Altick 1957
From Commonplace Book
Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader. University of Chicago Press, 1957. Print.
Intro
- 1 "the place of reading in an industrial and increasingly democratic society"
- "a revolutionary social concept: that of the democracy of print"
- prefiguring (influencing?) Eisenstein
- 2-3 methodological limitations of anecdotal evidence and records of bestsellers (but they have their uses too) -- the history of reading is rootedness in "the total history of the period" including political, religious, economic, and trchnological
- 3 "The history of the mass reading audience is, in fact, the history of English democracy seen from a new angle "
