This book explores blank space in early modern printed books; it addresses physical blank space (from missing words to vacant pages) as well as the concept of the blank. It is a book about typographical marks, readerly response, and editorial treatment. It is a story of the journey from incunabula to Google books, told through the signifiers of blank space: empty brackets, dashes, the et cetera, the asterisk. It is about the semiotics of print and about the social anthropology of reading. The book explores blank space as an extension of Elizabethan rhetoric with readers learning to interpret the mise-en-page as part of a text’s persuasive tactics. It looks at blanks as creators of both anxiety and of opportunity, showing how readers respond to what is not there and how writers come to anticipate that response. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter 1), the &c (Chapter 2) and the asterisk (Chapter 3). The Epilogue uncovers the rich metaphoric life of these textual phenomena and the ways in which Elizabethan printers experimented with typographical features as they considered how to turn plays into print.
