Free Thinking - Whose Book Is It Anyway?
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2016
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anne McElvoy explores some historic tussles over who read what, when, how and why. Bodleian scholar Dennis Duncan reveals how disputatious monks took the book out of the monastery; the novelist and New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau uncovers public frothing over political pamphlet reading in pubs in the 18th century; 19th century literature expert Katie McGettigan celebrates a loophole in copyright law which resulted in American literature dominating British bookshelves; Katherine Cooper from Newcastle and another New Generation Thinker reveals the role of women in expanding the horizons of literature in the 20th century and Matthew Rubery, author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, reflects on the way technology spread reading across society and he gives us a demonstration of the Optophone - an early machine to bring books to the blind.
Pres: Anne McElvoy Guests: Katherine Cooper, University of Newcastle Sophie Coulombeau, University of York; author of 'Rites' Dennis Duncan, The Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book Katie McGettigan, Royal Holloway University, London Matthew Rubery, Queen Mary University, London; author of 'The Untold Story of the Talking Book' forthcoming
The Optophone appears courtesy of Blind Veterans UK. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio programmes. You can find more programmes in the BBC #LoveToRead campaign http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b5zz8/members And hear more over the #LovetoRead weekend 5-6 November.
Producer: Jacqueline Smith
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. Welcome to an |
| 0:32.5 | autumn of reading across the BBC with hashtag love to read. And this week, Radio 3's free thinking discovers why |
| 0:38.7 | monks stop reading out loud and why Sir Walter Scott's Waverley has much to say to our British present. |
| 0:44.5 | Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century English readers would have smiled as they began his book of the Duchess. |
| 0:50.0 | For the poet hero finds he can't sleep and after tossing and turning, gives in and reaches for a book, |
| 0:56.9 | a book of tales of queens and kings and other smaller things, and goodbye sorrow. |
| 1:02.4 | Several hundred years later and reading is still the universal panacea for many, while the books themselves keep on coming. |
| 1:09.5 | According to UNESCO's statisticians, |
| 1:11.6 | approximately 2,200,000 new titles and editions perpetuate our reading habit year-on-year. |
| 1:19.6 | Here in the UK, we produce roughly 20 new titles an hour, that makes us publishing world-beaters |
| 1:25.6 | per head of population, according to the International Publishers Association. |
| 1:30.2 | And all that requires a lot of readers, but who reads or reads what and when and why, |
| 1:35.8 | or whose book is it anyway? |
| 1:38.0 | Providing us with some answers and some lively footnotes, five scholars who've read and read in order to write and write and write |
| 1:46.0 | about how Britain's got the reading habit. So I'd like to start you all off with a possibly |
| 1:50.7 | surprisingly knotty question, what is reading? Matthew Ribby, you're an expert in 19th century |
| 1:56.9 | literature, but your current research is particularly concerned with the rise of the audiobook. |
| 2:01.7 | Why is reading a contentious issue in that area? |
| 2:05.3 | Reading something I'd always thought was pretty straightforward until I started working on |
| 2:09.1 | audiobooks and quickly realized that most people don't really know what reading is in the first |
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