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“Books are not absolutely dead things”, wrote John Milton in 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 in 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 ∃ in 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).
It can be correctly inferred from the excerpt “A book is a metonym for the words that we read or for the thoughts that we have as we read them” (first paragraph of text) that
