Reading Typographically: Immersed in Print in Early Modern France

By Geoffrey Turnovsky

Anxieties about the fate of reading in the digital age reveal how deeply our views of the moral and intellectual benefits of reading are tied to print. These views take root in a conception of reading as an immersive activity, exemplified by the experience of "losing oneself in a book." Against the backdrop of digital distraction and fragmentation, such immersion leads readers to become more focused, collected, and empathetic.

How did we come to see the printed book as especially suited to deliver this experience? Print-based reading practices have historically included a wide range of modes, not least the disjointed scanning we associate today with electronic text. In the context of religious practice, literacy's benefits were presumed to lie in such random-access retrieval, facilitated by indexical tools like the numbering of Biblical chapters and verses. It was this didactic, hunt-and-peck reading that bound readers to communities.

Exploring key evolutions in print in 17th- and 18th-century France, from typeface, print runs, and format to punctuation and the editorial adaptation of manuscript and oral forms in print, this book argues that typographic developments upholding the transparency of the printed medium were decisive for the ascendancy of immersive reading as a dominant paradigm that shaped modern perspectives on reading and literacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781503639164

Book preview

STANFORD

TEXT TECHNOLOGIES

Series Editors

Ruth Ahnert

Roopika Risam

Elaine Treharne

Editorial Board

Benjamin Albritton

Caroline Bassett

Lori Emerson

Alan Liu

Elena Pierazzo

Andrew Prescott

Matthew Rubery

Kate Sweetapple

Heather Wolfe

READING TYPOGRAPHICALLY

Immersed in Print in Early Modern France

GEOFFREY TURNOVSKY

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2024 by Geoffrey Turnovsky. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Turnovsky, Geoffrey, author.

Title: Reading typographically : immersed in print in early modern France / Geoffrey Turnovsky.

Other titles: Text technologies.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2024. | Series: Stanford text technologies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023043616 (print) | LCCN 2023043617 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503637214 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503639164 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Printing—France—History—17th century. | Printing—France—History—18th century. | Books and reading—France—History—17th century. | Books and reading—France—History—18th century.

Classification: LCC Z144 .T87 2024 (print) | LCC Z144 (ebook) | DDC 744.4/7094409032—dc23/eng/20231025

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043616

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043617

Cover design: Susan Zucker

Cover art: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Theophila Palmer (1757–1848), half-length, in a cream dress and reading a copy of Clarissa Harlowe (ca. 1771) © Sotheby’s 2023; cover line art: Image of the designs, plotted on grids, of the Bignon commission

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION. The Benefits of Reading

1. Typeface: Disappearing Letters from the Romain du Roi to Didot

2. Print Runs: Tender Maps in the Marketplace

3. Format: Appropriations of the Book

4. Editorial Labors: The Typography of Intimate Texts

5. Punctuation Marks: Bringing Speech to Life on the Printed Page

CONCLUSION. Hybridity and Text Technologies

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I COULD NOT HAVE WRITTEN this book without the support of many people and organizations. I am especially grateful to colleagues and friends who read parts and even almost all of the manuscript as it developed over the years and who offered comments and suggestions that were essential for improving it. I am particularly indebted to Rebecca Wilkin and Kathy Wine, both of whom read almost the entirety of the text, and to Mathilde Bombart, Gregory Brown, Lisa Jane Graham, Nicholas Paige, Christophe Schuwey, and Abby Zanger for incisive reading of chapters at key moments in the development of the project. Beatrice Arduini, Marshall Brown, Douglas Collins, Chloe Edmondson, Jeffrey Todd Knight, Radhika Koul, Deidre Lynch, Joy Palacios, Richard Watts, along with colleagues in the Society of Scholars at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington during 2015 and 2016, also provided invaluable feedback on one or several of the chapters in various draft stages. My most heartfelt thanks to Priscilla Ferguson, a lifelong mentor who passed away on New Year’s Eve 2018 but who read my chapter on typeface and discussed typography with me even into the summer of 2018, when I visited her in her apartment on Riverside Drive. My thanks also to George Hoffmann, a generous and inspiring reader, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for Stanford University Press. My deepest gratitude to the excellent team at Stanford University Press who encouraged me to improve the manuscript in critical ways: Elaine Treharne, Ruth Ahnert, Erica Wetter, and Caroline McKusick, as well as to Joe Abbott for meticulous copy-editing. I am eternally grateful for and touched by the depth and intelligence of all these readers’ engagement with my project, which is much better for their suggestions, references, critique, and interest. I hope they are all able to see where they helped me finesse my arguments and improve my style.

