We're glad to again service customers, even though our former store front has closed and we operate this web store under reduced services.
Just scroll to the bottom to review limits placed on orders. .
The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem-and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies
"I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter with me?" The plaint of an anonymous reader in 1712 sounds with endearing frankness a note of consternation that resonates throughout The Faerie Queene's reception history, from its first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, who urged him to write anything else instead, to Virginia Woolf, who insisted that if one wants to like the poem, "the first essential is, of course, not to read" it. For more than four centuries critics have sought to counter this strain of readerly resistance, but rather than trying to remedy the frustrations and failures of Spenser's readers, Catherine Nicholson cherishes them as a sensitive barometer of shifts in the culture of reading itself. Indeed, tracking the poem's mixed fortunes in the hands of its bored, baffled, outraged, intoxicated, obsessive, and exhausted readers turns out to be an excellent way of rethinking the past and future prospects of literary study. By examining the responses of readers from Queen Elizabeth and the keepers of Renaissance commonplace books to nineteenth-century undergraduates, Victorian children, and modern scholars, this book offers a compelling new interpretation of the poem and an important new perspective on what it means to read, or not to read, a work of literature.Nevertheless, UPB provides ship-to-home service.
Unless and until we move our on-line fulfillment team to different premises, everything you purchase from us ships from warehouses outside of Berkeley.
Much of what we used to carry on store shelves is available, except for very expensive books, used books, and titles fallen between printings.
A number of limitations apply during this period of reduced operations:
You can also purchase eBooks and audio books through us. Distributed by Hummingbird, they include publications from the major trade publishers. Just access the menu link or the sidebar image above.
We greatly appreciate your support of the store with your book orders. Need a book without our current shopping restrictions? We recommend Bookshop. View our affiliate page, then search for whatever book you'd like.
Should you have questions, email us via our contact form. Since none of will be keeping regular hours, it may take a day or two to get back with you.
The Cafe Ohlone has closed for the duration of the epidemic. They will probably reopen at a different location when they do.
From 1974, University Press Books has stoked the blaze of well over ten thousand minds on fire, carrying new scholarship published by the great university presses in the English-speaking world.
Since our founding, we've added quality fiction and creative non-fiction to our selection, without drfiting from our mission to showcase top new texts introduced by university presses.
Order from us. Visit us. Let well-wrought words churn and burn within.