A History of Reading
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
Steven Roger Fischer's fascinating book traces the complete story of reading from the time when symbol first became sign through to the electronic texts of the present day. Describing ancient forms of reading and the various modes that were necessary to read different writing systems and scripts, Fischer turns to Asia and the Americas and discusses the forms and developments of completely divergent dimensions of reading.
Read more
With the Middle Ages in Europe and the Middle East, innovative re-inventions of reading emerged - silent and liturgical reading; the custom of lectors; reading's focus in general education - whereupon printing transformed society's entire attitude to reading. Fischer charts the explosion of the book trade in this era, its increased audience and radically changed subject-matter; describes the emergence of broadsheets, newspapers and public readings; and traces the effect of new font designs on general legibility.
Fischer discusses society's dedication to public literacy in the sweeping educational reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and notes the appearance of free libraries, gender differences in reading matter, public advertising and the "forbidden" lists of Church, State and the unemancipated. Finally, he assesses the future, in which it is likely that read communication will soon exceed oral communication through the use of the personal computer and the internet, and looks at "visual language" and modern theories of how reading is processed in the human brain. Asking how the New Reader can reshape reading's future, he suggests a radical new definition of what reading could be.
Liked A History of Reading? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked A History of Reading. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
-
The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs, and Pictograms Shares linguistics, language, history -
The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left Shares language, linguistics, nonfiction -
Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word Shares nonfiction, history, language -
Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words Shares history, nonfiction, books about
“People who read A History of Reading tend to reach for these next.”
-
Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again
-
Shakespeare's Bawdy
-
A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century
-
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-Day Iraq