My sincere thanks also to colleagues and friends who have invited me over the years to present parts of this project. I’ve learned an enormous amount from these occasions. In May 2016, I had the chance to present early versions of a number of the chapters in a series of seminars at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. My sincere gratitude to Dinah Ribard, Nicolas Schapira, and Christian Jouhaud, as well as to Alain Viala, who left us much too soon, for their always warm hospitality and support of my work as organizers, with Mathilde Bombart, of the Groupe de recherches interdisciplinaires sur l’histoire du littéraire (Grihl), and to those present at the seminars, for their engagement, comments and ideas. My thanks especially to Roger Chartier, who convened one of the workshops during that stay, and whose work has been an inspiration for me. My thanks to Déborah Blocker and Anne Piéjus, who organized a workshop on the Mercure galant in 2014 at a pivotal moment for my project. And my gratitude to all those with whom I had the good fortune to collaborate or exchange ideas and references in the context of conferences, publication ventures, or over a coffee or dinner: Masha Belenky, Carolyn Betensky, Ann Blair, Nicholas Cronk, Laurence Daubercies, Evelyne Ender, Donald Gilbert-Santamaria, Susan Hiner, Katherine Ibbett, Raymond Jonas, Sonal Khullar, Larry Kritzman, Antoine Lilti, Mary McAlpin, Katherine McDonough, Ourida Mostefai, Louise Moulin, Guillaume Peureux, Thierry Rigogne, Volker Schröder, Juliet Shields, Joanna Stalnaker, Deborah Steinberger, and Kate Tunstall, among many others.

I am grateful for the invaluable support of a number of institutions. The Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington has been a mainstay since I arrived in Seattle in 2006, and I am especially grateful to Kathy Woodward for her untiring support of my research and of my curricular projects at the university, as well as to the Simpson Center staff. I was fortunate to be a Society of Scholars Fellow in the 2015–16 academic year, at the beginning of this project, where I circulated what became chapter 2. I am thankful, as well, to the Royalty Research Fund office at the UW for funding a research quarter and trip in 2011; to the College of Arts and Sciences for supporting a sabbatical leave split up between spring 2022 and winter and spring 2023 quarters, during which time I was able to finish the manuscript; and to the Department of French and Italian Studies, especially to the department chair, Beatrice Arduini, for generously helping to fund the image program. I am also delighted to express my gratitude to the staff at the Helen Riaboff Whitely Center in beautiful Friday Harbor, Washington, for numerous opportunities over the years to use the center’s facilities in order to focus on various aspects of my book, most recently in January 2023.

I have been extremely fortunate to benefit from the always enthusiastic support of many librarians and archivists whose help locating and accessing materials and acquiring images has been invaluable. I am especially grateful to Deb Raftus, Sandra Kroupa, and many others in the UW libraries for their always generous assistance; and to many librarians and archivists at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque municipale Armand Salacrou in Le Havre, the Bibliothèque municipale de Reims, the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the Archives nationales Paris site, the Bibliothèque Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, the Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, and the New York Public Library.

Most of all, it is thanks to the tireless support, help, patience, and love of family members that I have been able to complete this book. My deepest gratitude to Demesira, Samuel, whose memory remains with us, and Debbie; to my sister Jacqueline and her family, Brad, Isabelle, and Archer; to Adrienne and Lucy; to my parents, Stephen and Michelle; and to my wife, Carolyn.

