The author of Shady Characters reveals how books and the materials that make them reflect the rich history and culture of human civilization, tracing the development of writing, printing, illustrating and binding to demonstrate the transition from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls to the mass-distributed books of today.
A lavish material history of the world’s most popular—and most powerful—medium.
Long repositories of human history and imagination, books themselves possess as rich a backstory as the words on their pages. Spanning cultures and civilizations, The Book crafts an invitingly tactile history of this 1,500-year-old medium, examining the development of paper, text and printing, the art of illustrations, and binding.Packed with fascinating stories of inventors striving to make a better book, from King Eumenes II of ancient Pergamon, who embraced parchment when war halted exports of Egyptian papyrus, to Cai Lun, the scheming eunuch who claimed to have invented paper, and James Paige, the snake-oil salesman whose typesetting machine almost bankrupted Mark Twain, The Book traces how modern books evolved from their centuries-old ancestors.As paper threatens to give way to pixels, Keith Houston gives us a affectionate, wonderfully illustrated, four-color ode to the most important information technology of all.
