Reading-advice books have surged in popularity in the last few years, with titles by Harold Bloom, Edward Hirsch, Geoffrey O'Brien, Anne Fadiman and oth­ers.1 Most seem to be extended essays or meditations on the experience of reading; others, like Bloom's, are more didactic in spirit. In the latter case especially, they signal the sudden revival of a genre which seemed almost to have died out by the 1960s, having figured as a persistent presence in anglophone reading cultures for most of the previous century, and which inhabit an oddly neglected corner of the new historiography of reading. It would be invidious to list the recent monographs and essay collections in which one might have expected to find such books discussed, or to make much of the oversight. It may be that such books have been perceived as naive and prescriptive precursors of reading historiography rather than its proper object; or they may have fallen through the gap that sometimes seems to have. developed between the study of elite and professional reading practices on the one hand and popular (especially 'resistant') reading practices on the other.2