Bibliophobia is a book about material books, how they are cared
for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of
writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the
contemporary idea of 'the death of the book' implied by the
replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying
twenty-first-century experiences of paranoia and literary
apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion back
to the origins of writing in ancient Babylon and Egypt, then
forwards to the age of Google. It uncovers bibliophobia from the
first Chinese emperor to Nazi Germany, alongside parallel stories
of bibliomania and bibliolatry in world religions and literatures.
Books imply cognitive content embodied in physical form, in which
the body cooperates with the brain. At its heart this relationship
of body and mind, or letter and spirit, always retains a mystery.
Religions are founded on holy books, which are also sites of
transgression, so that writing is simultaneously sacred and
profane. In secular societies these complex feelings are
transferred to concepts of ideology and toleration. In the
ambiguous future of the internet, digital immateriality threatens
human equilibrium once again. Bibliophobia is a global history,
covering six continents and seven religions, describing written
examples from each of the last thirty centuries (and several
earlier). It discusses topics such as the origins of different
kinds of human script; the development of textual media such as
scrolls, codices, printed books, and artificial intelligence; the
collection and destruction of libraries; the use of books as holy
relics, talismans, or shrines; and the place of literacy in the
history of slavery, heresy, blasphemy, censorship, and persecution.
It proposes a theory of writing, how it relates to speech, images,
and information, or to concepts of mimesis, personhood, and
politics. Originating as the Clarendon Lectures in the Faculty of
English at the University of Oxford, the methods of Bibliophobia
range across book history; comparative religion; philosophy from
Plato to Hegel and Freud; and a range of global literature from
ancient to contemporary. Richly illustrated with textual forms,
material objects, and art works, its inspiration is the power that
books always (and continue to) have in the emotional, spiritual,
bodily, and imaginative lives of readers.
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