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“... Stenography is dying out; so are stenographers. When I mention that I’m working on the history of shorthand, people tell me that their mother knew shorthand, or their grandmother, or their husband’s first wife. Google ‘stenography’ and you’ll find obituaries from small-town newspapers. Only bloggers now use the word, the new media’s name for what the old media do: shorthand, so to speak, for the charge that the newspapers and TV networks merely parrot press releases ...”

“... The primal scene of Marginalia takes place at a book-signing by the children’s writer Maurice Sendak. Pushed to the front of the queue by his star-struck parents, a boy begs Sendak not to ‘crap up my book’. Jackson’s central question – are marginalia crap? – has no simple answer, for her study uncovers our passionate ambivalence about unauthorised writing ...”

“... The ideal reader is all mind. Swept up in a virtual universe, she no longer notices hunger, heat or cold. Real readers are different. They need eyes to see the page and hands to turn it. Some lick their thumbs; others, like Sheridan’s Lady Slattern, ‘cherish their nails for the convenience of making marginal notes’. Some leave distracting, even disgusting residues ...”

“... Since Arthur Conan Doyle’s own lifetime, every mystery novelist applying to join the Detection Club in London has been required to forswear ‘Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo and Jiggery-Pokery’ along with ‘Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors and Chinamen’. Conan Doyle himself never did. In 1917, with a lacklustre medical career and three decades of best-selling Sherlock Holmes stories behind him, he announced that he had received messages from the dead ...”

“... Anthologies attract good haters. In the 1790s, the reformer Hannah More blamed their editors for the decay of morals: to let people assume that you had read the entire work from which an anthology piece was excerpted, she warned girls, was no better than lying outright. In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition of the Working Class in England to sneer at the anthologies littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie ...”

“... What exactly is book history? Literature students consulting their reference libraries would be hard put to find an answer: ‘history of the book’ appears nowhere in M.H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms or Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the names most ubiquitous in The Book History Reader, Roger Chartier and D ...”

“... to the rise of the middle class or to emergent forms of subjectivity – the discours du jour – Leah Price looks at novels in relation to the history of the book, and to the proliferation of anthologies in particular. It is a refreshing change: most histories and theories of ‘the’ novel have not been very curious about what and how distinct ...”

“... they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in literature, film and other cultural forms, of those who do write – manuscripts and ...”

“... pantofles’), ‘so they be not … mangy at the toes, like an ape about the mouth’. As Leah Price showed recently in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, we can do many things to books other than read them. Today we’re inclined to see such losses as unfortunate, even criminal, but early modern bibliophiles were quite happy for ...”

“... normally a fat book reader, you mustn’t be outfaced by the fatness of Illywhacker, nor by the price, which is hardly a fat book price, especially when the fat book is as comely as this one. Indeed, all the signs are that this is a book the publishers believe in. They’ve put their production values where their blurb ...”

“... it shouldn’t be this hot.’ The book begins with a woman called Shar scamming a woman called Leah Hanwell out of £30, then in a sort of Joycean pastiche, follows Leah for the rest of the summer. The next section is a series of comic set-pieces tracking a man called Felix on the late summer day when he ends up being ...”

“... of CREATIVE LIBRARIANS, PRACTITIONERS ALL … OF THE POETRY CURE’. Drawing on recent work by Leah Price, Bucknell looks more widely at ways in which poetry and literature have become medicalised in recent years. Books can be prescribed, poetry taken not just as a spoonful of sugar but as the medicine itself.‘Medicinal verse,’ Bucknell ...”

“... down on the grass himself while several others stripped him and pinned his spatchcocked legs for Price to apply the polish to his genitals.’ This victim passes the test. He emerges ‘naked, grinning and pale. In the middle of his white body was the shocking sight of his black, oiled penis, his thighs blotchy with scarlet finger marks.’ But others do ...”

“... of pleasure-taking, vacuous, escapist and pernicious. Combine this with the shyly smiling face of Leah Betts, who took ‘just one tablet’ on her 18th birthday and promptly died, and you have a powerful story. Here is a drug that transforms your daughter from a well brought-up girl into a banshee nymphet, and in the process could very possibly kill her: a ...”

“... on my year abroad in Paris, and reminded me of the importance of going beyond oneself even at the price of failure; On Beauty appeared the year I came to London and began working for the LRB, and I bought it in hardback and discussed it at a book group and even stole a placard of its very pretty cover from a Booker Prize party I snuck into; NW I read in a ...”