I founded and direct the Initiative for the Book. When I’m not setting type at the Scarlet Letterpress, I teach courses on the novel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, and book history.
My books include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Basic Books, 2019, Ukrainian translation 2020; Christian Gauss Prize); How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton UP, 2012; Patten Prize, Channing Prize, honorable mention for James Russell Lowell Prize) and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge UP, 2000). I also edited Further Reading (with Matthew Rubery, Oxford UP 2020), Unpacking my Library: Writers and their Books (Yale UP, 2011); Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (with Pamela Thurschwell); and (with Seth Lerer) a cluster of essays of PMLA on The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature.
I write for the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe and Public Books (where I am also a section editor: pitch me). My research on the history of reading has been profiled in The New Yorker, The Economist, New York Times Book Review and the New York Times. I enjoy helping students and members of public to make something — a piece of paper, an essay, an idea — and I hope you’ll come to Scarlet Letterpress open studio hours to talk about what you’d like to make.