People bound: a history of the anthropomorphic bibliometaphor

Abstract

The article takes a close look at the history of centuries-long transformations of the ‘anthropomorphic’ metaphor, which likens a book to a human being. The analogy between book and man is drawn by a number of philosophical ideas, scholarly theories, and creative practices. Incidental varieties of the anthropomorphic metaphor highlight diverse semantic and functional aspects of the book’s operation in culture. It is those aspects that the author points out and examines in order to prove that the anthropomorphic metaphor plays a fundamental and dominant role in book culture. The book in a human form had its interpretation in the discourse of Soviet activism and was further developed in modern times. It is typified by all-out visualization of objects. Describing the metaphor’s evolution from the Middle Ages to the present day, the author follows the process of books becoming more human, only to draw a conclusion that the opposite is increasingly true, and has already prompted the idea that ‘flesh is paper’ and the emergence of a ‘face book’.