In the years 1774-1830 literature became increasingly subject to modes of marketing and consumption that helped consolidate its functions, whether for entertainment or instruction, within a domestic space. One material sign of this was the rise in production of smaller format books, namely more octavos and duodecimos, and fewer quartos, signalling portability and accessibility. Most famously, Wordsworth and Coleridge, both notorious in their deferring of print publication, consider the problem of how to discover the true reader among an amorphous mass readership how to circumvent the levelling properties of print and address the 'clerisy' of readers through the 'living' text. The distinction between writing and reading, with its attendant implications of authentic and inauthentic communication, can also surface as one of genre, with poetry occupying the high ground and the novel relegated to a lesser space shaped by the low expectations of its mass readership and the commodifying strictures of the print industry.