This chapter addresses the relationship between distant and close reading, advocating middle-ground reading with a strong focus on texts per se. By taking an evolutionary approach, it reviews pragmatic use over three decades of the mechanically enhanced reading of eighteenth-century British fiction, viewing texts first as systems then as corpora and later as constituents of embedded and overlapping corpora. In a back-and-forth movement between text and corpus, it explores norm and typicality by looking at canonical and noncanonical fiction.