A History of Reading
by Steven Roger Fischer

Reviewed by Surya Bowyer

They seem strange, these words of ours. These words I write; these words you read. Strange how direct our relationship feels given it crosses an insurmountable gap, between my now and yours. These words provide a glimpse, yet our temporalities will never – can never – coincide. How strange it is to be read.

“Writing freezes the moment.” Steven Roger Fischer writes these words in the preface to the new edition of A History of Reading, a book first published in 2003, then reprinted a couple of times, and now – my now, 2019 – republished in an updated edition. The book is the third in an ambitious trilogy. Fischer’s previous two books tell the History of Language (1999) and History of Writing (2001). This final instalment, whose aim is to tell “the complete story of reading from the age when symbol first became sign through to the electronic texts of the present day,” is the longest of the three.

Many crossovers between the three histories become apparent as one reads through Fischer’s accounts; indeed, Fischer begins his History of Reading by teasing out a definition of writing. The issue here, Fischer tells us, is that by attaching a limiting definition to “something that defies limitation, the wonder of writing,” we can never do it justice. Fischer settles on the “working model” of complete writing, which is defined as being formed of artificial marks which relate to articulate speech. In other words, writing as we think of it today. “Complete writing,” Fischer tells us, “was a long time coming.” Before its arrival, many cultures used indexical symbols to represent quantities, like five pebbles for five sheep. While these could be said to have been “read” by those using them, Fischer does not spend too much time here; his account really gets going once “sign became sound” in Mesopotamia around 6,000 years ago.

Fischer’s book shares its title with a slightly earlier book (1996) by Alberto Manguel. Fischer cites his forerunner forty-six times. On two occasions, Fischer quotes Manguel’s argument; the remaining forty-four citations are Fischer retelling historical episodes previously charted by Manguel. This is not to say that these two Histories are isomorphic. Manguel’s book is thematic: each chapter might just as well stand alone as an essay. Fischer, conversely, presents a broadly chronological account of the development of reading. The chapter titles outline his partitioning of reading’s history into distinct movements: “The Immortal Witness,” “The Papyrus Tongue,” “The Parchment Eye,” “The Printed Page,” “The Universal Conscience.”

Fischer peppers his History with the verb to read in various languages: Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Japanese, Old English, Middle High German. In doing so, he makes clear the polyvalence the verb has held. The Sumerian šita also meant “to consider,” the Greek anagignōskō “to convince,” the Hebrew qara’ “to proclaim.” Today we might speak of reading a painting. Reading meant different things to difference cultures, and has always been tied up with other concepts, other verbs.

One verb in particular gets special attention from Fischer: eating. From Ezekiel’s Old Testament account of Yahweh instructing him to “Open thy mouth, and eat [the words] that I give thee,” to the Feast of Shavuout initiation where students lick honey off a slate in an act symbolising the ingesting of the holy letters, Fischer shows the importance of the reading-food metaphor to the Jewish faith. In both of these examples, words are something salubrious to be ingested. Yet the metaphor has many iterations. Queen Elizabeth I affirms she eats the “goodlie greene herbes of sentences” by reading them. Frances Bacon writes of tasting, swallowing, chewing, or digesting books, dependent on their type. In William Congreve’s Love for Love, the servant Jeremy mocks his employer: “You’ll grow devilish fat upon this paper diet.” Fischer shows how the relationship between reading and eating has recurred throughout human history, to the extent that “reading became food itself”. Indeed, just like eating, many of us now view reading as something we should do every day for our health.

Fischer’s book is marketed as a global history of reading, but in fact it is a largely Western-centric account. Chapter Three, “A World of Reading,” opens with the sentence: “For most of its history, Western reading remained one small chapter of the greater tome.” And yet in this “history of reading,” Fischer himself squeezes the “World” of non-Western reading into one small chapter. Fischer does include the Sumerians, Mesopotamians, and Ancient Egyptians when recounting reading's origins in chapter one, and Islamic manuscript traditions crop up a number of times later in the book. Yet for the majority of its pages, this book is the History of Reading in and near Europe. This means that chapter three has an unreasonable amount of work to do, something not helped by its relatively short extent: forty-six pages out of a main body that spans three hundred and seventy-eight. Geographically eclectic –– with sections covering China, Korea, Japan, the Americas, and India –– the chapter departs from the book's wider chronology, spanning a time period from 1400 BC to the twenty-first century. As a result, it sits awkwardly in relation to the book as a whole. Again, this would hardly be noteworthy if A History of Reading did not claim to trace “the complete story of reading from the age when symbol first became sign through to the electronic texts of the present day.”

To make these criticisms is not to dismiss the book as a whole. Indeed, the grand narrative that Fischer constructs, while admittedly Western-centric, is an impressive feat. Moreover, it is often in the smaller details, the intervening moments, that the book is at its most enjoyable. Joel Fineman, in his essay “The History of the Anecdote,” suggests that the anecdote ruptures expansive historical narratives as a result of it being oppositional to such narratives. And the opposition between anecdote and broad overview is in fact central to Fischer’s History. The reader may notice that one anecdote sheds light on others, creating moments which collectively go against the grain of the book’s larger grand narrative. It is these counter-narratives which linger longest in the mind after one has closed the cover for the final time.

One of the most striking of these counter-narratives is the belief that some writing holds power in and of itself, without any need of a reader. Monumental Roman funerary inscriptions portrayed rank and respectability through their appearance, being seen but seldom actually read. In the mid-eighth century AD, the Japanese Empress Kōken ordered the printing of one million Buddhist charms; the project took six years to complete, and not one of the resulting scrolls was intended to be read. During the first millennium BC, in Nippur (now Iraq), people bought clay bowls adorned with Aramaic inscriptions. These inscriptions were not intended for humans, but rather for mischievous spirits: it was believed that by reading the inscriptions the spirits would become trapped under the bowl. Sumerians may have grown devilish fat from the food contained within the bowl, but never from the goodlie greene herbes inscribed into it. Fischer reminds us that nowadays most office workers read for a living, and the only activity they spend more hours doing is sleeping. Modern readers may, as a result, find writing not intended for a human audience a difficult notion to grasp. How strange it is to be read, sure – but how strange it is also not to be read. They are strange, these words of ours.