WQ AUTUMN 1989
Reading is reading is reading, as Gertrude Stein might have said. Medieval monks reading the Bible aloud, a subway commuter scanning the New York Daily News, Mao Zedong perusing Marx's Capital-all, it may seem, are engaged in the same activity. But is it the same? Robert Darnton thinks not. Reading has a history, he argues. Here he examines the act of reading in Europe and Amer- ica as it has changed over four centuries. How people read can be more revealing than what they read....