From The History of a Book to the "History of the Book": Readers, Handlers and Users in the It-Narrative

Leah Price

This paper asks what book historians - particularly historians of mid-Victorian realism - have to learn from the it-narrative. As descriptive bibliographers have long emphasized, books accrue meaning not just through their manufacture, but through their subsequent uses: bought, sold, exchanged, transported, defaced, mended, sorted, catalogued, ignored, collected, neglected, discarded, recycled. A history of the novel that took these transactions into account might model its own narrative form after the "it-narrative," the fictional autobiography of a circulating thing. If it-narrative corresponds to a bibliographical project that retraces the manufacture and circulation of printed objects (what Robert Darnton has called "the biography of every book"), then the Bildungsroman bears a closer resemblance to those methods that chart the development of an individual's literary sensibility (whether under the names of reader-response or of reception history or even of close reading).