INTRODUCTION

THE BENEFITS OF READING

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF reading? Enter this question into a Google search and somewhere over two billion results return with links to web pages hailing the health benefits of reading, the science-based benefits of reading, or the ways reading makes you better at life.¹ Typical of the web, many of these pages offer enumerated rankings, itemizing the top five, eight, ten, or fourteen benefits.² In fact, these benefits cohere around a limited number of themes that recur throughout the lists (often expressed in the same or near-same terms, as is typical for this kind of clickbait): reading exercises the brain; it staves off Alzheimer’s and dementia and enhances memory; reading helps manage stress and improves sleep. In a survey of twenty-nine randomly chosen lists—selected, that is, from the first five or six pages of results I saw when, in May 2021, I entered the search for benefits of reading—eleven included memory enhancement as one of the itemized benefits; thirteen proposed improved sleep; fifteen highlighted protection against Alzheimer’s and dementia; and twenty-four of the twenty-nine lists pointed to stress reduction and relaxation.

For the purposes of this sampling, I selected only lists that conceived of reading in the most general terms without any further qualification, such as reading to children or reading aloud. In this sense, the enumerated benefits purport to reflect a nonspecific, intransitive reading, with no ulterior objective or goal beyond the activity itself. These are quite simply the benefits of reading. There are, after all, follow-on benefits to reading a recipe or to reading the instructions for how to renew a passport. Learning how to do things, or how effectively to accomplish tasks, whether performing a job, putting together a piece of furniture, or fulfilling the obligations of citizenship—being informed, voting—has long been central to our evolving conceptions of the value of literacy. The US Department of Education’s 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which measured the reading skills of American adults, foregrounded these more utilitarian outcomes in its survey, viewing literacy as the use of information in order to adequately function at home, in the workplace, and in the community.³

This functionalist perspective is, however, almost entirely absent from the conventional wisdom distilled in the twenty-nine online lists I looked at. In those inventories, reading’s benefits ensue from the activity per se, not from the information or skills to which reading gives access. Accordingly, the payoffs are envisioned holistically, in terms of benefits to health, well-being, and personal ethical development. The latter is reflected in a series of moralized attributes that, the lists claim, reading also cultivates. An increased ability to concentrate, focus, and to become immersed in the activity appears in seventeen of the twenty-nine lists (in one or more of these three formulations). And related to the capacity for immersion (which itself depends on the ability to focus and concentrate), eighteen of the twenty-nine lists highlight an augmented capacity to empathize with others. According to studies, losing yourself in books, especially fiction, might increase your empathy, notes one site.⁴ Reading makes you more empathetic, affirms another: by reading about the lives of people who are very different from yourself, your empathy for others naturally increases.⁵

At this juncture, two points bear mentioning. First, illustrated in the just-cited examples, is how easily and often the lists end up shifting from the unqualified reading announced in the website headings to more articulated formulations in the listed benefits, such as reading fiction or reading about the lives of people, despite the ostensibly general framing for which I had filtered the results. This conflation is systematic. Twenty-one of the twenty-nine lists go on in their itemizations to include benefits pointedly tied to reading fiction or, in a number of cases, literary fiction. Many of these qualifications come in connection with reading’s ability to teach empathy for others, where the others for whom one learns to feel empathy are characters in a story or a novel.⁶ Getting lost in a good read can make it easier for you to relate to others, states one site, offering science-backed reasons to read a (real) book. The page goes on to assert that literary fiction, specifically, has the power to help its readers understand what others are thinking.⁷ As this example makes obvious, the narrowing of reading to reading fiction is fully conscious. But it is unaddressed as such. That is, the validity of the gradual conflation of reading with reading fiction goes without any rationalization or explanation. Reading fiction is simply assumed to be an acceptable or natural proxy for reading, notwithstanding the many other ways and types of materials that people read. In this sense, when conceived abstractly as an activity with particular health and moral benefits, reading is more specifically construed as an intense, focused, and immersive experience that activates emotions, interests, and affective attachments focalized not on the reader’s objective lived reality (as would be the case with an instruction manual or a recipe book) but on an alternative world represented in the text read, especially in a text of narrative fiction: When you read a book, all of your attention is focused on the story—the rest of the world just falls away.⁸ As it turns out, detachment from the reader’s lived reality in order to become lost in a surrogate textual world lies at the heart of the various benefits the reader can expect, whether these are imagined as enhanced cognitive capacities mobilized in an ability to focus and follow a plotline, as stress reduction and an unplugging from the travails of real life that leads to a recentering of self, or as the ethical payoff of becoming a more understanding person through compassion for a fictional character.

