Papyrus · The Invention of Books in the Ancient World

This is a book about the history of books. A journey through the life of that fascinating device we invented so that words could travel through space and time. The story of how books were made, of all the forms we've tried over nearly thirty centuries: books of smoke, of stone, of clay, of reeds, of silk, of leather, of trees and, most recently, of plastic and light.

It is also a travel book. A route with stops at Alexander's battlefields and the Villa of the Papyri beneath the eruption of Vesuvius, at Cleopatra's palaces and the scene of Hypatia's murder, in the earliest known bookshops and the workshops of manuscript copyists, at the bonfires where banned codices burned, in the gulag, in the Sarajevo library and in the underground labyrinth of Oxford in the year 2000. A thread connecting the classics with the dizzying contemporary world, linking them to current debates: Aristophanes and lawsuits against comedians, Sappho and women's literary voice, Livy and fan phenomena, Seneca and post-truth…

But above all, this is a fabulous collective adventure led by thousands of people who, throughout time, have made books possible and protected them: oral storytellers, scribes, illuminators, translators, traveling booksellers, teachers, sages, spies, rebels, nuns, slaves, adventurers… Readers in mountain landscapes and beside the roaring sea, in capitals where energy concentrates and in the most remote enclaves where knowledge takes refuge in times of chaos. Ordinary people whose names history often fails to record, those saviors of books who are the true protagonists of this essay.