By Keith Houston
“Everybody who has ever learn a booklet will enjoy the means Keith Houston explores the main robust item of our time. and everyone who has learn it's going to agree that stories of the book’s dying were significantly exaggerated.”―Erik Spiekermann, typographer
We could love books, yet can we comprehend what lies in the back of them? In The Book, Keith Houston finds that the paper, ink, thread, glue, and board from which a publication is made inform as wealthy a narrative because the phrases on its pages―of civilizations, empires, human ingenuity, and insanity. In an invitingly tactile heritage of this 2,000-year-old medium, Houston follows the improvement of writing, printing, the paintings of illustrations, and binding to teach how we've got moved from cuneiform drugs and papyrus scrolls to the hardcovers and paperbacks of this present day. guaranteed to satisfaction publication fans of all stripes with its lush, full-color illustrations, The Book provides us the momentous and astonishing background at the back of humanity’s so much important―and universal―information technology.
seventy one colour illustrations
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Additional resources for The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
Example text
Of all the pages of all the books in my bookcase, not one is made of anything other than paper, and aside from those few people who study, conserve, or trade in antique books, the vast majority of us will never handle a book that is not made chiefly from paper. Paper, however, was entirely absent from the world in which books first came about. 2 Without paper, there is no book as we know it today. The overlapping reigns of papyrus and parchment are plain enough in the archaeological record, with thousands of documents unearthed from tombs and rubbish heaps across Egypt, Europe, and the Near East betraying the slow rise of the one at the expense of the other.
This book is about the corporeal ones that came before them, the unrepentantly analog contraptions of paper, ink, cardboard, and glue that we have lived with and depended on for so long. It is about books that have mass and odor, that fall into your hands when you ease them out of a bookcase and that make a thump when you put them down. It is about the quiet apex predator that won out over clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, and wax writing boards to carry our history down to us. It is, admittedly, all too easy to take the existence of physical books for granted.
The first is made by placing strips of papyrus on a table so that they abut along their long edges, and a second layer running at right angles to the first is laid atop it. Ancient scrolls readily reveal this laminated construction: held up to the light, a crosshatched pattern caused by the two perpendicular layers is easily seen. The reed’s vascular bundles, which transport nutrients through the stem, stand out as dark lines against the paler parenchyma, or filler cells. But what of the need for “Nile water” to glue the layers together?
