Reader's Block draws on methods in cultural history, literary theory, and descriptive bibliography to reconstruct the social life of Victorian books. My ambition is to wrest literary critics' attention away from the fraction of its lifecycle that any book spends in the hands of readers, toward the whole spectrum of social practices for which printed matter provides a prompt.

Over the past few decades, literary critics have entered into dialogue with the history of the book, itself reshaped by cognate investigations into the history, phenomenology and sociology of reading. No less than the internalist literary history that preceded them, however, those new disciplines tend to obscure the simple fact that reading is only one among many uses to which printed matter can be put. Bought, sold, exchanged, transported, displayed, defaced, stored, ignored, collected, neglected, dispersed, discarded, books can be enlisted (to state the obvious) in a range of transactions and rituals that stretch far beyond the literary or even the linguistic. From the prehistory of the coffeetable book to the birth of junk mail, from the rise of book collecting to the fall of newspaper recycling, I trace not only the shifting history of users' investments in printed objects but also the social relationships that books broker (or buffer) among their users, owners, and handlers.

The society that invented advertising circulars and subsidized tracts also formulated implicit rules for what to do with an increasingly unmanageable mass of books: how they should be read, certainly, but also how they should be displayed or hidden, distributed or hoarded, sold or resold, alienated or personalized, bequeathed or disposed of. Reader's Block sets out to explain why unread books inspired the Victorians with such visceral emotional and ethical reactions. What made cartoonists mock sofa-table books and dummy spines? Why did missionaries spend their time short-circuiting the operations into which illiterates could conscript the Bible – whether sacred (as when a copy was kissed, sworn upon, or placed in a grave) or profane (as when pages were torn out to wrap food or wipe shit)? And what did paper remain good for even (or especially) once its contents had passed their read-by date?

Long before McLuhan, the Victorians groped for a language in which to make sense of the relation between medium and message -- between the book (a material object) and the text (a sequence of words). Library catalogues, religious tracts, decorating manuals, antiquarian treatises, novels of development and comedies of manners together plot those pairs onto a series of different axes: temporal (new books get read, old books get handled), social (the book as the domain of rich bibliophiles or poor rag-collectors, the text as the purview of middle-class intellectuals), sexual (male thinkers internalizing the text, women displaying or disbinding the book), moral (the text as the vehicle of empathy and selfhood, the book of acquisitiveness and selfishness), generic (the text as the object of piety, the book as the butt of jokes). The physicality of print swims into focus at extremes: in the case of books that are especially expensive (bibliophilic collectibles) or especially valueless (subsidized tracts); among subcultures especially bookish (antiquarians, librarians) or especially bookless (the illiterate, the superstitious); with books considered especially sacred and timeless (the Bible) or especially profane and ephemeral (newspapers, calendars); at beginning of their life (manufacture) or end (pulping).

My argument ends with the end of the book's life, asking how Victorian users understood the relation between old texts instantiated in new books (reprinting) and new texts transmitted via old books (marginalia, binder's waste, and paper recycling). In this context, two phenomena usually explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century -- the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader -- can be traced instead to two much earlier developments: one legal – the repeal of paper duties – and the other technological – the rise first of woodpulp paper, then of plastics.

Table of contents:

I. Trollope, Thackeray, and the book as prop

II. Dickens, Brontë, and the book as prompt

III. The Religious Tract Society and the book as victim

IV. George Eliot and the book as chain

V. Henry Mayhew and the book as waste

Conclusion: Digitization and the book as ghost