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Adrian Johns
32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 1 2 3 4 5
Acknowledgments ix
1 A New Science 29
Notes 429
Index 469
Acknowledgments
This book was largely written during 2020– 21 under the constraints of
the COVID-19 pandemic. But I have been thinking about the themes that
it addresses for some years— decades, in fact. I initially started reflecting
on the science of reading back in the mid-1990s, when I was a research
fellow at Downing College in Cambridge (a research fellowship is roughly
equivalent to a postdoctoral fellowship in the United States). That gave
rise to a chapter on “the physiology of reading” in my first book, The Na-
ture of the Book (1998). The period that that book dealt with was the sev-
enteenth century, however, long before modern scientific research enter-
prises came into being. Since then I have returned to the topic every so
often, wondering about how people in later times conceived of the prac-
tice and impact of reading and how their conceptions affected cultural
experiences. For the most part, those reflections took the form of talks
rather than publications. They did range increasingly widely, however,
and eventually they extended into the modern era. Once or twice I even
dared to mention neuroscience. The notion of writing in earnest about
the topic came to seem a real possibility, if still a remote one.
For the stimulus to develop all those piecemeal ideas into a book I
must thank Paula McDowell of NYU. In the spring of 2020, just days before
New York locked down, Paula ran a conference on the theme of Marshall
McLuhan as a reader, and she invited me to give a keynote speech. It was
a gamble on her part given that I had been professionally under the radar
since the death of my wife in 2016. But it worked out: I found myself bitten
ix
x Acknowledgmen ts
by the research bug once again. I followed the science of reading down a
rabbit hole, reaching back from McLuhan’s rendezvous with Samuel Ren-
shaw (for which, see chapter 7) to, at one end, James McKeen Cattell and
Edmund Burke Huey, and, at the other, the strange contemporary tech-
nology of “machine reading.” So my first gratitude is to Paula for making
possible my own version of Berlioz’s Lélio— a return to intellectual life.
It so happened that that conference happened just before I began a
period of research leave. This sabbatical, which ran from July 2020 to June
2021, occurred thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities (FEL-267420-20) and additional support from the Univer-
sity of Chicago. I am extremely grateful to both. Without the freedom to
concentrate wholly on this project without the distractions of teaching,
administration, and pandemic-avoidance, it could never have been sub-
stantially begun, let alone completed. As it was, I was able to retreat from
the world and submerge myself in the extensive and often odd literature
of the science of reading.
The first tentative version of this book was completed on the day of
the presidential election in November 2020. Karen Darling at the Univer-
sity of Chicago Press then took it in hand. She saw its potential immedi-
ately. That it eventually appeared in this form is a tribute to her editorial
prowess. She and I have worked together for some years on the Press’s
science.culture series, and it would be impossible to imagine a better col-
laborator. I am also very grateful to both the outside readers— I have no
idea who they were— to whom she sent the manuscript. They not only
agreed to read through the whole thing but also provided a number of ex-
traordinarily acute observations, both on what the text said and on what
it neglected to say. The final version has been improved immeasurably
thanks to their insights.
Other than that, my debts are mainly general ones, for conversations
undertaken over many years. It would be possible and warranted to list
hundreds of such occasions. I have been at the University of Chicago since
2001, and the community there has been a constant source of inspiration.
I am especially thankful to Bob Richards, who is a truly extraordinary hu-
man being, generous and humane to an extent that few can match. James
Evans has been a constant friend and coworker on allied topics, espe-
cially those to do with the information sciences. And although they won’t
Acknowledgmen ts xi
1
2 In troduction
ings that are enforced upon the organism in reading? Just what, indeed,
do we do, with eye and mind and brain and nerves, when we read?”1 Ap-
parently simple, these questions are in fact deep and complex; and they
are extremely difficult to answer. They require not only sophisticated psy-
chological and physiological concepts but stances on such matters as the
mind-body relationship and the nature of knowledge itself. All of science
and philosophy, we might almost say, are implicit in them. That is surely
why, Huey observed, in ancient times reading was accounted “one of the
most mysterious of the arts,” and why its operation was still accounted
“almost as good as a miracle” even in his own day. And yet, starting in
about 1870, generations of scientists did take on Huey’s questions. The Sci-
ence of Reading is about the rise and fall— and subsequent rise again— of
the enterprise these scientists created to answer them.
Huey posed those questions at the beginning of what was the first ma-
jor book in this new science to be published in America. The Psychology
and Pedagogy of Reading first appeared in 1908 and proved to have ex-
traordinary longevity. It was reissued several times in the next two de-
cades, it was reprinted again by MIT Press in 1968 as a classic of cognitive
science, and it enjoyed a new edition as recently as 2009. The volume is
valuable as a gateway into the subject of this book, not only because of
its prominence in the field, which is unrivaled, but also because Huey
was remarkably and explicitly reflective about the cultural concerns that
underpinned his new science and gave it its purpose. I shall say more
about this in chapters 1 and 2, but for now it is useful simply to call to
mind the historical distance that separates readers today from those
whom Huey investigated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. Although the questions that he posed in his research were in one
sense naturalistic— that is, they were questions about the properties of
readers considered as human beings in general, independent of time and
place— Huey was well aware that what made those questions meaning-
ful were contemporary contexts both large and small. He was writing in
the era of the first mass education and the first mass democracy. Indus-
trialization and the Gilded Age had given rise to giant capitalist institu-
tions that transformed perceptions of society and people’s places in it.
Telegraphy and telephony were transforming communications, and ra-
dio would soon do so even more. The mass-circulation newspaper was
changing how people thought about themselves, their privacy, and that
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