“Secret Lives of Readers”

Books reveal themselves. Whether they exist as print or pixels, they can be read and examined and made to spill their secrets. Readers are far more elusive. They leave traces–a note in the margin, a stain on the binding–but those hints of human handling tell us only so much. The experience of reading vanishes with the reader.But it’s not necessarily gone for good. Projects like the Reading Experience Database, based at the Open University in the U.K., and scholars like Leah Price, a professor of English at Harvard University, have set out to recover what people did with their books.”