Stephen Orgel: The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford Textual Perspectives). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Some years ago when I was working with my colleague Gordon McMullan to compile a collection of essays in honour of Richard Proudfoot, I remember being slightly disconcerted by a phone call from Henry Woudhuysen who told me that what he really wanted to write about was the significance of blank pages in printed plays from the early modern period; he was particularly interested in pages left deliberately (and expensively) blank at the beginnings and endings of plays. Stephen Orgel is also fascinated by blank spaces in books, but his focus is on the ways in which readers use these blank spaces, including margins, filling them up with writing of their own which may or may not bear any relation to the actual content of the book. Such inscriptions have, until very recently, been regarded as a kind of vandalism which devalues books in the eyes of collectors and librarians, unless they are manuscript notes by the author or by another famous person: one might think, for example, of Herman Melville’s jottings in his copy of King Lear which show him working towards ideas he was to incorporate in Moby Dick. But Orgel, along with other scholars like William Sherman, Heidi Brayman Hackel and Jason Scott-Warren, argues that these annotations form a significant dimension of the history of any book and the role it played in the life of its readers.