Notational

When we think about reading today, we do so in Copperfield’s terms: It’s an act we perform alone and with imagination, one that helps us nurture and understand ourselves. But Leah Price, one of Harvard’s most influential English professors, believes this idealized version of reading has kept us from understanding something just as important: the role books have actually played in society. Price has made a career out of studying books creatively—examining them as physical objects that reveal something about their authors and publishers, or tracing how their earliest readers pulled them apart and put them back together in anthologies. In her new book, “How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain,” she pushes this notion even further. In fact, Price argues that literary critics should stop assuming that reading is the most important thing people do with books.