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Quote by Leah Price

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Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books

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Author

Leah Price
Leah Price

Leah Price (born October 6, 1970) is a scholar specializing in literary studies, book history, and reading culture. Her work explores the interaction between the material form of books and textual meaning, as well as how reading practices shape social and individual identities. Known for her interdisciplinary approach, Price combines literary criticism, history, and cultural studies to analyze books and reading from the 18th century to the present. She has taught at several prestigious universities and authored influential works, including How to Read a Book and The History of the Book. Her research extends beyond academia, influencing public understanding of reading through lectures and media commentary. Price's contributions redefine the study of books as cultural objects, emphasizing their materiality, circulation, and reception history. She is considered a leading figure in book history. more

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“There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature--poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve.”

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Book:Saturday Papers: Essays on Literature from The Literary Review
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“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

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Book:On the Incarnation
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