![]() ![]() ![]() Rose relies heavily on the power of individual anecdote and oddball incident to make his case. This is absolutely a first-rate scholarly book, but it’s not a boring, demanding one. We owe not only books as we know them to those 18th century reading obsessives, but also much of our politics. Rose’s guiding proposition is that historically, in Britain anyway, books and reading were NOT actually the exclusive purview of elites, but were appropriated by working people to further themselves in truly original and astonishing ways. Lurking beneath the bland, academic sounding title is one of the wisest, slyest, wittiest pieces of writing on books and readers I’ve ever encountered. It’s as much a “people’s history” as Howard Zinn or Studs Terkel might have done with the same material. If there’s such a thing as a community of readers, this book should be among our founding documents. ![]() (This is the old edition jacket image.) This year we're bringing out a new, larger format second edition. In 2001, Yale published a devastatingly brilliant work of social history by Jonathan Rose called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. A brief time out from obsessing over all the exciting new forthcoming books to shine a light on a deserving backlist title. ![]()
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