Victorian paddy field

… Literary Review - John Sutherland on Leah Price's How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Price is fascinated by the 'thingness' of books and their occasions. She's very perceptive, for example, on evangelical 'tracts' that do-gooders such as Wilkie Collins's Miss Clack dropped, like holy hand grenades, wherever she went. And Price has a mission of her own, which extends evangelically beyond the borders of her Victorian field specialism. She wants her profession to 'get physical' which, as she sees it, means getting to grips with books as books.