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Original scientific paper

Readers, books and texts: shapes of interaction

Zoran Velagić ; Department of Information Sciences faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Osijek, Croatia


Full text: croatian pdf 372 Kb

page 337-345

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Abstract

The goal of this paper is to show different shapes of
readers’ interaction with books and texts, mostly from the
19th century, by using a limited source material, 156 books
published until 1835 from the private library of Herman
Weissmann held in the library of the Museum of Slavonia
in Osijek. The research has been encouraged by a relatively
large number of readers’ ‘’traces’’ in books from the Weissmann
collection in relation to those books that are preserved
in monastery and other public libraries. Weissmann
repurchased the books from private owners so it is assumed
that the individuals as owners treated the books freer and
more intimate than their readers in libraries.
Since the research of readers’ habits is rather a new
field within a book history, the authors innovatively approach
the researching of interaction forms and consider separately
a relation towards a book as an item and the relation
towards its content as a cultural heritage. Consequently this
paper analyses the interaction between the owner/reader
and a book as a medium (ownership mark, books’ curses,
dedications, letters and messages, personal notes) and the
interaction of a reader with the text or content (notes along
the text, a content structure and textual supplements).
The analysed interaction forms show that persons
of different reading skills had different relations towards
the book and its content – from mere ownership marking
to text dissecting with comments, underlining, and in rare
cases correcting – thus the interaction research reveals a
text significance in a society, referring to a reader-book relationship,
it reveals what the book meant to the owner/or
reader etc.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

95659

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/95659

Publication date:

20.5.2010.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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