If one had to name the most powerful tool ever to have shaped human civilisation, what would it be? The wheel, the ship, the engine, the written word? Surely overshadowing all these would be the book, which grew out of the written word, for the book was the great container of human thought, and the record of human experience. As an object the book is small, passive, silent and fragile, but its contents are mysteriously powerful and everlasting, and they have shaped our minds as certainly as physical tools have shaped our environment. This book ranges over world literature, examining texts of religion, philosophy science, poetry, history and fiction, and explains their importance in creating our collective memory.
Today we are moving forward into an era of global electronic communication, and the book’s historic role as the container of ideas, and as a great shaping force of civilisation, may be nearing its end. This is therefore the ideal moment to look back over some of the great books of the past, and to show how the life of man was for centuries to be found in the life of books. This book is a small mirror of the richness of human thought which will delight all who care about the past and the future of the book.
Two sample texts are shown here, and some of the 70 authors and works discussed are:
The Bible Bhagavad Gita The Communist Manifesto
The Origin of Species Freud Newton’s Principia
Anna Karenina Virgil’s Aeneid Dante’s Divine Comedy
Pepys’s Diary Plato’s Phaedo Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Eliot’s Waste Land Copernicus Hegel’s Philosophy
Homer’s Odyssey More’s Uotpia Vasari’s Lives of the Painters
Emily Dickinson Shakespeare Jane Austen
244 pages Richly illustrated throughout Price £10
Pen to Paper
