The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston (review)

In this volume, Keith Houston aims to provide a "cover-to-cover" exploration of what he calls "the most powerful object of our time." He refers not to the supercomputer or the nuclear bomb, but the book. As he explains, "this book is about the history and the making and the bookness" of the "physical book" (xvii). Houston has already made his mark in scholarly discussions of what many would consider minutiae in Shady Characters, which tells the story behind various punctuation symbols. Broadening his scope to the paged book allows Houston to continue in this vein.

The structure of The Book examines the four major aspects of the physical book form. Houston examines, in turn, the pages books are made of (part 1), the text that fills these works (part 2), the illustrations that often illuminate those pages (part 3), and the tangible form of the "physical book" (part 4). Each of these sections tells a story that spans from ancient through to contemporary times. Moving to a new section is like hitting the carriage return on a typewriter as Houston takes us back to the ancient world to explore the origins of a paratextual feature of the book form. For example, in part one, Houston takes readers from the papyrus plant in ancient Egypt, to the subsequent "grisly invention" of animal-skinned parchment, and finally to the "ambiguous origins" of paper in China and its journey across the world and through the centuries (3–76). Part two, then, begins with the invention of writing by the Sumerians back in "one of the oldest settled civilizations in the world" (79).

For each of these sections, too, Houston lingers over a sociological spectrum that he fills out with supplementary information and intriguing anecdotes. For example, Houston's account of the Chinese eunuch Cai Lun and his quest to navigate the imperial court of the Han dynasty and master the art of papermaking is genuinely interesting and helps bind together a technical account of the origin of paper (39–49). Interesting vignettes also punctuate Houston's account: conspiracy theories to explain enigmatic watermarks on medieval paper (59–60); ancient prayers by Arab writers to the "King of the Cockroaches" to protect their books from insect infestation (51–52); silk maps smuggled in Monopoly board games to prisoners in World War II (38); the role of linen undergarments in the early production of paper in Europe (61–62); a papermaking company in Greeneville, Connecticut, that in the 1850s used linen from ancient mummies for materials; the happenstance discovery of a trove of manuscripts in an Egyptian trash heap (261–63); the murder mystery associated with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi collection (277–79). Houston manages to weave together a web of these technical details into a coherent narrative that reads at times like a user's manual and at times like an adventure tale.

Houston concludes the book with a colophon that describes, in the style of his own history of the paged book, every process that was required to produce The Book (329–31). This final section illustrates once more that the modern printed book "is the solution to an equation that takes in more than two thousand years of human history" (331). Because Houston often refers to the physical copy of The Book to illustrate a feature of bookmaking, the volume itself becomes a tangible piece of evidence for this account. Houston's account is also well documented with an impressive range of scholarly works from the relevant fields of bookmaking. Accordingly, this book can also function as an accessible starting point for further research in these fields.

One storyline that is missing from Houston's account but worth mentioning is the early and unanimous preference for the codex among early Christians in the Mediterranean world. The early adoption of this book...