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This book is about the process of how we became bookish at the turn of the nineteenth century. It asks what we did with books and what books did to us when there were suddenly too many books. As historians of the book have shown, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a dramatic expansion in the number and circulation of printed books across Europe and North America. It was a period that saw the rise of a variety of social practices and spaces centered around the organization of books, whether it was the emergence of the public lending library, the private family library, the reading club, or the expansion of gift-giving rituals involving books.
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