctance of spotty schoolboys to respect their betters and the ingratitude of the entertainment-loving lower classes. Attitudinising is easy, analysis less so. 

There's a more penetrating analysis in The Ethnography of Reading (Berkeley, Uni of California Press 93) edited by Jonathan Boyarin, in Harvey Graff's The Literacy Myth: Literacy & Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City (New York, Academic Press 79) and Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels & Working-Class Culture in America (London, Verso 87).

Barry Sanders' potboiler A Is For Ox: The Collapse of Literacy & The Rise of Violence In An Electronic Age (New York, Vintage 95) - television = moral collapse + spiritual impoverishment - is a downmarket version of the very fashionable Neil Postman, author of the bizarre Building A Bridge To The 18th Century: How The Past Can Improve Our Future (New York, Knopf 99) - come back, dead white males, all is forgiven - and specious Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture To Technology (New York, Vintage 93).

We'd recommend instead the thoughtful Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America (New York, Norton 92) by James Atlas, biographer of Delmore Schwartz, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in AnteBellum America (Chapel Hill, Uni of North Carolina Press 00) by Isabelle Lehuu and Maurice Saxby's Offered To Children: A History of Australian Children's Literature 1841-1941 (Sydney, Ashton Scholastic 93).  

Jeffrey Brooks' When Russia Learned To Read: Literacy & Popular Literature 1861-1917 (Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 85), Reading & Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry. (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 82) by François Furet & Jacques Ozouf, Reading in America: Literature & Social History (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Uni Press 89) edited by Cathy Davidson, and Literacy in the United States: Readers & Reading since 1880 (New Haven, Yale Uni Press 91) edited by Carl Kaestle &  Helen Damon-Moore provide points of reference.

Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil - Second Thoughts On The Information Highway (Doubleday, New York 95) and High-Tech Heretic: Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (Doubleday, New York 99) reach the entirely unsurprising conclusion that a life does not necessarily equal being online and indeed that the non-digital world, unlike Broadway, is alive and well. 

Economist and cultural critic Tyler Cowan gives a more considered analysis of the market for the written word and the shape of culture (after the death of the book/author/print/reader) in his In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 98).

Admirers of Stoll might usefully turn to The View from the Bridge: Aspects of Culture (Sydney, ABC 96) by the marvellous although maddening Pierre Ryckmans, author of the landmark Chinese Shadows and The Death of Napoleon.

James O'Donnell's elegant Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus To Cyberspace (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 98) argues that print will be supplemented rather than superseded by the electronic word in much the same way that printing did not result in the disappearance of speech.

     status 

Historical perspective on culture, consumption and status is provided by Joan Shelley Rubin's scholarly The Making of MiddleBrow Culture (Chapel Hill, Uni of North Carolina Press 92), which explores radio and television literature programs, book clubs and 'great book' programs, and the Book-of-the-Month phenomenon. 

It's superior to Janice Radway's quirky A Feeling For Books: The Book Of The Month Club, Literary Taste & Middle Class Desire (Chapel Hill, Uni of North Carolina Press 97). There's another perspective in Beauty & the Book: Fine Editions & Cultural Distinction in America (New Haven, Yale Uni Press 00) by Megan Benton, especialyy useful on little presses.

Michael Kammen's The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes & the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (New York, Oxford Uni Press 96) considers the Stolls and Birkets of an earlier age, when social change and the eruption of new technologies such as moving pictures and radio led to prophecies of doom strikingly similar to current criticisms of the Web. Reports of the death of the book, like that of culture and Mark Twain, seem somewhat premature.

Richard Todd's Consuming Passions: The Booker Prize & Fiction in Britain Today (London, Bloomsbury 96) discusses the prize - originally a marketing initiative by the UK agribusiness conglomerate Booker - the Salman Rushdie affair (doing a James Dean would have been a great career move), the decline & fall of the Waterstones & Dillons retailing chains and patterns of authorship in the past two decades.


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