1. Reading and its consequences
2. Economic characteristics of the printed book industry
3. Intellectual property
4. Anthologies, abridgment, and the development of commercial vested interests in prolonging the obsolete
5. The high monopoly period in England
6. The explosion of reading
7. The old canon
8. Shakespeare
9. Literary production in the romantic period
10. Manufacturing
11. Selling, prices, and access
12. Romance
13. Reading constituencies
14. Horizons of expectations
15. 'Those vile French piracies'
16. 'Preparatory schools for the brothel and the gallows'
17. At the boundaries of the reading nation
18. Frankenstein
19. North America
20. Reading, reception, and dissemination
21. The romantic poets in the Victorian age
22. The political economy of reading

Most people believed that reading significantly influenced minds, attitudes, and actions during the centuries when printed paper was the only means by which texts could travel across time and distance. William St. Clair offers a very different picture of the past from those presented by traditional approaches through quantified information he provides on book prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships gathered from over fifty publishing and printing archives