Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare 1623

Abstract

Imagine that you are the sort of person who buys books. A bit of a stretch, I know, for most readers of this essay; but imagine that you live in a world without book auctions at Sotheby’s, without Amazon.com, without mass-mailed sale catalogues: a world in which, if you want to buy books, you have to get off your ass and go to a bookshop. Imagine, in particular, that you are the sort of person who haunted bookshops in London in 1622. Imagine that, as you are standing in one of those very particular physical spaces where books were displayed and sold, you notice a new book — you can tell it’s new because ‘1622’ is printed on the title-page, but also and more reliably because the book has that aroma, as recognizable and exciting to every bookshop-haunter as the morning smell of coffee to another sort of addict, that aroma of new ink and new paper, not yet dissipated into the indifferent air, not yet smothered by the relentless accretions of dust — and in the bookshops of London in 1622, as in bookshops at all times and places, the new books tend to be congregated together, intensifying that chemical fog that tugs at the customer’s unconscious. Anyway, as you peruse the books published since you last indulged yourself in this vice, you pick up a particular new book, entitled The Tragedy of Othello, The Moore of Venice; you open it, and the first thing you encounter, on signature A2, the first recto page after the title page, is a brief paragraph, headed ‘The Stationer to the Reader.’