Too Much to Read? How Reading Habits Change

A Narrow Review of Joel Halldorf’s ‘Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age’

In my book The Idea Machine, I contrast two libraries: Machiavelli’s and Montaigne’s. Machiavelli owned maybe a dozen books, some of them copied by his own hand; Montaigne owned a thousand.

Both were men of the Renaissance, but a couple generations divided the pair. Born in 1469 two decades after the dawn of print, Machiavelli still trafficked in a manus…