Introduction

Milan Kundera warns us that ‘metaphors are dangerous’.1 But let us, for a moment, live dangerously. For it is diffi cult to think of books other than metaphorically; or, more precisely, metonymically. When asked about our favourite books, the books that have inspired us, the books we feel guilty for not having read, we treat ‘books’ as a metonym. In proper accordance with the rules of this particular language-game, we understand that our questioner wants to know about favourite, inspirational or guilt-inducing texts; about semiotic structures; about what books contain. Were we to treat ‘books’ literally – to talk about favourite, inspirational, or guilt-inducing objects – we would fail to play by the rules, fail to acknowledge the space between container and contained. But scholarship abhors a vacuum and in recent decades has begun to fi ll the space between the literal and the metonymic book, between the physical object and the text which it transmits. For many years, the history of the book was a fi eld for specialists in material bibliography, paper manufacture, the history of library catalogues and the like. Such concerns are no less indispensable to the advancement of learning than other kinds of scholarship, but in recent times intellectual and cultural developments in Europe and North America have transformed the discipline into something much more vigorous and multifaceted, enriched by productive exchange with economic history, literary history, sociology, art history and much else besides.2 The history of the book has come to occupy an important position in the humanities and shows every sign of continuing to fl ourish and expand.