When something vanishes—a community, a natural environment, an institution—it suddenly invades public discourse. Would this also be the fate of the book? Publications on libraries, the history of reading, the future of the book, but also typography, bibliomania, or paper, are flooding the tables of all bookshops as well as the shelves of personal and public libraries. There are certainly readers for these kinds of books, if not the hype would not last, but are there still readers of books in general in these days of digital communication and electronic reading and writing tools? The answer given by Oliver Bessard-Banquy, one of the leading scholars in the field of contemporary publishing in France, is a plain yes. However, the positive answer of this short but excellent and cleverly illustrated essay is not the one that might have been expected.
Bessard-Banquy’s work on the modernity of the book (subtitled: “new...