Margaret Willes

As a work of historical scholarship, this is without question a first-rate, five-star book. It is exhaustively researched and documented. My review is highly subjective, and reflects what I found to be some tedious and repetitious aspects of the prose and narrative. I have fussed over my assessment of this book for the past couple of days, and in the end decided to qualify my less than complimentary "stars" rating with one simple fact: Margaret Willes is a first-rate historian, and a first rate prose stylist as well, but who could, I think, in this book, benefited from more judicious editing. As one perspicacious reviewer says below, this book is "UK-centric," which may have been another obstacle to my full enjoyment of this fine book.… (meer)

In 'Reading Matters', Margaret Willes explores the history of reading - or, because history is fundamentally based on records, the history of people buying books. In 9 chapters, chronologically arranged from the 15th to the 20th century, she tells the stories of several booklovers and the libraries they built during their lives. Some of the chapters are centered on notorious bibliophiles (Samuel Pepys, Thomas Jeffersen or John Soane), but others start from less familiar territory (Bess of Hardwick, for example). We meet not only the book collectors but also their families, friends, booksellers and occasionally publishers. The chapter on former defence secretary Denis Healey and his wife Edna for example also chronicles the rise of the pocket book in the 20th century.
Although anekdotes form an important part of the book, 'Reading Matters' is far from anekdotal. The author succeeds in giving a vivid description of 'what it must have been like' to buy books in, say, the Georgian era - if you were a rich baronet, that is. The common reader is generally (though not completely) underrepresented, which may of course be caused by the scarcity of sources but also by the tendency of the author to look for her historic readers in libraries managed by the National Trust. Anyone looking for information on the so-called 'common reader' will be better of reading William St.Clairs masterpiece 'The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period' (which, by the way, encompasses the whole period from the late 15th up to the early 20th century). Let there be no doubt, however, that they will find more pleasure in Margaret Willis' 'Reading Matters'.… (meer)