According to Umberto Eco, it belongs to the same category as the spoon, hammer or wheel. Nothing better has been found since the invention of these objects. The book is so perfect that you might even forget that it hasn’t always existed.
But it has not always existed and it is the millennial adventure of the birth of the book that undertakes to tell Irene Vallejo with Infinity in a reed. The invention of books in Antiquity, an essential trip for bibliophiles of all stripes.
First stop in Alexandria, at IIIe century BC, when all ships calling were subject to search. By order of Ptolemy Ier, a former general of Alexander the Great who became King of Egypt, customs officers seized any writing found on board, had it copied onto new papyri, returned the copies and kept the originals.
Of the famous library of Alexandria, of which no physical trace has been found to date, we only know that its catalog occupied at least one hundred and twenty scrolls, five times more than theIliad.
Despite its fragility, the papyrus scroll, says Irene Vallejo, nevertheless represented a “fantastic step forward”. With this support much lighter than stone or clay (let us think of the tablets covered with the cuneiform writing of the Sumerians 5000 years ago), wood or metal, language was able to take root “in living matter. “: The reed that grew on the banks of the Nile, in Egypt. “The first book in history was born when words, barely air bubbles, found refuge in the marrow of an aquatic plant,” she writes.
Born in Zaragoza in 1979, Irene Vallejo was rocked throughout her childhood by Greco-Latin mythology, before studying classical philology and obtaining a doctorate from the universities of Zaragoza and Florence. Also a novelist, she passes with remarkable talent as a storyteller from Cicero to Borges, Bosnian Muslim cantors at the beginning of the 20th century.e century to Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, from Codex to Kindle, and tells an odyssey that is still ongoing.
Nothing remains of the oldest books in Europe, only echoes and allusions in texts that have come down to us. Papyrus is a perishable and fragile material that does not survive more than about two hundred years in humid climates. And if the birth of Greek philosophy coincided with the birth of books, says the author of Infinity in a reed, this is surely no accident.
Hailed by Alberto Manguel and Mario Vargas Llosa, awarded the National Essay Prize in 2020 and the Spanish Booksellers Association Prize, Irene Vallejo’s essay tells us about this fascinating epic. An epic of knowledge almost as gripping as theIliad – as papyri unearthed in Egypt confirmed that Homer’s book was by far the most widely read Greek book in ancient times.
Not hesitating to have recourse to personal anecdotes, combining known or unknown episodes of history, the Spanish philologist has compressed all her erudition between the pages of this book which reads like a novel.