Adrian Johns, <i>The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America</i> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. 504. ISBN 978-0-226-82148-1. $32.50 (cloth).

That the world we live in is shaped by science seems indisputable, even if the histories of that shaping remain difficult to delineate.As Adrian Johns's compelling new book argues, 'We live today in a world shaped by the science of reading ' (p.416).Johns makes the case that there is such a thing as the science of reading, and that tracing its development is worthwhile in some measure because it has made a difference.The history of the science of reading has been neglected until now not because the subject of reading is unimportantit is anything butbut rather because of the ways in which all scholarly inquiries morph across time, subject to institutional vicissitudes, competing research programmes, disciplinary shifts and the interests and attentions of a broader public.The science of reading began in the late nineteenth century, entwined with the beginnings of the modern research university and amid the contexts of newly industrial print production.James McKeen Cattell helped establish the science in Americaafter training with Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt in Germanyand went on to a lengthy career editing Science magazine and presiding over a scientific news agency.For Cattell and his colleagues, questions about reading were psychophysical in nature, and reading begged for anthropometric measurement.Specialized laboratory instruments were developed to detect and record eye movements and gauge reaction times.For Edmund Burke Huey, author of the field's foundational book, reading was a matter of mental hygiene, one with obvious social implications.New tools like eye movement cameras and tachistoscopes would soon be deployed to measure, record and eventually optimize reading.America needed better, more readable fonts, for one thing, and elementary education needed a complete overhaul.'The experience of modernity' itself, Johns writes, had turned the science of reading into an urgent matter (p.93).In the twentieth century, psychophysics was superseded by new disciplinary and institutional formations.Some scholars, like Charles Hubbard Judd at the University of Chicago's School of Education, stuck with laboratory science.(Chicago even started a 'lab school'.)Others took up questions about reading as a social-scientific inquiry, looking into reading as a shared social practice to be understood demographically, for instance, researched by librarians, among others, and cultivated as a civic virtue.(The University of Chicago started its Graduate Library School.)Disparate lines of inquiry like these would eventually lead to a new, resilient concept: communication (p.116; and Chicago started 'the world's first graduate degree-granting body in the prospective field of communications'p.205).