Jonathan Rose > Quotes

“Historians, as Robert Darnton observed in 1980, 'want to penetrate the mental world of ordinary persons as well as philosophers, but they keep running into the vast silence that has swallowed up most of mankind's thinking.”
― Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

“Like his fellow inmates, Churchill was driven by an “earnest desire to do something, however small, for the British cause,” with one important difference: “Of course, I am a man of peace. I do not fight. But swords are not the only weapons in the world. Something may be done with a pen.”
― Jonathan Rose, The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor

“Or, to take the analogy imagined by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger in Jews and Words, the reader today who consumes “Tolstoy and Toni Morrison with his morning coffee while skimming two news sites on his electronic device and perusing the small print on his breakfast cereal package.”
― Jonathan Rose, Readers' Liberation: The Literary Agenda

“First, Andrew Carnegie would supply bricks, mortar, and even blueprints for library buildings, but local communities and librarians had to pay for and select the books on the shelves. No less critical was Melvil Dewey’s decimal system of classification: the old system of having librarians guard and fetch books from closed stacks gave way to user-friendly open stacks where readers could find books on their own—a method pioneered by Carnegie himself. The first generation of public librarians diligently kept out improper books and tried to restrict the circulation of light fiction. But by the 1920s the winds of liberalism were sweeping through American society, and second-generation librarians were more inclined to give the public what they wanted.”
― Jonathan Rose, Readers' Liberation: The Literary Agenda

“Scrapbooks allowed readers to take complete artistic control and create their own bricolage, combining text and image. In the United States they often took the form of highly idiosyncratic anthologies of poetry clipped from newspapers, back when every local newspaper published local poets.36 As a hobby, scrapbooking really took off during the Civil War, when Northerners and Southerners alike assembled their own histories of the conflict, reflecting their respective biases. Confederates naturally liked to clip reports of happy slaves proclaiming their loyalty to their masters.37 They didn’t realize that some former slaves were starting their own scrapbooks.”
― Jonathan Rose, Readers' Liberation: The Literary Agenda