The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries Book

This book belongs to the category I call "complicators" in which the author tries to show the complexity of a subject in opposition to what he or she sees as oversimplified versions by other authors. Ironically, Chartier could have achieved this with great simplicity.

"Inventorying titles, categorizing works, and attributing texts were all operations that made it possible to set the world of the written word in order." vii

"[R]eading, by definition, is rebellious and vagabond." Viii

"Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (one forgets oneself and also forgets), it does not keep what it acquires, or does it poorly, and each of the places through which it passes is a repetition of the lost paradise." 1 [quoting Michel de Certeau]

"Whereas the mere possession of a book had long signified cultural difference, with the conquests of printing, reading postures and typographical objects were gradually invested with that function." 16


"…two propositions of Michel de Certeau. The first recalls, against all reductive attempts to deny the creative and inventive force of practice, that reading is never totally constraint and that it cannot be deduced from the texts it makes use of. The second stresses that the readers' tactics, insinuated in the lieu propre (place of their own) produced by the strategies of writing, obey rules, follow logical systems, and imitate models." 23

"In the tradition of the social history/of print as it has developed in France, books have readers but they do not have authors'or more precisely, authors do not enter into that history's domain of competence: they are wholly the province of literary history and its time-honoured genres'biography, the study of a school or a current, or the description of an intellectual milieu." 27-8

"Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors…to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive." 30 [quoting Foucault]