Book Review: "The Nature Of The Book"

The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making by Adrian Johns
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked this book up four or five years ago while on vacation, but just got around to reading it in the last month. I want to like this and recommend it, I really do. But alas, I cannot. It's 650 pages of small font text, very difficult to read. I love books about books and printing (my dad was a printer), but this is so difficult I can't read it. I struggled through to page 46 before quitting. On page 45, in close proximity, were the words interlocutors, prolix, and otiose. I'm not stupid, but I only knew one of those words without looking it up. And other pages are pretty much the same.

The introduction runs through page 58. I'm stopping at page 46. I read the words, try hard to concentrate, but the writing is so involved and the concepts so difficult to grasp, that I'm not comprehending.

I shall put this on the shelf, and revisit it in my retirement, when, hopefully, my mind will be able to concentrate and, with The Nature of the Book and a good dictionary in the other, and with my mind less cluttered than it is now, I'll be able to make more sense of this. On to something else.


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