Richly illustrated with manuscripts, printed objects, and art works, Bibliophobia tells a 5000-year history of writing and of books to give readers a fascinating account of why books matter and how they impact on our lives.

Brian Cummings is Anniversary Professor at the University of York. Before arriving at York, he was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and then Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He has held visiting fellowships at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, Munich; the University of Toronto; and the Folger Library in Washington D.C. In 2012, he gave the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University; in 2013, the Margaret Mann Phillips Plenary Lecture at the Renaissance Society of America; he has also given the British Academy annual Shakespeare Lecture and the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture in Washington D.C. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

• Preface


• Note on Texts


• I. DEATH OF THE BOOK


• 1: Is there a future for the book?


• 2: The library as computer


• 3: The message of Ashurbanipal from antiquity


• 4: Living in the Tower of Babel


• II. BOOKS AND VIOLENCE


• 5: The book-fires of 1933


• 6: The making and unmaking of libraries


• 7: Incombustible heresy in the age of Luther


• 8: The bondage of the book


• III. SACRED TEXT


• 9: The mystery of Arabic script


• 10: The unnameable Hebrew God


• 11: How the alphabet came to Greece from Africa


• 12: The characters of Chinese


• IV. THE CULT OF THE BOOK


• 13: Words and images


• 14: Kissing the book


• 15: Books under the razor


• 16: Shakespeare and bibliofetishism


• V. THE BODY AND THE BOOK


• 17: The book incarnate


• 18: The hand in the history of the book


• 19: Written on the flesh


• 20: Book burial


• VI. GHOST IN THE BOOK


• 21: The book after the French Revolution


• 22: The smartphone inside our heads


• 23: Heresy and modernity


• 24: Glyph


• Notes


• Bibliography