A History of Reading

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning, and at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist and editor Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the six-thousand-year-old conversation between words and that hero without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel brilliantly covers reading as seduction, as rebellion, and as obsession and goes on to trace the quirky and fascinating history of the reader's progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to CD-ROM.

Author: Alberto Manguel
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 08/26/2014
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 1.10d
ISBN13: 9780143126713
ISBN10: 0143126717
BISAC Categories:
- History | Civilization
- Literary Criticism | Books & Reading
- History | Social History

About the Author
Alberto Manguel is a writer, a translator, and an editor of international reputation; his many books include The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (with Gianni Guadalupi), the award-winning novel News From a Foreign Country Came, and the short story anthologies Black Water, The Gates of Paradise, and (with Craig Stephenson) In Another Part of the Forest. Born in Buenos Aires, Manguel has traveled extensively and is now a Canadian citizen.