Readers, books and texts: shapes of interaction

The goal of this paper is to show different shapes of readers’ interaction with books and texts, mostly from the 19th century, by using a limited source material, 156 books published until 1835 from the private library of Herman Weissmann held in the library of the Museum of Slavonia in Osijek. The research has been encouraged by a relatively large number of readers’ ‘’traces’’ in books from the Weissmann collection in relation to those books that are preserved in monastery and other public libraries. Weissmann repurchased the books from private owners so it is assumed that the individuals as owners treated the books freer and more intimate than their readers in libraries. Since the research of readers’ habits is rather a new field within a book history, the authors innovatively approach the researching of interaction forms and consider separately a relation towards a book as an item and the relation towards its content as a cultural heritage. Consequently this paper analyses the interaction between the owner/reader and a book as a medium (ownership mark, books’ curses, dedications, letters and messages, personal notes) and the interaction of a reader with the text or content (notes along the text, a content structure and textual supplements). The analysed interaction forms show that persons of different reading skills had different relations towards the book and its content – from mere ownership marking to text dissecting with comments, underlining, and in rare cases correcting – thus the interaction research reveals a text significance in a society, referring to a reader-book relationship, it reveals what the book meant to the owner/or reader etc