Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book Brian Cummings

Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9780192663092,9780192847317,0192663097,0192847317,2021942603

Product details:

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0192847317
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0192847317
• Author(s): Brian Cummings

Bibliophobia is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of ‘the death of the book’ implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty-first-century experiences of paranoia and literary apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion back to the origins of writing in ancient Babylon and Egypt, then forwards to the age of Google. It uncovers bibliophobia from the first Chinese emperor to Nazi Germany, alongside parallel stories of bibliomania and bibliolatry in world religions and literatures. Books imply cognitive content embodied in physical form, in which the body cooperates with the brain. At its heart this relationship of body and mind, or letter and spirit, always retains a mystery. Religions are founded on holy books, which are also sites of transgression, so that writing is simultaneously sacred and profane. In secular societies these complex feelings are transferred to concepts of ideology and toleration. In the ambiguous future of the internet, digital immateriality threatens human equilibrium once again.

Table contents:

I. DEATH OF THE BOOK
1:Is there a future for the book?
2:The library as computer
3:The message of Ashurbanipal from antiquity
4:Living in the Tower of Babel
II. BOOKS AND VIOLENCE
5:The book-fires of 1933
6:The making and unmaking of libraries
7:Incombustible heresy in the age of Luther
8:The bondage of the book
III. SACRED TEXT
9:The mystery of Arabic script
10:The unnameable Hebrew God
11:How the alphabet came to Greece from Africa
12:The characters of Chinese
IV. THE CULT OF THE BOOK
13:Words and images
14:Kissing the book
15:Books under the razor
16:Shakespeare and bibliofetishism
V. THE BODY AND THE BOOK
17:The book incarnate
18:The hand in the history of the book
19:Written on the flesh
20:Book burial
VI. GHOST IN THE BOOK
21:The book after the French Revolution
22:The smartphone inside our heads
23:Heresy and modernity
24:Glyph
Notes
Bibliography

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