On Brains on Books

“De Hamel’s book [The Manuscripts Club] is a group biography, reaching back to the Middle Ages and forward to the 20th century, of the old and affable brotherhood (and sisterhood) of manuscript lovers... Another new book out this season, Adrian Johns’s The Science of Reading, pairs curiously well as a bookend with de Hamel’s to the act of reading. Johns seeks to explain how we read; de Hamel seeks to explain why... Reading shapes the thinking of book lovers in ways that go beyond merely what they read. I remember sitting, in college, in a lecture that the professor was giving extemporaneously, without notes. At one point, he said, ‘As I said above…’ He was writing the words in his head as he spoke, or at least he was moving through his ideas spatially as one would down a page. Was this oral culture, written culture, or a mix of the two? If we can’t separate the dancer from the dance, what hope do we have of separating reading from the reader?”

Elyse Graham, “This Is Your Brain on Books,” - https://www.publicbooks.org/this-is-your-brain-on-books/. I relied on De Hamel and Johns both in my last monograph as there is much to be admired in their approaches to book history.