A History of Reading by Steven Roger Fischer

A History of Reading by Steven Roger Fischer by Reaktion  treats

the immense history behind an activity that most of us love to do: the one of reading.  Books, physical books, the only instrument of knowledge not killed by the arrival of the internet and... ebooks.

All the rest, a millenary culture was killed: letters, telephone calls, visits; what it meant sociality in the common sense of the words was destroyed and a profound mutation invested all our society.

Books, with dignity stayed in their old places, in our houses, in libraries, smiling for a change that didn't invest them, but all the rest of the human sphere and the world.

Why this?

And what does reading means?

First of all let's say that for humans reading have always been a great necessity and as adds the author: what it means music to the spirit, reading is to the mind and if writing is expression, reading is impression, writing is public, reading personal, but more, reading is forever.

Describing also the birth of literature in China, Korea, Japan, Americas and India in the first 240 pages, in our western civilization a big change was represented by the arrival to the horizon by Petrarca, and later Dante and in Englad Geoffrey Chaucer. Slowly books were read aloud, in particular in 1500 (Ludovico Ariosto and L'Orlando Furioso) but also before, in 1300 when a wealthy man requested a copy of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis of Assisi, because he wanted to read it aloud to his sons.

Slowly there was the arrival in books of chapters, with also, for readers, lectern and desk.

It was of course the printed page who made the difference: we speak of Gutenberg.

It was the biggest revolution for books and accessibility.

If in our modernity, writes the author, we see written words from the morning to night, in the remote past it wasn't in this way. People once invented the printed word, were in grade not just to read the Holy Word but many other books as well.

It's a beautiful excurses this book written by Fischer, through centuries, writers and thinkers and what it meant and mean for men reading in all the aspects and complexisites.

Interesting book, for whoever in love with literature and books.

Highly recommended.

Anna Maria Polidori