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and highly personal representation of a rich diaspora print culture, and in it we find the names of most of the notable individuals in Irish American writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, whether authors, translators, or publishers. The appendix lists the books known to have been in the possession of Connary and his family. This accumulation of books cannot be said to be truly representative of publishing output and collecting trends, but it nonetheless gives a good impression of the types of reading programs that helped shape the flourishing of Catholic communities in the decades following the first wave of Irish immigration into America.

      This archive of books and annotations provides occasional glimpses of a systematic and attentive reader, one who is stirred devotionally and enabled theologically from repeated, in-depth reading. Such productive exchange between text and reader will be highlighted in this study, which is in part motivated by the observation that much current book history and readership study gives very little sustained or analytic attention to the text. We will examine those instances when we see Connary as an astute and critical reader in an impassioned dialogue with the content of his books. The approach is to read Connary’s annotations closely alongside the passages that they gloss, to show how an understanding of textual content is a prerequisite to fully appreciating the reader’s extensive and intertextual gloss of prayer and theological reflection. Two of the most treasured and densely annotated books in his library are in the genre of the spiritual autobiography, and we will consider how these influence his thinking on salvation, social obligation, and the good life.

      The purposes and practices of Connary’s reading are diverse and overlapping. He reads husbandry manuals for knowledge about livestock and farming, and he relies on a range of practical and didactic writings for his management of the corporeal and moral welfare of his family. He consults a broad range of titles for general knowledge on geographical, political, and historical topics, while books on Irish culture and history kindle nostalgic longing and are instrumental in cultivating a sense of Irish rootedness in the Connary family. Catechetical and theological works are employed to bolster religious education in the household, and a devotional literature, often of a mystical flavor, fuels an already ardent Catholic faith. (These categories of reading material are surveyed in greater detail in chapter 1.)

      Accompanying such diversity of goals in Connary’s reading is a multiplicity of reading processes and reader response. With access to a considerable number of books owned and used by the same reader, we can make some assessment of the complex modalities of reading, and we may see how each instance of reading is part of an evolving routine, with different elements attended to and with varying levels of intensity.²² It is difficult to assign Connary’s reading habits to a single, unified category; he habitually and unproblematically merges oppositions to which scholars often resort in the attempt to understand past traditions of book use.²³ Connary reads both extensively and selectively, and he reads intensively, with texts becoming the focus of concentrated, even meditative reading. Sometimes he responds to the text as a whole, but more often his concern is with local particulars, his attention fixed on a paragraph or even a word, not on the broader picture.

      However fragmented the evidence, the enhanced books yield some insight into the microprocesses of reading and into the distinction made in cognitive psychology between on-line and off-line processes in readers’ experience and interpretation of the text.²⁴ On-line processes involve the immediate reading and comprehension of the text. Reading performed in the here and now may lead the reader to write occasional elaborations and corrigenda in the margin, to underline or otherwise mark as he or she goes along, to record reading times and other reading context, or to add spontaneous remarks that highlight and endorse specific passages. These are traces that indicate repetitions and the immediate experience of reading, sometimes showing that considerable mental effort is associated with the act of reading, and sometimes suggesting how reading can be a spur to imaginative, nostalgic, or meditative flights motivated by a passage or a few words. Such on-line reading is of a different nature than off-line processes that take place when reading is interrupted or concluded and more comprehensive consideration and interpretation is possible. At this level, antipathy or sympathy with a text or its author can be established and recorded, texts can be combined and integrated in myriad ways, or a work can be understood in the light of established dominant ideas.

      In Connary’s case, much of his interaction with books seems detached from any act of reading, and evidence is particularly rich for off-line activity, in which texts are routinely combined with, and assimilated to, a complex of strongly held moral and religious beliefs. Another form of off-line activity also documented amply in the material is the recording of details about the reading situation and programs of book use. Often book historians rely on such records preserved apart from the books read, in diaries, notebooks, book reviews, and the like, but with Connary we find observations of this sort carefully preserved inside books on interleaved notebook pages. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine a variety of on-line and off-line processes in Connary’s reading activities, but they also show the difficulty of keeping these processes entirely separate. For example, it can be difficult to determine whether an inserted note that disagrees with a point in the text represents an on-line or off-line response, as these may differ very little in form and substance, and a handwritten record of date and time is oftentimes ambiguous, as it may indicate a moment of actual reading or another form of book use and enhancement disengaged from the act of reading.

      To examine Connary’s book uses, this study proceeds by a form of forensic bibliographic method. This involves paying close attention to factors indicating patterns of book handling and reading, such as underlinings, manuscript punctuation, forms of emendation, inserted bookmarks, wear and tear of pages and bindings, deposits on or between the pages, and imported elements such as decorative embellishments and additional text (print or manuscript). It means also investigating the circumstances of reading—by looking, for example, at contextual statements about the reading situation, datings, ownership records, notes about procurement, evidence of shared book use, and personalized indices and reading plans.

      Approaching Connary’s radically customized volumes through a type of in-depth bibliographic inquiry allows us to make inferences about the diversity of book uses and to form an impression of reading practices that are intensive and extensive, silent and vocalized, withdrawn and communal. Past acts of reading can never be transparent to us now, only partially reconstructed. However, it is one of the tasks of the book historian to make educated, plausible conjectures about reading habits by attending to the physical particulars of the material objects before us, by building on what a rich literature on reading history and reading processes past and present has taught us, and by carefully situating and historicizing books and audiences.

Paratext

      Gérard Genette’s famous typology of the paratext has brought with it a new awareness of how concrete textual presentation is crucial to the experience of reading and the production of meaning.²⁵ “Paratext” is defined as the accompanying textual elements, supplied by authors, editors, or publishers, that surround the main text and influence the reception of the text and its interpretation by the public.²⁶ Paratext consists of elements both internal and external to the book. The internal elements (the “peritext”) include framing components, such as the cover, typesetting, authorial attribution, title, list of contents, preface, and illustration, while elements situated outside the book (the “epitext”) cover a large complex of public or private contexts that surround a text and bear on its reception, such as interviews, reviews, correspondence, and private conversation. The latter is a far more blurred territory of implicit contexts with no precise limits, “circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space.”²⁷ For Genette, paratext as a conceptual category converges toward authorial intention: paratextual elements constitute the threshold into the text, guiding the reader’s engagement with, and understanding of, the text, and they are inserted by the author or by the editor or publisher

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