What do John Keats’s Shakespeare, Wordsworth’s library catalog, and Victor Hugo’s commonplace book have in common with primers and spellers and other historical materials on learning to read? Each item is among the 1,200 books and manuscripts–comprising more than 250,000 web-accessible pages–now discoverable online in Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History. Developed by Harvard’s Open Collections Program with generous support from the Arcadia Fund, Reading is an online exploration of the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard Libraries. A great deal of Houghton Library material is included on this site. Nine of fifteen highlights, for example, are from our collections.
Reading
