Knowing Books. Christina Lupton

to Sterne’s prowess as manipulator of the book as printed product. But it also works, like many of the analogies with coach travel in earlier novels, to emphasize the way the physical vehicle of the book prevents readers’ contact with the scenes they experience. Approaching his marbled page, Sterne reminds readers of the black page they encountered in the first volume of his novel and warns against “deep” reading on this new occasion of physical interruption:

      You had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading … you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths, which still mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one. (204)