The second point needing emphasis reflects another conflation, one that is less conscious yet even more systematic: the conflation between reading and reading books. In fact, every one of the twenty-nine lists ultimately represents reading as an activity defined by books, even if a few do specify alternative potential formats for reading materials, such as an audio file or a longer piece of text understood in context to be electronic.⁹ These allowances, though, tend to serve more as caveats and backup plans—If you cannot go to the library . . . , you can even scout for [books] on online sources¹⁰—and prove the rule that reading, in its most constructive forms, ostensibly happens with books. What does book refer to in the context of delineating literacy’s edifying payoffs? None of the lists defines what a book is. That is presumed to be understood. But all of the lists make the book’s deep implications in reading’s salutary effects evident. The works of fiction that teach empathy are invariably referred to as books. Books are what readers become immersed in: Getting lost in a book could also make you more empathetic.¹¹ Books are what emotionally transport readers and expand horizons.¹² Books are what demand and hold attention: sitting down with a book takes long periods of focus and concentration.¹³

Do books, in these examples, mean printed books? Twenty years ago, I suspect the print/digital divide would have overtly, and likely polemically, if also paradoxically, defined the reading practices promoted in these websites, as was the case in the 1990s, when Sven Birkerts railed against electronic reading in his print book, Gutenberg Elegies. Interestingly, however, in the early 2020s, only a few of the lists make the connections among reading, books, and print explicit. One, cited above in reference to (real) book[s], stresses the rewards of flipping pages and the feel of paper pages under your fingertips: When it comes to actually remembering what you’re reading, the site asserts, you’re better off going with a book than you are an e-book.¹⁴ Most of the other sites, however, take the advent of e-readers and digital platforms in stride; and in a number of instances, as we have seen, they embrace the possibility that the reading practices being advocated can be found in those formats: If you’re not up for lugging a book around, and your e-reader doesn’t see much action, don’t worry—all you need is your phone.¹⁵ Yet even when they do entertain such a prospect, all twenty-nine of the lists sketch a concept of reading that is symbolically represented by the book. This book-centered concept is, in turn, consistently made to stand in stark counterpoint to the mind-sets and dispositions elicited by new forms of information media, which, in contrast with the health effects of reading books, push the individual in less worthy ways. Computers, the internet, blog posts, news articles, technology, TV, phones, screens and screen time, podcasts, email, and social media are all, at various points, invoked in the websites as modern agents of distraction, enervation, fragmentation, restlessness, and anomie. Reading and books are, to these, the antidote: Step away from the computer for a little while, crack open a book and feel free to replenish your soul, advises one article.¹⁶

Allowances for digital formats—a PDF or ePub file to read on an electronic device—notwithstanding, overall, as the formulation crack open a book conveys (a phrase used in a number of the lists), it is impossible to ignore how deeply the basic techniques and experiences of reading celebrated in the websites—from sitting down with a book to curling up with your book after a long day to cozy[ing] up to read with a cup of tea to picking up and reading a ‘real’ book¹⁷—are embedded in the analog experiences of printed books, even as some of the articles concede that soul-replenishment and moral education can be found from a digital platform (most simply don’t address the distinction). In fact, while the sites have more or less entirely abandoned the mid-1990s antidigital polemics of Birkerts, the techniques they describe correspond well to what Birkerts had upheld as the order of print, conceived as linear, requiring the reader’s active engagement and sustained attention, and essentially private. This was articulated against the electronic order, which is in most ways opposite—networked, evanescent, lacking detail and linear sequentiality, rapid, and driven by jump-cut increments.¹⁸

Birkerts’s rhetoric was steeped in the nostalgic view that, as Nicholas Carr would put it in a more recent Birkertsian exposition from 2011, The Shallows, the age of print was now defunct.¹⁹ Birkerts lamented the loss of the vestigial order of the printed word and the shift away from the patterns and habits of the printed page.²⁰ And, to be sure, there is no denying the momentousness of the rise of digital technologies and the profundity of their impacts on our writing and reading practices. But this only makes more remarkable the fact that, in the conventional wisdom of the early 2020s on reading’s significance and salutary effects, as distilled in scores of online lists of reading’s benefits, the printed book’s presence is relentless and ubiquitous, as the framework and language (curling up with a book) for articulating a set of ingrained and edifying reading techniques and habits, not to mention in the profusion of images of printed books that adorn these sites. What are we to make of this?

