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prevailed? Studies by Kevin Sharpe, Lisa Jardine, and Anthony Grafton
have proven that humanists in the 16th and 17th centuries often read
discontinuously, searching for passages that could be used in the cut and
thrust of rhetorical battles at court, or for nuggets of wisdom that could

be copied into commonplace books and consulted out of context.
In studies of culture among the common people, Richard Hoggart
and Michel de Certeau have emphasized the positive aspect of reading

intermittently and in small doses. Ordinary readers, as they understand
them, appropriate books (including chapbooks and Harlequin romances)
in their own ways, investing them with meaning that makes sense by
their own lights. Far from being passive, such readers, according to de

Certeau, act as "poachers," snatching significance from whatever comes
to hand.
Writing looks as bad as reading to those who see nothing but

decline in the advent of the Internet. As one lament puts it: Books used
to be written for the general reader; now they are written by the general
reader. The Internet certainly has stimulated self-publishing, but why

should that be deplored? Many writers with important things to say had
not been able to break into print, and anyone who finds little value in
their work can ignore it.

The online version of the vanity press may contribute to the
information overload, but professional publishers will provide relief
from that problem by continuing to do what they always have done—
selecting, editing, designing, and marketing the best works. They will

have to adapt their skills to the Internet, but they are already doing so,
and they can take advantage of the new possibilities offered by the new
technology.

To use an an example from my own experience, I recently wrote a
printed book with an electronic supplement, Poetry and the Police:
Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Harvard
University Press). It describes how street songs mobilized public opinion

in a largely illiterate society. Every day, Parisians improvised new words
to old tunes, and the songs flew through the air with such force that they
precipitated a political crisis in 1749. But how did their melodies inflect

their meaning? After locating the musical annotations of a dozen songs,
I asked a cabaret artist, Hlne Delavault, to record them for the electronic
supplement. The reader can therefore study the text of the songs in the

book while listening to them online. The e-ingredient of an old-