"Books reveal themselves" he says, " Whether they exist as print or pixels, they can be read and examined and made to spill their secrets. Readers are far more elusive. They leave traces—a note in the margin, a stain on the binding—but those hints of human handling tell us only so much. The experience of reading vanishes with the reader."
So how do we recover the reading experiences of the past? Lately scholars have stepped up the hunt for evidence of how people over time have interacted with books, newspapers, and other printed material.
"You're looking for teardrops on the page," says Leah Price, a professor of English at Harvard University and the author of How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton University Press, 2012). "You're looking for some hard evidence of what the book did to its reader"—and what the reader did with the book.
It's a tricky business. A bibliographer works with hard physical evidence—a manuscript, a printed book, a copy of the Times of London. A scholar seeking to pin down the readers of the past often has to read between the lines. Marginalia can be a gold mine of information about a book's owners and readers, but it's rare. "Most of the time, most readers historically didn't, and still don't, write in their books," Price explains. But even a book's apparent lack of use can be read as evidence. "The John F. Kennedy Library here in Boston owns a copy of Ulysses whose pages—other than a few at the very beginning and very end—are completely uncut,” she says. “This tells us something about the owner of the copy—who happens to be Ernest Hemingway.The history of reading," Price says, "really has to encompass the history of not reading."
Anyone who has ever displayed a trophy volume on the coffee table knows that people do many things with books besides read them. A book can be deployed as a sign of intellectual standing or aspiration. It can be used to erect a social barrier between spouses at a breakfast table or strangers on a train. It can be taken apart and recycled or turned into art. 
For every Pepys or Johnson or Woolf there were thousands of people just ... reading. 
Of special interest were commonplace books, Eliot says, referring to the miscellanies or scrapbooks people often kept to help them remember intriguing or useful tidbits they'd read. Commonplace books were especially popular in the days when paper was still scarce and expensive, before a mid-19th-century revolution in papermaking technology caused manufacturers to switch to cheaper, readily available wood pulp. "Sometimes people just copied out huge chunks of a novel, because they couldn't afford to buy it," Eliot says.
British newspapers have turned out to be sources of valuable information about reading circumstances and how they could turn deadly. "One account in the Times describes a woman in her bedroom, dressed for bed, reading a play, and the candle caught her hair, and she was found severely burned," Eliot says. "In fact it was suggested she wouldn't survive the day."Today's readers, at least in the West, tend not to fret about having something to read and light enough to read by, "because books are so cheap and light is so cheap," Eliot says. British readers of earlier eras were not so lucky. Unless they could afford oil lamps or beeswax candles, they had to deal with messy, smelly candles made from tallow. Those imperfect sources of light required frequent trimming and were a fire hazard. Under such circumstances, "reading has to be choreographed," Eliot says. "You have to stop and trim" the wick as well as avoid setting yourself on fire

Price sketches out a broad, shifting range of uses for books that go beyond just reading. 

 Because paper was expensive and therefore precious in early 19th-century Britain, people reused and recycled it. Books might be unbound and their pages used to make dress patterns, line trunks, or wrap pies. What began as text might end up as toilet paper. As a result, Price says, "even people who are illiterate for reasons of rank or sex still have a very sophisticated, fine-grained taxonomy of paper." Mayhew reports, for instance, that food vendors preferred certain newspapers because of the absorbent or repellent characteristics of the newsprint.
As texts circulated, they triggered class and social anxieties. An upper-class employer might worry that if she touched a book her maid had touched, she'd be sullied by the implied contact. "There have to be as many intermediaries between the master's body and the servant's body" as possible, Price explains. Think of the ritual of delivering letters on a tray.
After 1850, the rise of public libraries brought readers of different classes into closer contact. It set off debates about what reading matter was suitable for the public, Price says. Some libraries blacked out the racing pages of newspapers so as not to promote gambling, for example.
Victorians also worried about books as vectors of disease—"that question of where has that library book been," Price says. Proposals circulated for book-disinfecting machines to be installed at libraries. "It was mainly, if you pardon the pun, vaporware," she says. "But there were a lot of prototypes designed."
Easier access to reading material created other class-related strains, too, though not the ones Price expected. "I had expected, going into the project, that middle-class gentlemen would be worrying about their servants getting their hands on political tracts," she says. She discovered they were more concerned about time theft. Hours spent reading, even something like the Bible, were hours not spent dusting or doing other chores. Conduct books for women and girls, too, warned their readers against letting books distract from caretaking duties.
Sometimes employers inflicted unwelcome reading matter on their servants. A mistress might press a religious tract on her maid. "These are offers that you can't refuse," Price says. "One of the things that surprised me about the kinds of human relationships that are brokered by books in this period is that you see a pretty dramatic shift from the beginning of the 19th century." Early on, there was the sense that books were a precious commodity. By century's end, she says, there's a feeling "that books are something foisted or forced on inferiors by their social superiors."
Texts might be invitations to unwelcome contact, or markers used to define household boundaries. In romantic relationships, books played the part of matchmakers or match-breakers. "On the one hand, you have the book being used in courtship—a gentleman giving a copy to a lady that he's picked out for her, perhaps with certain passages underlined for her particular attention," Price says. "But on the other hand, you have the book as a wedge—the husband and wife who are ignoring each other at the breakfast table," one buried in her novel, the other in his newspaper.
Victorians used texts to keep each other at arm's length in nonromantic spheres, too. With the spread of public transportation, "the newspaper grows up with the commuter rail as a way of avoiding eye contact," Price says. Like modern subway or bus riders losing themselves in their iPhones, 19th-century commuters could virtually escape the madding crowd by putting up a wall of paper between other people and themselves. "The Victorians were using books very much the way we use smartphones," as a kind of "Do Not Disturb" sign, Price says.
As the century wore on, paper itself became something to escape. "If someone is standing on the street corner handing out religious pamphlets, you don't want to take it," whereas in earlier decades you might have welcomed any free scrap of paper, Price says. She points out that, along with the shift from rag-based to wood-based papermaking, changes in the British tax system made paper much cheaper. That in turn made it more economical for publishers of books, newspapers, and pamphlets to print and sell their wares.
Reforms in the mail system midcentury also made it cheaper to distribute the new abundance of paper. The postal reformers "wanted to democratize knowledge," she says. But they "didn't foresee that this wonderful new postal system would be used primarily to distribute catalogs" and other ephemera. As Price says, the Victorians "really invented what we now call spam."
Echoes of Victorians' shifting attitudes toward text carry over into this era of digital reading. The 19th century had its cheap paper; we have ever more electronic content. As it did with the Victorians, abundance changes how we as a culture treat the physical book. For every bibliophile who worships the physical codex as an objet d'art, there's someone waiting to turn it to novel or irreverent purposes. 
Then as now, devaluing the object sometimes creates more emphasis on content. "Going back to the 19th century makes you realize that a phenomenon we tend to blame on digitization actually happened a century earlier," Price says. "Once you can throw it away, the value of books comes to reside in the words they contain rather than their potential for reuse."