Keith Houston’s The Book. A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time. W. W. Norton and Co, 2016.
Houston describes one my favorite objects ever : the book. Starting with the substrate of papyrus, he traces the development of parchment, made from sheep, and then also paper in China. Houston describes the how codices seemed to appear in the Roman Empire and how they are superior to scrolls. Several pages are devoted to Gutenberg, the father of printing with the use of movable type. But, he also mentions how China invented moving type centuries earlier, but it never caught on, mostly because of the sheer number of characters needed. Throughout the book are handy annotations, using The Book itself to show what such things as endpapers or an ad card are. Towards the end, it did get a touch dry with the detail Houston goes into, but overall the whole story was still fascinating. I heartily recommend The Book as a wonderful gift for the bibliophile in your life.
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