The Spacious Margin: Eighteenth-Century Printed Books and the Traces of Their Readers

The Spacious Margin: Eighteenth-Century Printed Books and the Traces of their Readers draws from the holdings of the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta, presenting an array of readerly interactions with books in the form of annotations, improvements, corrections, ornamentation, and suggestive wear-and-tear. In this scholarly catalogue, Brown and Considine describe and contextualize the notable physical traces of readership and circulation for each of the 62 items displayed in the accompanying exhibition (The Spacious Margin, Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, 5 October 2012 - 15 February 2013). The result is a snapshot of the life of books and readers in the eighteenth century: in the British Isles and beyond, from the modestly literate users of well-thumbed dictionaries to learned critics of canonical poets and contemporary philosophers.