El infinito en un junco : La invención de los libros en el mundo antiguo

Of smoke, of stone, of clay, of silk, of leather, of trees, of plastic, and of light... A journey through the life of the book and those who have safeguarded it for almost thirty centuries. This is a book about the history of books. A journey through the life of that fascinating artifact we invented so that words could travel through space and time. The story of its manufacture, of all the types we have experimented with over almost thirty centuries: books of smoke, of stone, of clay, of reeds, of silk, of leather, of trees, and, the most recent arrivals, of plastic and light. It is also a travel book. A route with stops at Alexander's battlefields and the Villa of the Papyri under the eruption of Vesuvius, at Cleopatra's palaces and the scene of Hypatia's murder, at the first known libraries and manuscript copying workshops, at the bonfires where forbidden codices burned, in the Gulag, in the Sarajevo library, and in the underground labyrinth of Oxford in the year 2000. A thread that links the classics to the dizzying contemporary world, connecting them to current debates: Aristophanes and the trials of comedians, Sappho and the literary voice of women, Livy and the fan phenomenon, Seneca and post-truth… But above all, this is a fabulous collective adventure starring thousands of people who, throughout history, have made books possible and protected them: storytellers, scribes, illuminators, translators, street vendors, teachers, scholars, spies, rebels, nuns, Slaves, adventurers… Readers in mountain landscapes and by the roaring sea, in capital cities where energy is concentrated and in the most remote enclaves where knowledge takes refuge in times of chaos. Ordinary people whose names, in many cases, history does not record, these saviors of books who are the true protagonists of this essay.