I consider myself a reader, also if the book consists of mainly pictures.
The title 'Book users' immediately made me think of people altering the books while they read them (underlining, dog earing, using books to make other objects out of them).
I've just shared this with another PhD student in my office, who's thinking about engagement with memory texts! As I work on drama, I usually default to thinking about a reading "audience" but I really like your points about "using" texts, and what this means for different types of printed works. Thank you!
My theater studies background makes me think about audiences a lot, too, but then I started wondering about the ways in which some readers and some users are not the intended audience or how they read/use books in ways that are outside of the creators' intents. Judith Fetterly's resistant reading, but also turning a collected works of Gower into a place to copy in the margins deeds and family history. Or even more extreme, cutting up and defacing religious works to remake them into something else! That didn't feel like audience to me. But I still find audience a useful concept as a way of discussing how the creators of a work (writers and printers/publishers) imagine how it will be used.
I consider myself a reader, also if the book consists of mainly pictures.
The title 'Book users' immediately made me think of people altering the books while they read them (underlining, dog earing, using books to make other objects out of them).
I've just shared this with another PhD student in my office, who's thinking about engagement with memory texts! As I work on drama, I usually default to thinking about a reading "audience" but I really like your points about "using" texts, and what this means for different types of printed works. Thank you!
My theater studies background makes me think about audiences a lot, too, but then I started wondering about the ways in which some readers and some users are not the intended audience or how they read/use books in ways that are outside of the creators' intents. Judith Fetterly's resistant reading, but also turning a collected works of Gower into a place to copy in the margins deeds and family history. Or even more extreme, cutting up and defacing religious works to remake them into something else! That didn't feel like audience to me. But I still find audience a useful concept as a way of discussing how the creators of a work (writers and printers/publishers) imagine how it will be used.
Handlers or wrasslers? I like the idea of the book as a troublesome diva that needs handling or wrangling. Also, Handlyng Synne.
oh, I like wrasslers! Some of those books really are divas. Maybe I'll start calling my curator friends book wrasslers....