ABSTRACT
Book history, by comparison, aims to arrive at a historical sociological understanding of a work, in which certain reading events within the aesthetic frame are only a component. It focuses ‘on the material and social conditions of the production, transmission and consumption of text, rather than simply on the discursive meaning of texts’.1 In a work’s social history, other frames are involved, especially the economic. e commodity reading constructs a hypothetical yet plausible commodity response to a text, which identi es values that may have been the ones marketed at some point in the work’s commercial history. e lingual goods that the commodity reading generates acquire their value primarily not from text-internal structures, but from social relations and the context of commodity culture. ey would have little value for a literate Tarzan gure who chanced across a library.