Considering Printing Technology in the History of Reading

Reading Typographically explores the development of an immersive ideal of reading that is celebrated today as especially amenable to health and moral benefits such as focus and concentration. Most saliently for this study, the ideal provides a framework for experiences of empathy, channeled through the reader’s capacity to connect affectively and psychologically with characters represented in written text as if they were real people and to grow and improve personally in and through these experiences. The rise of empathetic or sentimental reading in the eighteenth century has been scrutinized by literary and cultural historians. What drives my investigation is a question not centrally addressed in most existing studies but that the websites and discourses cited above make pertinent: how did this ideal become so deeply associated with print technology such that in today’s reflections on reading and literacy the link is inescapable and inextricable? If readers learn to focus, it is insofar as they have been trained by the materiality of the printed book, led by its sequence of bound leaves to follow a line of argument or narrative through a succession of printed pages,²¹ while the book’s analog disconnectedness, its unnetworked monotasking qualities—its lack of hyperlinks and of multiple windows running alternative sites and applications—enables readers to become absorbed. Online, writes Steven Johnson, "you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article—sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument."²²

In fact, there is nothing natural about the medium of the printed book that necessarily entails reading it in a linear and absorbed way. The existence of printed dictionaries, phone books, cookbooks, and newspapers, as well as the prevalence of what is surely the largest category of books printed since the advent of Gutenberg’s press—religious and devotional texts—suggests that the linear, immersive mode was never the exclusive or even dominant method for reading real books, old-fashioned or otherwise. Nor does immersive reading have any claim to historical precedence over the discontinuous approaches called for by these other kinds of texts. On the contrary, the strictly linear reading of books is a belated aberration, a brilliantly perverse interlude in the long history of discontinuous reading, as Peter Stallybrass memorably argued, the ascendency of which tracked not the rise of print but the popularity of new narrative genres like the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, well after print had established its preeminence in Europe.²³ Relatedly, rather than being tied to printing technologies, arguments about linear reading and books are more properly associated with the physical characteristics of the codex—that is, the book form familiar to us today as a bound collection of flippable pages. The history of the codex extends back far earlier than the spread of movable-type printing, back into antiquity when boards of wood hollowed and filled with wax were tied together to function as notebooks for punctual and transient texts inscribed into the wax with a stylus and in turn easily melted for new writing. As a more permanent and authoritative platform for recording, accessing, and preserving texts, the codex became dominant among early Christians in the first centuries of the Common Era. Not the least of the codex’s advantages was its ability to enable discontinuous reading by offering easier access to disparate and disconnected parts of the book (above all, to passages in different biblical books in the context of liturgy and devotion), without having to unroll and reroll a scroll.²⁴ From the manuscript codices of the Middle Ages to the printed books that spread through Europe and across the globe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, most key innovations that catered specifically to codex-based reading—the development of indices, concordances, pagination, tables of contents, marginal annotations, footnotes, and the structural organization of texts into paragraphs and chapters, among other developments—reflected the prevalence of jump-cutting navigation and punctual information retrieval—ironically, precisely the type of reading that tends to be ascribed today to the digital in opposition to print—rather than the prioritization of absorption and focus as a reading experience.

