Over the past year or so I've become more fond of reading physical books than ebooks. There are some practical benefits—it's easier to flip back and forth through them quickly, they let me 'unplug' and be less distracted by electronics, they perhaps take more advantage of the brain's ability to remember spatial organization—but mostly it's an aesthetic preference. Aside from occasional differences in font, every ebook looks pretty much like every other ebook; their appearance and layout are determined more by the user's settings than the publisher's decisions. By contrast, physical books come in many shapes, sizes, textures, designs; each book is a unique sensory experience.
So, reading this book about the physical form of books was a self-indulgent joy for me. It has lots of interesting historical tidbits; here are a few:
- Armed Services Editions played a key role in creating a large market for paperback books.
- Christianity was an important factor driving the adoption of codices over scrolls. Codices could hold more text and were more amenable to quickly flipping to arbitrary locations in the text, which made them attractive for copies of the Bible. (The book doesn't discuss why Judaism would not have developed a preference for codices for the same reason much earlier.)
- The chapter on censorship notes that censorship often functions not to block access to a text, but to make the text available in a form deemed acceptable. One example given is The Art Book, whose Chinese edition quietly replaces the entry on Ai Weiwei with a relatively unremarkable Renaissance painter.
- Mein Kampf was widely used as a symbol to declare one's identity in Nazi Germany—"12 million copies ... are estimated to have circulated". "Most elaborate of all was a huge, medieval-style edition lettered in gold and decorated with clasps.... Printed in a limited edition of around fifty copies for top party officials, it was allegedly displayed as if it were a Nazi Bible, open on a lectern in the entrance hall of the home of Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe."
- "...early books were often sold as unbound sheafs of printed quires so that buyers could customize the binding to match their library and their means."
- Regarding books bound in human skin: "most are connected with physicians, as if human leather is a kind of professional trophy."
- 17th-century missionary/colonizer John Eliot devised a system for transcribing Wôpanâak in order to publish a translation of the Bible. Surviving copies contain heartbreaking margin notes from Native readers: "I am forever a pitiful person in the world. I am not able clearly to read this, this book."