It’s Books All the Way Down!

My Favorite Books about Books: A Reading List for True Bibliophiles

Is there anything more delightfully meta than books about books? Sometimes, as Marshall McLuhan (or Cosmo Kramer) could tell us, the medium really is the message. In my book about books, The Idea Machine, I argue that books are humanity’s first great information technology—an invention that hasn’t simply preserved and spread ideas but has transformed how we think and even have built our civilization.

And what other books best illuminate that story? What follows is a brief, guided tour through the literature of literature. Some of these titles influenced my thinking for The Idea Machine; others fill in the picture or extend the argument in unexpected directions; still others just make for fun reading—perfect for any bibliophile to get better acquainted with one of our species’ greatest inventions.

Photo by Rey Seven on Unsplash

Together these books form a highly incomplete but equally enjoyable reading list for those curious how cuneiform glyphs incised on clay tablets could become the machinery of thought itself. How should we get started? Let’s go with the basics.

Writing and Reading

“Writing,” said Voltaire, “is the painting of the voice.” Every story about books begins before books with the invention of writing. Stephen Roger Fischer’s A History of Writing charts the evolution from writing’s first use in accounting to cuneiform to the alphabet and beyond. His companion volume, A History of Reading, shows how the act of interpreting those marks transformed in tandem—and transformed us in the process.

For something more digressive and philosophical, I recommend Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. Manguel meanders through centuries of readers and their habits, exploring the nooks and crannies of experience: private reading, being read to, and more (including stealing books, something I tend to discourage).

Martin Puchner’s The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization widens that lens, arguing that humanity has sustained itself with the stories it tells. “We are, as a species,” says Jonathan Gottschall, “addicted to stories.” Puchner follows the thread from the Epic of Gilgamesh through Don Quixote, all the way to Harry Potter, showing how narratives have shaped cultures around the world. I had the pleasure of interviewing Puchner in 2023 and find his work fascinating.

I also recommend Matthew Battles’s Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word and Frank Furedi’s Power of Reading: From Socrates to Twitter, which explores how literacy transforms the lives of individuals and the trajectories of societies. Furedi’s great warning? Modern culture doesn’t so much discourage readers as it infantilizes them.

Books as Objects (and More)

Books aren’t just vessels for ideas; they’re physical artifacts with structure, heft, functions, and features. Keith Houston’s The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time covers the bookiness of books. A beautifully designed book, it takes a historical look at the development of the page, the text, the illustrations, and the forms that comprise the book. Houston amplifies our appreciation for books as things, which is core to my argument about the book as a technology.

Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, part of MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series, approaches the same fascination from a more conceptual angle. Her tagline says it all: “The book as object, as content, as idea, as interface.” Though written for an academic audience, it’s accessible to all and brimming with insight for anyone curious about how the codex became so successful—and what happens when books migrate to screens. As Edmond Jabes says, “What is beyond the book is still the book.”

Though first published several decades ago now, David Diringer’s The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental remains a treasure for understanding the material world of the book in the ancient world. Packed with 185 illustrations, Diringer reveals how wildly diverse the pre-print world was. Diringer covers everything from Mesopotamian clay tablets to Chinese bamboo slips, reminding us that the book has never embraced just one format. Along with Diringer, I recommend Larry Hurtado’s The Earliest Christian Artifacts, which explores the materiality of ancient Christian codexes—a fascinating and underappreciated side of the religion’s origin story.

Another angle on books as objects? Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf, a surprisingly enjoyable history of the shelf as the most successful user interface ever invented. Before shelves, books were stored flat in trunks and chests, stuffed in window niches, or chained to tables and lecterns. The vertical shelf—books standing upright, spines out—made browsing possible and turned libraries into navigable spaces (see The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books below for more on that). As a book lover and engineer, Petroski tackles his subject from a unique angle.

These objects are, of course, more than objects. Tom Mole’s The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More Than Words explores how books shape our sense of identity, memory, and community. Books aren’t just “passive tools,” he says; rather, they exert “forces of their own.” Now, in a world that values screens more than pages, books matter more than ever, and Mole shows how; he even explores how books get along with other technologies.

Along similar lines, it’s hard to beat Stuart Kells’s The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders for its fast-paced history of books and the fascinating figures who obsess over them. I interviewed Kells a while back; it’s an illuminating exchange.

When Books Were New

For a return to the earliest days of the Greco-Roman book, there’s nothing better than Irene Vallejo’s Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World. She explores the founding of the Library of Alexandria and follows the trajectory through the decline of the Roman Empire. “We are the only animals who imagine fables,” says Vallejo,

who scatter the darkness with stories, who learn to live with chaos thanks to the tales we tell, who stoke the embers of fires with the air of their words, who travel great distances to carry their chronicles to strangers. And when we share the same stories, we are no longer strangers anymore.

