Questions of material form have intensified in the digital era. In what contexts can an electronic copy serve as a substitute for its print predecessor? What information is lost when a text’s form changes? How should our approaches to reading change in response? Although pressing and pertinent, these questions are not new. My dissertation makes the case that Victorian writers asked and answered similar questions, and they did so in ways that can be helpful for framing the stakes of media transformations today. Victorian readers witnessed a surge of affordable texts in the middle of the century. History of the book and media history scholars discuss this “print explosion” in terms of technological innovation. Emergent communication technologies accelerated the speed of production, while developments in transportation facilitated mass circulation across continents. By focusing on innovation, however, we bias the narrative toward new media, consequently eliding the persistence of older media in the period. Newer technologies did not immediately displace their forerunners. They did, however, call into question the impact of form on interpretation. Moving the conversation away from issues of production and circulation and toward preservation, this dissertation recovers Victorians’ engagement with pre-print texts. I argue that Victorians writers interrogated the durability of material forms in order to grapple with an increasingly varied media ecology in which the status of writing was under constant review. The case studies offered in this dissertation show how preservation, which ultimately informs interpretation, was (and remains) bound to material, political, and personal interests. Each chapter foregrounds one of these intertwined interests and applies them to a collection of media, from a mix of pre-print forms (Chapter 1) and early modern manuscripts (Chapter 2) to ancient rock inscriptions (Chapter 3) and electronic texts (Coda).