In other words, for the first three hundred years of the age of print in Europe, the technology of typography developed in order to better provision a textual world that had long become invested in discontinuous reading as the default and preferred mode, the mode, moreover, presumed to offer the greatest benefits of reading. In this respect, the order of print was the opposite of what Birkerts contended. It was not linear, a fact further underscored by the new text-copying process itself. Printing required pages to be set and laid out on the press, not according to the sequential flow of the text but in the disjointed order determined by the folding and binding of the large sheets of paper onto which multiple pages—two, four, eight, twelve, or more—would be printed with each pull of the press.²⁵ We should also keep in mind at this juncture that the history of the book is not the history of print, as implied by the conflation in Birkerts’s and Carr’s ascribing of a codex-derived quality—the sequence of pages—to the not necessarily related technology of movable-type printing. Birkerts and Carr reflect broader tendencies—to associate print specifically with codex-enabled linear reading (and its ostensible effects) and to credit print for the latter, which long preexisted print—that are critical to keep in mind and ultimately one of the key interests of this book.²⁶

As Stallybrass emphasized, it was the advent of new textual forms that most promoted new linear reading habits rather than qualities inherent to the materiality of printed books, above all, novels and other forms of fictional narrative that took off in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with plotlines that had to be followed from start to finish for the reading experience to make sense and be fulfilling. Accordingly, historians investigating the rise of more immersive reading practices have, in their analyses, foregrounded the impacts of formal, stylistic, and linguistic factors: the emergence of new genres, such as the psychological, epistolary, or sentimental novel; the popularity of affective, tear-jerking thematics; a more deeply psychologized characterization that entailed more realistic depictions of personae; effusive style; and powerful authorial claims to moral clarity. All of these factors were geared toward eliciting in the reader focused attention, emotional response, and ethical investment. Lynn Hunt’s history of the invention of human rights in prerevolutionary France opens with a provocative chapter arguing for the pivotal role that reading novels played in creating the framework of a political order predicated on a belief in universal rights. In Hunt’s account, new psychological dispositions among impassioned readers of the novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Samuel Richardson inclined them, as they became deeply and personally interested in characters hailing from all walks of life and from distant parts of the world, to experience empathy across divides of social, economic, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds. Readers could then, in real life, conceive of commonalities among all people: reading novels created a sense of equality, Hunt asserts. Critical was the triumph of the epistolary novel. Brimming with sentiment and subjectivity, the letters constituting works like Clarissa and La Nouvelle Héloïse offered the illusion of direct, unmediated access into the minds of characters who could then be perceived with such vividness that readers took the fictional constructs to be living people with whom they could imagine interacting, as humans. This made possible a heightened sense of identification, Hunt contends, as if the characters were real, not fictional.²⁷

Robert Darnton stresses the rhetoric of Rousseau’s authorial performances in his investigation of the powerfully uplifting experiences that readers of La Nouvelle Héloïse reported in letters they addressed directly to the author. The effectiveness of this rhetoric, as Darnton put it, which readers encountered in the work’s multiple prefaces, caused them to read [Rousseau] in the way that he asked to be read. As they recounted in their gushing missives the way they suspended their critical instinct, identified with characters, and let waves of emotion wash over themselves, these readers, Darnton asserts, paraphrased or quoted, consciously or not, the instructions that Rousseau had given them himself in the prefaces.²⁸

The distinctive tones, formal and generic qualities, and authorial airs connected with the eighteenth-century novel have figured prominently in scholarship on the emergence of affective and identificatory reading practices in the eighteenth century.²⁹ But studies of other pivotal moments in the history of modern reading—for instance, the expanding readership that formed around periodicals like the Mercure galant in late seventeenth-century France—have also gravitated to the overriding explanatory power of textual form, language, and genre to account for new reading practices. In the case of the Mercure’s public, it was the compressed narrative genre of the nouvelle, which the Mercure promoted in its pages, that conjured up a new public, one that was more provincial and diverse in socio-occupational background than the aristocratic groups that had supposedly constituted the readerships of the long heroic romances of the early seventeenth century. The nouvelle offered fictions with more concentrated plotlines situated in more familiar contemporary settings, as well as deeper, more complex, and more relatable characters with whom average readers, to use Joan DeJean’s phrase, connected. As Monique Vincent affirms, "[the] scenes would please female readers [aux lectrices] all the more that they were set in [the reader’s] own milieux. A constant assimilation was established between characters and readers with the frequent use of the epistolary form."³⁰

