ABSTRACT
Charles, the hero of Fletcher’s 1637 comedy e Elder Brother, speaks of his books as ‘companions’, regarding them as friends, courtiers and living entities with whom he can actively engage. He does not simply speak to or listen to the ‘old Sages and Philosophers’, but rather converses with them in what is clearly a two-way exchange. Books have many ways of communicating with us: in the same way that Charles looks for intellectual stimulation from long-dead philosophers we can analyse Fletcher’s play itself in the hope of discovering some insight into seventeenth-century attitudes to books. In this chapter I am concerned with what books as material objects have to say – one collection of books in particular.
