ABSTRACT
Although the chief purpose of a book inscription is to express ownership, marking possession is in fact just one of its many communicative functions. Owners were often highly conscious that their books would be read by others and thus used the space provided to perform identity and social status. In this chapter, I identify the lexical and semiotic structures that individuals used to index and perform their personal, group, and social identities, enact and forge relationships with others, record private musings, and contest or perpetuate their position in Edwardian society, often through creative and transformative means. Here, I demonstrate that, with the aid of a multimodal ethnohistorical perspective, it is possible to find class-based differences in the various functions and purposes that individuals gave to their book inscriptions in Edwardian Britain.
