Seven Books

UNDER PUBLICATION

This is a book about books that played a significant part in the 2,000+-year-old civilisation that Europeans have in common. It considers seven books that, over long periods of time, had large numbers of readers – in some cases from Dublin to Budapest and Stockholm to Naples – but which are now rarely read outside the scholarly communities that guard their memory. The books range in time from Cicero’s On Duties in the first century BC to Walter Scott’s Waverley in the early nineteenth century.
For each book, its background and that of its author are described, its contents discussed, its reception over time and across countries traced, and the reasons for its great popularity and eventual neglect analysed. The effects of changes of medium – from papyrus to parchment to paper and printing – are explored, and attention is given to where and when each book was read, by what kinds of people, and in what format. Unusual recorded uses of books – Plutarch’s Parallel Lives as a collar press, Boethius’s The Consolation of Philo­sophy as a weapon, Malory’s Morte Darthur as a window stop – are noted. The author also reflects on the history of his own encounter with each of the books, and on the physical or other characteristics that affected his response.
This is a work that demonstrates the central place of the book in European culture. It concludes with a recommendation to read these seven books, and with a discussion of the different types and purposes of reading – to encounter great minds from the past, to analyse the book’s impact on oneself, when totally engrossed, when intermittently raising one’s head from the text and, most blissfully of all, when alone and glancing out of the windows of a train.