The Spacious Margin: Eighteenth-Century Printed Books and the Traces of their Readers draws from the holdings of the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta, presenting an array of readerly interactions with books in the form of annotations, improvements, corrections, ornamentation, and suggestive wear-and-tear. In this scholarly catalogue, Brown and Considine describe and contextualize the notable physical traces of readership and circulation for each of the 62 items displayed in the accompanying exhibition (The Spacious Margin, Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, 5 October 2012 - 15 February 2013). The result is a snapshot of the life of books and readers in the eighteenth century: in the British Isles and beyond, from the modestly literate users of well-thumbed dictionaries to learned critics of canonical poets and contemporary philosophers.

Sylvia Brown is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her areas of research include women's writing and gender in the early modern period, Milton, Bunyan, and early modern print culture. The author and editor of several articles and books, she is currently working toward the completion of a monograph entitled Household Reformations: Women, Textual Culture, and the Survival of Protestantism.

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John Considine is Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, specializing in lexicography, the history of the English language, early modern British literature and culture, and the history of the book. Among his recent publications is Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and Making Heritage. He is currently at work on a sequel.

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