Useless Books: (Mis)reading the ‘How-To’ Book in Early Modern England (1550–1630)

This thesis traces the history of reading the early modern English ‘how-to’ genre, which promised to teach skills like gardening and surveying via the printed page. It argues that how-to books were so insistent on being useful to their readers that they reveal early modern anxieties about useless books, and the value of reading. By paying close attention to where and how the how-to book demanded to be read, the four chapters uncover a hidden history of misreading that unsettles the status of useful knowledge in print.

Chapter One examines in-book advertisements for tuition and other specialist services, establishing the author’s efforts and failures to control the unpredictable reader of the how-to book. This chapter culminates with a case study of Walter Cary (fl. 1580–1611), a forefather of medical advertising, whose paranoia about reaching profitable readers led to a piracy scandal. Chapter Two moves to the pocket book as a format that was especially vulnerable to misreading when brandished before an audience. It culminates with William Pratt’s (fl. 1616–20) ‘Arithmetical Jewel’, a luxury mathematical instrument bound within his how-to book that was designed for display. Chapter Three turns to loss: holes and gaps in the text, both metaphorical and material, that emerged as the printed instruction book decayed over time. It centres Yorkshire vicar William Lawson (c. 1553–1635), whose gardening manual is full of uncertainties about his future readership and the practicality of print for preserving knowledge. Finally, Chapter Four examines play and laughter in the how-to book through the figure of the maze, and the works of surveyor William Folkingham (15751629), who invoked the labyrinth as a model for recreational reading. In inviting readers to ridicule his instructions, Folkingham exposes the fault lines between useful and useless knowledge that destabilised the making of practical books.