It is at this point that I'm forced to drop the scholarly pretense of the third person. After spending months researching combinatory reading and writing practices — practices that are radically Other to us, so far from (to return to Chartier) "the genealogy of our own contemporary manner of reading" — I could not, in both theory and reality, write a narrative history. The institutional conventions of scholarly reading, writing and publication seek to familiarize and contain, conceptualizing the production of knowledge and text itself as a process of illumination, literally "bringing to light"; yet, as the combinatory practices I was researching underscore, there is nothing "natural" to these institutions. In fact, their very familiarity is partly a byproduct of the assumptions I hoped to challenge — assumptions that have perpetuated totalizing arguments about "print" and "the book." How could I defamiliarize a history of reading and writing within such a prosaic academic literacy?