Books

Eras

• Papyrus & Scrolls, Before the page there was the roll. Egyptian papyrus made from a river reed, the Dead Sea Scrolls sealed in jars, the carbonised Herculaneum library now being read by particle accelerator and machine learning, and the slow shift from the scroll to the bound codex that changed how anyone could look something up.
• Scribes, The people who made the marks, and what they made them with. Copyists at the desk, cuneiform pressed into wet clay, the reed and the quill, oak-gall ink and lapis ground into ultramarine, and the colophons where an exhausted monk complains in the margin about his cold hands.
• Parchment & Paper, The substrate. Animal skin scraped, stretched and limed into vellum; paper travelling from Han China through Samarkand and Baghdad to Fabriano and then everywhere; rag pulp, watermarks, the mill, and the acid-paper disaster that is quietly destroying most of what was printed after 1850.
• Manuscripts, Books written entirely by hand, and the objects that survived. Domesday, Magna Carta, the great codices, palimpsests where an earlier text was scraped off and read back centuries later, and the libraries and collectors who kept them intact.
• Illuminated Manuscripts, Gold leaf, miniature painting and the decorated initial. The Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels, books of hours made for people who could not read the Latin in them, bestiaries, and the marginalia, the knights fighting snails, the rabbits with trumpets.
• Islamic Manuscripts, Calligraphy as the highest art form. Kufic and naskh, the Qur'an as an object, Persian and Mughal painting, the paper mills of Baghdad, the translation movement in the House of Wisdom, and the manuscript libraries of Fez, Cairo and Timbuktu.
• World Manuscripts, Hebrew, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopian and Coptic books; Mesoamerican codices in bark paper and deerskin, most of them burned; the Timbuktu manuscripts smuggled out of Mali in rice sacks in 2012; and the writing traditions that never entered the European story at all.
• Asian Books, China, Japan, Korea and the wider region, where printing is older than Gutenberg by centuries. Bamboo slips, the Diamond Sutra of 868 as the oldest dated printed book, Korean movable metal type in 1377, the Tripitaka Koreana's 81,000 blocks, and the Japanese and Chinese book trades.
• Woodblock, Printing from a carved surface. East Asian woodblock and the European woodcut, engraving, etching and lithography, the image half of the book, and the technique that put pictures into print long before photography.
• Gutenberg, Mainz, around 1450: a goldsmith, a punch, a matrix, a hand mould, an oil-based ink and a converted press. The 42-line Bible, the lawsuit with Fust that took the business away from him, and the argument about what he actually invented and what he borrowed.
• Printing, The press and what it did. Incunabula, Aldus Manutius and the pocket book, Caxton in Westminster, Plantin in Antwerp, the hand press, the iron press, steam, stereotype, the Linotype, offset, and the print shop as the noisiest room in town.
• Typography, Letterforms and the people who cut them. Roman and italic, Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Caslon, blackletter, the punchcutter's hand, Gill and Zapf and Frutiger, the Swiss grid, phototypesetting and the leap to digital type.
• Bookbinding, Turning sheets into a book. Sewing, the gathering and the signature, boards and leather and gold tooling, the fore-edge painting hidden until you fan the pages, the treasure binding in metal and jewels, and the conservators repairing all of it now.
• Bibles, The most printed book there is. The Vulgate, the Gutenberg Bible, Tyndale burned for translating it, Luther's German, the King James, the Geneva Bible and its footnotes, mass distribution by the Bible societies, and the translation work still going on in hundreds of languages.
• Libraries, Rooms full of books and how they were organised. Alexandria and what actually happened to it, the reading room, the card catalogue, Dewey and the Library of Congress classification, the stacks, and the fight over what a library is for now.
• Monastery Libraries, The chained library and the scriptorium. St Gallen, Admont, Strahov, Melk, Hereford, the Joanina at Coimbra, the Escorial, the rooms where books were copied, kept and read for a thousand years, and which mostly still look exactly as they did.
• National Libraries, The great deposit collections. The British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale, the Library of Congress, the Vatican Library, and the buildings, budgets, legal-deposit rules and cyberattacks that keep them going or nearly stop them.
• Librarians, The job. Reference work, cataloguing, prison and hospital libraries, bookmobiles and camel libraries, the ALA, funding fights, and the librarians who refused to hand over borrowing records.
• Archives, The record that was never meant to be published. Registries, national archives, the disaster of a burned or bombed archive, digitisation programmes, provenance and repatriation, and how you find one document among forty million.
• Publishing, The trade. The publisher, the editor, the agent, the advance, the imprint, paperback revolutions, Penguin, the airport bestseller, the conglomerate merger, self-publishing, and how a manuscript becomes a product.
• Bookshops, Where books are sold. The independent, the second-hand shop, Shakespeare and Company, the chain, the remainder table, the book fair, and the shops that closed and the ones that somehow did not.
• Readers, The other half of the act. Reading aloud, reading silently, marginalia, commonplace books, book clubs, the novel-reading panic, audiobooks, Braille and talking books, and what the eye and brain actually do on a page.
• Literacy, Learning to read, and who was allowed to. Hornbooks and primers, mass schooling, literacy campaigns, the alphabet wars and phonics, adult literacy work, and the parts of the world where the fight is still on.
• Censorship, Books stopped by authority. The Index of Forbidden Books, obscenity trials from Ulysses to Lady Chatterley, samizdat typed on onionskin, the fatwa against Rushdie, and state censors from Franco's Spain to the present.
• Book Bans, The modern wave. School-board removals and district lists, the titles pulled most often, the parents and librarians on both sides of it, lawsuits, and the counts published each year by the ALA and PEN.
• Book Burning, Fire as an argument. The Nazi bonfires of 1933, the National and University Library of Bosnia in 1992, the Jaffna library in 1981, Louvain twice in two wars, and the deliberate destruction of a written culture as a tactic.
• Encyclopedias, The attempt to hold everything. Pliny, the Chinese leishu, Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie as a political act, the Britannica and its door-to-door salesmen, Brockhaus, and Wikipedia, the largest of them all, written by nobody in particular.
• Landmark Books, Individual titles that changed something, and the copies of them that survive. The First Folio, Newton's Principia, Audubon's double elephant folio, and the rare-book world of auctions, forgeries and thefts that grew up around such objects.
• Children's Books, The books people remember longest. Picture books and the illustrator's craft, primers and fairy tales, Carroll and Sendak and Blyton, board books, banned children's titles, and the reading that decides whether anyone becomes a reader at all.