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“Books are not absolutely dead things”, wrote John Milton ∈1644. A book is a physical object, yet it also signifies something abstract, the words and the meanings collected within 1t. Thus, a book 1s both less and more than its contents alone. A book 1s a metonym for the words that we read or for the thoughts that we have as we read them. At one level, like any domestic object, a book takes on the imprint of its producer and its users. Old books have further value as containing the presence of many other readers ∈ the past. Yet, more than other objects, a book 1s felt to embody not only a physical memory but also a record of past thoughts. The book contains both its reader and its author. In Milton”s more poetic terms, books “contam a potency of life mn them”, because they “preserve the extraction of that living intellect that bred them”.
The book thus achieves a further mystery, of transforming what appears to be purely immaterial and conceptual into something with a concrete form. I is therefore not entirely extravagant for Milton to claam that a book possesses “a life beyond life”. Destroying a book, then, 1s a crime worse than that of homicide, since a book encloses the life of more than one person and ∃∈ more than one time. Paradoxically, regardless of the material survival of a physical copy or artefact, a book 1s something immortal and imperishable.
Brian Cummings. The book as symbol. /n: Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen. The Book: a global history. Oxford: Oxford Universit Press, 2014 (adapted).
According to text, books
