Talking with Books

Extract

In his ‘Postscript’ toThe Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco famously concluded that ‘books talk among themselves’, summing up the postmodern sense in which texts forever exceed the bounds of both authorial intention and reader interpretation. Three centuries earlier, Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704) had imagined them not only talking but violently quarrelling over their respective merits.

Such accounts have a touch of the uncanny because they elide the human agent, implying that the contents of our libraries may be talking not only among themselves but behind our backs. If the title of Abigail Williams’s The Social Life of Books suggests this kind of papery whispering, however, the subtitle – Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home – puts humans squarely back into the picture. This is, in fact, not the social life of books but the social life of readers; or rather, of people for whom reading, and the discussion of reading, forms one part of the social glue that binds them to others and enables them to define themselves.