In prioritizing genre and literary form, these studies share the inclination, in defining the reading experience, to deprioritize the impacts of material evolutions in the printed codex and typography. The evolution implicitly posited in the studies is toward reading becoming a more purely intellectual or psychological exercise, in which the book, as a typographic artifact, plays less and less of a positive role. The printed book’s defining purpose is, in this sense, to gradually vanish from an experience that it enables yet which is predicated on the reader’s emerging belief that the words delivered by the book and deciphered by the reader simply are the words of the author or the character who speaks them, not the typographic representation of those words on a page, carrying all the artisanal and editorial mediations that this would imply. The power of the epistolary form to connect readers with characters lay in this obfuscation: No narrator, indeed no quotation marks, stand between us and Pamela herself, Hunt observed. Such a statement plays down the typographic and editorial labor required to generate the impression of immediacy. This is hardly surprising. The absence of quotation marks does not impress a sense of the importance of typography. It also emblematizes the fact that this labor sought not highly noticeable effects but ones that deflected readerly attention: editorial self-effacement, streamlined and unobtrusive type design, rational page layout, an easy and standardized typographic code for punctuating what was intended to be read as nontypographic language—the live speech or private handwritten letters of another human—and a chronological organization of documents presented as their natural state, rather than the outcome of editorial or curatorial work, to name a few of the phenomena that we will explore in this book.³¹

The relatively small place given to the material and typographic dimensions of reading in studies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries stands in contrast to scholarship focused on reading in earlier periods. The latter has been more likely to consider as germane to the reading experience different kinds of physical interactions with the book object. These interactions might be ocular, as in the development of conventions around word spacing and punctuation developed by medieval scribes, which potentially allowed for faster, less oralized, and thereby more internalized reading practices.³² They might consist in particular kinds of appropriations of books. Studies of Renaissance readers have focused on annotations left in the margins of their books, through which these individuals engaged the knowledge of antiquity.³³ By the same token, we have already seen the copious presence of printed books in current discourse on immersive reading, though as we will consider in this study, I suspect the roots of both the absence and presence of print in, respectively, historical scholarship on absorptive reading after, say, 1650, and conventional wisdom about its benefits today are closely related. The ascendency of typography as a primary textual platform in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries entailed the dominance of a reading mode defined by the ability—learned as one learns to read and sustained by evolutions in typographic and book form—to ignore the platform, to see through the printed page rather than to look at it, as if the page were a window onto the world represented by the text, and did not carry the text per se. This ingrained, reflexive ability to separate content from form—to distinguish a text from its material instantiation and to focalize on the former at the expense of the latter—is what enables readers to believe that they can hear the voice of the author or see a scene play out. It is ultimately what allows them to envision characters as real people with whom they can empathize and imagine interacting, rather than as the artifacts of discourse conveying a lesson to internalize or a model to imitate. The inattention to print in scholarship on seventeenth-and eighteenth-century reading reflects an inattention to the printed book in historical archives bearing witness to reading habits that had been trained to ignore it. Sans que je m’en aperçoive (without noticing) is how Denis Diderot described the way that reading Richardson’s novels impacted him, exemplifying the way they should ideally be read.³⁴ In turn, the prospect today of print’s obsolescence and its replacement by screens and digital platforms has inspired awareness of how much these habits had in fact been shaped by typography.

Though typography does not play a major role in Darnton’s interpretation of how readers read Rousseau, his influential essay on the topic does underscore the prevalence, in a time when books were made by hand, of a typographical consciousness that has disappeared now that books are mass-produced for a mass audience. The reader of the Old Regime approached [books] with care, Darnton states, invoking an exoticized historical reader who would finger the paper, . . . study the type, examine the spacing, check the register, evaluate the layout, and scrutinize the evenness of the printing.³⁵ We would of course be surprised to see this type of fastidiousness in a buyer browsing the latest titles in a bookstore today, even less so in an online shopper clicking a link. But the reality is more complex than Darnton suggests. In fact, as an articulation in a longer history of reading, the emoting, moralistic readers of Rousseau in the 1760s were, to an unprecedented degree, uninterested in the materiality of their books and were far more inclined than earlier readers to overlook rather than to appreciate the bibliographic niceties Darnton enumerates. Viewed in a broader time frame, there had perhaps never been a group of readers less conscious of the quality