PAPYRUS

A million-copy global bestseller relating a 6,000-year adventure through the history of books and reading. Long before books were mass-produced, scrolls hand copied on reeds pulled from the Nile were the treasures of the ancient world. Emperors and Pharaohs were so determined to possess them that they dispatched emissaries to the edges of the earth to bring them back. In Papyrus, celebrated classicist Irene Vallejo traces the dramatic history of the book and the fight for its survival. It shows the journey from oral tradition to scrolls to codices, and how that transition laid the very foundation of Western culture. It is a story full of heroic adventures, bloodshed and megalomania, from the battlefields of Alexander the Great and the palaces of Cleopatra to the libraries of war-torn Sarajevo and Oxford. Here are scrolls made from aquatic plant pith, tablets, and how the book's development is interwoven with Western civilisation. The author has a talent for evoking ancient scenes such as her description of the poet Martial returning to Spain from Rome as she chronicles the thrills and spills of literary culture from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia to the eReader tablets of today and how all of these have helped preserve their rich literary tradition, with texts as a sensual pleasure and also alive and frequently disruptive. 'A literary phenomenon... didactic and daring... elegant and richly digressive.' - TLS. A must for all bibliophiles and first time discounted. 443pp, paperback.