archaicisms - In 1700s, why was 'books that never read' grammatical?


Naomi Baron, in Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (1 edn 2015). p. 16, quoted Daniel Defoe's The Compleat English Gentleman, composed in the early 1700s:


Scan of book



I hate any thing that looks like a cheat upon the world. Whatever I am, I can't be a hypocrite. What should I do with books that never read half an hour in a year I tell you?





  1. Is there some linguistic term for the bolded words in the quote that I underlined in red in the image?




  2. I don't know the precise linguistic terms, thus here's my attempt to word the question using some that I know. Why could ‘read’ could be used transitively and without any auxiliary verb for an inanimate subject? Nowadays we must say ‘books that [WERE] never read’.




  3. How can I interpret this curio so that it feels natural and intuitive to a reader in 2019?






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