Reading and Ownership

First paragraph: ‘It is as easy to make sweeping statements about reading tastes as to indict a nation, and as pointless.’ This jocular remark by a librarian made in the Times in 1952 sums up the dangers and difficulties of writing the history of reading. As a field of study in the humanities it is still in its infancy and encompasses a range of different methodologies and theoretical approaches. Historians of reading are not solely interested in what people read, but also turn their attention to the why, where and how of the reading experience. Reading can be solitary, silent, secret, surreptitious; it can be oral, educative, enforced, or assertive of a collective identity. For what purposes are individuals reading? How do they actually use books and other textual material? What are the physical environments and spaces of reading? What social, educational, technological, commercial, legal, or ideological contexts underpin reading practices? Finding answers to these questions is compounded by the difficulty of locating and interpreting evidence. As Mary Hammond points out, ‘most reading acts in history remain unrecorded, unmarked or forgotten’. Available sources are wide but inchoate: diaries, letters and autobiographies; personal and oral testimonies; marginalia; and records of societies and reading groups all lend themselves more to the case-study approach than the historical survey. Statistics offer analysable data but have the effect of producing identikits rather than actual human beings. The twenty-first century affords further possibilities, and challenges, with its traces of digital reader activity, but the map is ever-changing

Schoolbooks and textbook publishing.

In this chapter the author looks at the history of schoolbooks and textbook publishing. The nineteenth century saw a rise in the school book market in Britain due to the rise of formal schooling and public examinations. Although the 1870 Education and 1872 (Scotland) Education Acts made elementary education compulsory for childern between 5-13 years old, it was not until the end of the First World War that some sort form of secondary education became compulsory for all children

Books and other media

This chapter tells how in the twentieth century it was to the book industry that the film, radio, television and later media industries turned for stories, scripts, ideas, formats and all forms of creative content. The visual culture which arose in the nineteenth century became the inspiration for the new industries. Graphic magazines with their lithographs and etchings were the first visualisations of characters and storyline and sometimes formed the source material for the mis-en-scene of the silent movies. The new developments in radio, film and tlevision opened up larger audiences for authors and added to their potential revenue streams.  As subsidiary rights proliferated through the growth of new media formats, authors set up companies to control and exploit their intellectual properties.  While the BBC sought to avoid direct competition with the book trade, the trend in other media companies though the century was through acquisition to exploit its content across media. So the electronic media appropriated the book’s core values taking access to education, information, and entertainment beyond the walls of the library or schoolroom into the living room as the television set, and then the personal computer, entered the home. Yet the book retained its status and at the end of the century book publishing in Britain remained an essential part of an interconnected communications system for the commodification of ideas and cultural expressions