CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
September 1997, Vol. 39, No. 8
CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
September 1997, Vol. 39, No. 8
A History of Reading,
The substitute teacher scratched onto the blackboard four letters in hard white chalk: a "t," an "h," an "i," and an "s." She asked if we could read what she had written. Of course we couldn't! We could "read" our little books with big colorful pictures and three- and four- letter words printed in giant-sized type. But we couldn't read a bunch of letters, not without helpful pictorial hints and friendly reminders from our teacher that we had just seen the same word on the previous page. As I struggled with those letters, incredibly, they became a word. Somewhere in my young mind, the "th" sound replaced the "t" and the "h," and slid together with the "is." The word was "this!" I still remember the moment of discovery: I can read! This was different than memorizing a few common words, and I knew it. I knew that from now on, when I looked at a book, I could start with the words, instead of the pictures. I can read!
Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading will trigger similar memories for you. Maybe you will recall learning to read, being read to, teaching your children to read, or reading a favorite book. In our information age and in our information profession, we sometimes take reading for granted. Manguel does not. Nor is he a "stuffed shirt" about reading. For him reading is broadly defined. Unlike some partisans in the print vs. electronics war, he sees no conflict between reading a book in the park and reading a CD-ROM at a computer screen. In fact, he sees reading a book as being closely related to reading the stained glass windows of a cathedral, reading the signs of nature, or reading the future.
Organized by theme rather than chronology, his delightful history is both global and personal. For example, he devotes a chapter to "Being Read To." The young Manguel loved to hear what was going to happen next in the stories read to him at bedtime, but he enjoyed just as much the "luxurious sensation of being carried away by the words." That same chapter describes the practice of public readings to workers as practiced in the Cuban cigar industry in the late nineteenth century. The idea originated with cigar-maker and poet Saturnino Martinez who first wanted to publish a newspaper for cigar workers, a paper that would include news and politics, but also poems, short stories, science, etc. to enlighten the workers. When illiteracy prevented wide circulation of his paper, he proposed that cigar workers be read to on the job. He received assistance from a local high school, as well as the support of a factory owner and the laborers. The experiment was so popular that cigar factory readings of newspapers, histories, and books of all types rapidly spread throughout Cuba. When an independence movement sprang up on the colonial island, the Spanish authorities banned the readings as subversive, and drove them underground. Later, migrating Cuban workers carried the public reading tradition to the U.S. where the readers added dramatic effects to their readings in order to enhance interest and comprehension.
A theme that runs throughout the diverse chapters is the power of the reader to understand and interpret what he reads based on his own experience and on everything else he has read. For Manguel, no reader ever returns to the same page he has read before because the reader brings to it understanding and ideas that differ from those he brought to his first reading. People read in order to understand themselves and the world around them. Martinez initiated the cigar factory readings to help the workers see beyond the walls of their factories. The Spanish government outlawed the readings to keep the workers "illiterate" and uninformed about the independence movement. The history of reading is a history of similar tensions: religious communities carefully selecting texts for their members and prescribing strictly orthodox interpretations, plantation owners harshly punishing slaves who tried to learn to read and anyone who sought to teach them, even the library that "tyrannizes" the act of reading by forcing "the reader ... to rescue the book from the [classification system] category to which it has been condemned.(p. 199)."
Manguel ends his history with a World War II photograph of a heavily damaged library. Inside the shaky looking structure are several patrons who are searching the shelves for reading materials. Viewing the photograph, you cannot help but wonder if these folks have taken leave of their senses. But then, with Manguel's help, you realize that these are people who need to find meaning in a world that has taken leave of its senses. The tensions, pressures, and demands of our world should not keep us from reading, rather they should drive us to the bookshelves in search of understanding.
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