THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 61
waggish doodles—a bagpiping mon-
key, a knight jousting with a snail. Mar-
ginalia can record boredom, distraction,
and mental drift, or even the refusal to
read: in my used copy of John Milton’s
“Comus,” the text is covered in elabo-
rate calligraphic “Z”s, to denote snor-
ing. (The classroom doodle ought to
be recognized as a special genre of il-
lustration.) Some scribbles in books act
as a warning against reading. In grad
school, I came upon a copy of the scholar
Newton Arvin’s great study of Haw-
thorne in Harvard’s Lamont Library.
Arvin, like Hester Prynne, the heroine
of “The Scarlet Letter,” was persecuted
for perceived sexual deviancy. He was
arrested by the Massachusetts State Po-
lice and forced to retire by Smith Col-
lege, his reputation ruined. On the title
page of the book, under his name, was
a reader’s inscription accusing him of
“dealing in pornography, homosexual-
ity + intercourse with Animals.” (This
last charge was purely apocryphal.)
Later, another reader came to his de-
fense in the margins: “So what?” The
book is still in the stacks.
P
rice, who has taught English at
Cambridge, Harvard, and Rutgers
universities, is the founding director of
the Rutgers Book Initiative, a wide-
ranging venture that promotes book
history at universities and libraries. She
is not an elegist for print: her extraor-
dinary grasp of every development in
book history, from incunabula to beach
reads, monasteries to bookmobiles, sug-
gests that a love of printed matter need
not be a form of nostalgia. She warns of
the danger of turning books into a “bun-
ker,” a place to wait out the onslaught
of digital life. Print, she reminds us, was
itself once a destabilizing technology.
In Price’s radical view, a book might
act something like a switchboard, con-
necting readers who connect to it.
Though Price’s title riffs on the famous
Raymond Carver short-story collection,
substituting “books” for “love,” the most
important word is, in fact, “talk.” Her
book, and my review, and the attention
you bring to both, are examples of the
very kind of “talk” across every conceiv-
able platform that Price finds so plen-
tiful and so encouraging in the digital
age. What we now possess, in her mostly
cheery view, are “places and times” in
which readers can “have words with one
another.” These infrastructures, as Price
calls them, do more to “shape reading”
than “whether we read in print or on-
line or in some as-yet-unimagined me-
dium.” And these reading infrastruc-
tures are more varied and more durable
than ever before, even if people are read-
ing on their devices. The important
thing is the “interactions through which
we get our hands on books,” as well as
those that “awaken a desire for them.”
As Price notes, many old-fashioned
infrastructures are enjoying an unlikely
comeback, sometimes by baiting the
trap: libraries now get people in the
door by loaning lawnmowers, croquet
sets, cake pans, and other nonliterary
essentials. Public libraries, which be-
came common in the mid-nineteenth
century, “form a testing ground for hopes
and fears about civic connection,” like
public pools. Also like public pools, they
call up a recent past when not every cit-
izen was welcomed. Books themselves
were viewed by some Victorians as dan-
gerous vehicles of contagion. Certain
libraries still have the weird antiseptic
feeling of a hospital ward. And they
tend to reproduce the hierarchies of
whatever community they serve. In
her poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars,”
Tracy K. Smith imagines outer space as
a utopian “library in a rural commu-
nity” where the segregationist past is re-
jected and the pencils are “gnawed on
by the entire population.” If you’re driv-
ing through, say, Peacham, Vermont,
and want to see what the community
values, the bulletin board at the little li-
brary is the best place to start.
Independent bookstores—which
suffered under the proliferation of giant
Barnes & Noble and Borders stores in
the nineties, then again with the tri-
umph of Amazon—are now on the rise
in much of the United States. They sur-
vive partly on popular—and lucrative—
authors’ readings. These events have the
effect of making an object often prized
because it is perfectly standardized and
reproducible into a unique keepsake. A
visiting author signs piles of books that
then usually cannot be returned to the
publisher. The signature makes the book
simultaneously worthless and priceless;
most good bookstores have signed cop-
ies on their shelves for this reason. In-
evitably, these signed copies, possessions
that can only exist in the world of ob-
jects, appear on social media.
While many say that they seek ref-
uge in books, they document their es-
capes online, and that, in turn, feeds
other readers’ appetites for real, authen-
tic, one-off events. And authors have
learned how to put on a social-me-
dia-ready show. I’ve noted that more
and more writers now borrow from
rock stars the accoutrements of the
“tour,” including set lists, promotional
posters, T-shirts, and other merchan-
dise, which they publicize on Twitter
and Instagram and sell on their Web
sites; after reading, they pose for selfies
at bars or cafés.
Yet, because brick-and-mortar stores
exist in part to provide the sort of one-
time experiences that go viral online,
virtual infrastructures are newly defini-
tive. On Twitter, the book recommen-
dations whiz past at a furious clip; it’s
always somebody’s publication day, or
a book’s birthday; fans tweet out poems
to mark a poet’s death, or to chart an
emerging voice through the wilds of
magazine publication.
As on the Internet at large, social
media has brought back from the dead
much arcana from pre-digital culture.
During Pride Month, Instagram and
Twitter users were posting images of
pulp novels like “Hot Pants Homo” and
“Blow Boy.” On any given day, you can
find photographic outtakes from W. G.
Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn” along-
side video clips of James Baldwin on
“The Dick Cavett Show.” After Notre-
Dame burned, an old photo of Sylvia
Plath in front of the cathedral, wearing
a tartan skirt, made the rounds. You can
buy that very skirt for twelve thousand
five hundred pounds at the Second Shelf,
a London rare-books shop devoted to
books by women, whose Twitter feed
features luscious images of first editions
by Iris Murdoch and Daphne du Mau-
rier. The shop itself, in Soho, looks ador-
able, its print catalogue is sumptuous—
but social media knits all these experiences
together, and makes them to some de-
gree indistinguishable.
P
rice’s book about books reads like
an anthology of ironies, including
several that pertain directly to it. This
book is self-consciously shaped by, and
susceptible to, its own account of how
