Description:

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap?

Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading.

Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Review

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)

Price is a master of pithy comments that constantly remind us of the parallel but contrasting journeys of novels, tracts, fictional protagonists and real people. (Times Higher Education Supplement)

Extraordinarily rich. (Journal of Victorian Culture)

Strong writing continually spiced with wit. . . . This archaeologist of the imagination . . . continually offers new understandings of matters lying in plain sight but invisible to most of us. Like all first-rate criticism, hers makes us see familiar texts and familiar issues in new ways. (VictorianWeb)

From the Inside Flap

"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