It’s a beautiful sentiment but sadly untrue. Among all the volumes that have shaped human history, none has brought us closer together—or driven us further apart—than the ancient collection of Hebrew literature and sectarian writing known as the Bible. To understand its origins, reach, and impact, I point you to a trinity of tomes:

• Jaroslav Pelikan’s Whose Bible Is It? A Short History of the Scriptures,

• Bruce Gordon’s The Bible: A Global History, and

• John Barton’s A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book.

Each charts the text’s remarkable journey across languages, cultures, and continents. Pelikan focuses on contested ownership—who gets to interpret Scripture and by what authority—while Gordon maps the Bible’s global circulation, showing how translation and transmission created not one experience of the Bible but many. Barton’s history is my favorite of the bunch and in some ways the most challenging. Together they illustrate how a collection of ancient Near Eastern texts became a force that could both topple empires and transform individual lives.

Rex Winsbury’s The Roman Book drills down on books in the ancient Roman context alone. Winsbury highlights all aspects of Roman book culture, including the degree to which slave labor underwrote book production. Slaves were, as he says, “infrastructure of the trade.” I found it quite eye opening. Along with this I recommend William V. Harris’s Ancient Literacy and Ancient Literacies, edited by William A. Johnson and Holt N. Parker.

Finally, Christopher B. Krebs’s A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich explores the life and afterlife of a single ancient text. Tacitus’s ethnography of Germanic tribes, written in 98 CE, became centuries later a toxic guidebook for Nazi racial ideology. The big idea? Krebs shows how books can mutate in meaning as history moves on, demonstrating that texts don’t simply sit inert on shelves—they get misread, misused, sometimes even weaponized, and conscripted into causes their authors never could have imagined. (Happens to the Bible, too.)

Medieval Transformations

The shift from scroll to codex—from rolled papyrus to bound parchment—is one of the most consequential format changes in book history. The codex made random access possible, enabled cross-referencing, indexing, and amplified the book’s use as a tool for study and reference. Hurtado’s book, mentioned above, covers some of that ground. So does Harry Y. Gamble’s Books and Readers in the Early Church and Kim Haines-Eitzen’s Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature.

One particularly helpful book along those lines is Christianity and the Transformation of the Book by Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams. They detail the innovative work of Origen and Eusebius in book production and technology—underexplored and underappreciated areas of literary history. Williams followed up that volume with one dedicated to the crankiest monk in late antiquity, Jerome, who bequeathed the world some enjoyably snarky letters and the Vulgate Bible. The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship bridges the ancient and medieval worlds. Williams explains how Jerome worked and what he produced and how it shaped centuries of subsequent study.

Once you’re in the medieval period proper, Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts offers a 600-plus-page pilgrimage through some of the most exquisite books ever made: the Book of Kells, the Codex Amiatianus, the Copenhagen Psalter, and nine others. Illustrated in full color and bubbling with detail from de Hamel’s firsthand encounters with these books, it’s impossible not to get swept up in the beauty they conjure.

How were such books made? Sarah J. Charles’s The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages offers a step-by-step masterclass in medieval book production, covering not only the history but also all the individual aspects, such as the workshops where books were painstakingly made, how parchment and ink were prepared, how the books were actually copied and illuminated, and more. It’s also full color.

How were such books used? For that I point to Laura Saetveit Miles’s The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation. Miles (Writing Visionary here on Substack) explores the symbolic and devotional role books played in art and theology, particularly in depictions of the Annunciation—where Mary is so often shown reading. Similarly, there’s Eamon Duffy’s Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, a history of medieval books of hours.

Dennis Duncan’s Index: A History of the deserves special mention here, not only for its cheeky title. It’s a lively, surprisingly entertaining study of the humble back-of-the-book index, tracing its invention from medieval scriptoria to Google search. As I argue in The Idea Machine, the index exemplifies how textual technologies increase a book’s value by making knowledge more findable—a principle as relevant today as in the thirteenth century.

And Then Came Gutenberg

The arrival of movable-type printing around 1450 is often treated as a clean break, a before-and-after moment in history. Not exactly. The impact was both immediate and lumbering. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 offers a highly readable account of the slow transformation wrought by print culture and how it upended intellectual and social life in Europe.

Ross King’s The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance captures the tottering, liminal moment at the threshold when books crossed from the scribes to the presses. Vespasiano da Bisticci, the titular book dealer of Florence at the center of King’s tale, witnessed both worlds: manuscripts as luxury objects and printed books as mass-produced commodities.

Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library chronicles Hernando Colón’s visionary and ultimately foolhardy attempt to collect and catalog all knowledge. Colón, Columbus’s bastard son, amassed more than 15,000 volumes and pioneered cataloging techniques that prefigured modern library science. He basically built a Renaissance Google for an analog internet—an ambitious project to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.

No one understood print’s potential better than Martin Luther. Andrew Pettegree’s Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, Protest, and the Stream of Books That Changed the World recounts how the unruly monk from Wittenberg caused a local theological crisis to metastasize into a controversy that affected every corner of the continent—all through entrepreneurial mastery of the new media.

Books in Wartime

Pettegree has written widely on book history, including (with Arthur der Weduwen) The Library: A Fragile History, a sweeping study of how public and private book collections have preserved human knowledge, despite their vulnerability to neglect, ideology, fire, and war. Knowledge is always one disaster away from oblivion, and Pettegree and Weduwen remind us that humans excel at creating disasters.

Pettegree’s The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict narrows that lens to show how reading changes under bombardment. What role do books play in provoking conflict? How do nations mobilize literature in battle? And what about collateral damage? Pettegree explores not just physical destruction but the psychological and cultural traumas that war inflicts upon readers and reading.

Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II tells how pocket-sized paperbacks became weapons for Allied soldiers during the Second World War to win the battle for morale. The compact and durable Armed Services Editions brought literature to millions of servicemen. Manning shows how books we regard as classics today—for instance, The Great Gatsby and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—soothed the nerves and steeled the souls of men in extreme danger.

And then, of course, come the book burners. Anders Rydell’s The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance exposes how the Third Reich systematically pillaged private and public collections across the continent. Books became spoils of war, some burned, others seized. Rydell highlights the postwar efforts to return many of these pilfered volumes to heirs of the conflict—a process still underway.

What motivates the war-mongers? Daniel Kalder’s The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy turns the focus on authoritarian authors. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and many, many others—it so happens they had literary ambitions like anyone else. Of course, they also had the power to make everyone under their thumb read their work. Mein Kampf? Mein Gott! Thankfully, no one has to read any of this garbage any longer. But since the ideas in these books ravaged the twentieth century, we lose out if we ignore them completely. Thankfully, Kalder serves as a capable Virgil through this inferno of terrible tomes and failed philosophy and somehow makes it all hilarious along the way. I recently interviewed Kalder, and you can get a good sense of what he brings to the undertaking.

Two additional volumes extend the inky side of the ideological struggle into the Cold War era and provide fascinating espionage stories along the way. Duncan White’s Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War examines how authors, such as Orwell to Solzhenitsyn, became combatants in the fight between the democratic West and Communist East. And Charlie English’s The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature reads like a spy thriller, recounting the covert campaigns to smuggle banned books behind the Iron Curtain. Books became contraband, vessels of subversion smuggled in suitcases, and surreptitiously produced on verboten printing equipment.

For Fun and Personal Growth

After all this talk of the ancient world, Middle Ages, propaganda, warfare, and culture-shaping texts, it’s worth remembering that books are also simply fun.

Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader provokes exactly that kind of fun—a series of eighteen whimsical, domestic essays about the pleasures and quirks of bookish life. Family forms a key ingredient, as do plagiarism, writing in books, eating books, and proofreading. She highlights the conflicts that emerge when two bibliophiles marry (his books versus hers), the joy (and perils) of reading aloud, the care and abuse of books, and more than an few oddities; did, for instance, Sir Walter Scott really shoot down a crow and use its blood to scribble a sentence?

Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction interrupts our endless scrolling and skimming to re-present the book as a device engineered for delight. Jacobs reminds us that reading serves us better when we take it as a joy, instead of a job. Read what you love! Follow your whims! His follow-up, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, extends that invitation across time, showing how conversations with the past, mediated through books, can dial down the frenzy of the present. I, for one, need such a prescription.

But reading for pleasure doesn’t mean reading without purpose. Karen Swallow Prior’s On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books takes us back to the role of reading in personal formation and growth. Drawing on the classical and theological virtues (prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope, love), Prior tours several novels and asks not just what they mean but what they do to us—an angle Tom Mole would appreciate. (And I’m sure you’ll appreciate not just one, but two interviews I’ve done with Prior!)

This list is hardly exhaustive. There are a million more. But it’s a start. If you’ve just finished The Idea Machine and want to keep reading, these titles will take you deeper into the machinery of thought and imagination. Some extend the argument; others complicate it; depending on how you look at it, I’m pretty sure a few might even contradict it. All of them, in one way or another, testify to the strange and enduring power of putting words on a page and trusting they’ll find their way to a reader somewhere, sometime, who needs them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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