Every Book Its Reader

The starting point is a 1963 show at the British Museum that marked five hundred years of printed books. Nicholas A. Basbanes uses that event as a springboard to examine texts that shaped the course of events and captured the minds of many influential readers.

This is Basbanes's fifth book on some aspect of book culture. It asks what can be learned about well-known figures, including John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Henry James, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller, the Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler, simply by looking at what they read.

The author looks at books these people consulted, some of them annotated with their own marginal notes. Those volumes, he argues, can offer suggestive evidence of how their characters changed and how their ideas developed.