Samuel Pepys and his Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, 1660-1703

Samuel Pepys was a great collector of books, news, and gossip. This study uses his surviving papers to examine reading practices, collecting, and the exchange of information in the late seventeenth century. Offering the first extensive history of reading during the Restoration, it traces developments in the book trade and news transmission at a time when England was the scene of dramatic political and religious upheavals. The investigation goes beyond Pepys's famous diary of the 1660s, empl...