Not Knowing How-To: Reading Advertisements in Early Modern English Print

ABSTRACT: The early modern "how-to" genre promised readers opportunities to learn practical skills like gardening, surveying, or arithmetic from the printed page. Though the title pages of how-to books usually touted the clarity of the text within, recent reconstructive projects and broader studies of the genre have suggested that learning from a book was rarely straightforward. This article focuses on printed advertisements in early how-to books as textual interventions that sought to offer support to "imperfect" readers. It first surveys the range of readers addressed in the how-to book, from error-prone beginners to specialists in their field. Building on past studies of medical and mathematical advertising, the article then turns to the small but growing number of advertisements printed in how-to texts from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. In-book advertisements offered comprehensive directions to confused and curious readers to visit a person or place in pursuit of answers to lingering questions, whether basic or advanced. Hastily inserted additions and reader annotations indicate that these personal invitations could leave their readers even more uncertain than before. These imperfect advertisements and their unpredictable readers shed new light on the care with which how-to literature imagines and negotiates the book's failures alongside its successes.