"Is reading historical?" The question is anything but anodyne. The answer is bound up with lead notions about changes in the communication media. In contrast to universal models and the tendency to trace the course taken by the history of reading to external conditions, 'internal' history sees reading as a medium with its own intrinsic resistances. It shows how, as cultural change in the communication media proceeds, reading techniques enter into certain alliances, and further pinpoints the functions operative in giving those techniques preference over other possibilities. The art of reading is a historical matter. But there is an identifiable model. It dates from the year 1735.