Next article FreeBook ReviewBibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book. Brian Cummings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xxiii+562.Martyn LyonsMartyn LyonsUniversity of New South Wales Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis book is a bravura performance. It originated in the Clarendon Lectures given at Oxford in 2012. But it is no longer a slim volume of pithy lectures, because in ten years since conception it has grown profusely, now offering a roller-coaster ride across six continents, seven religions, and five thousand years of writing since Sumer (the author’s and publisher’s blurbs repeat this as though it were a virtue). We briefly meet Freud, Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Levi-Strauss, Hegel, McLuhan, Socrates, and many others along the journey. The treatment, although global, is not chronological; the reader time travels from the present to Babylon, the Protestant Reformation, or ancient Greece at a speed that would give any self-respecting historian vertigo.Cummings opens with the decline of the codex, defying prophecies of its imminent death. Today we are all digitized, but the digital book has not replaced paper, any more than printing destroyed manuscript culture. The usual parallels are drawn: just as the internet offered a utopian world where knowledge would be at everyone’s fingertips, so too, people once thought that printing could change the world, some for the better, others for the worse. As Cummings’s title suggests, he is interested in the “dark side” of the book—those who hate it, fear it, and attempt to destroy it. Writing is always close to violence, as Nazi book burnings and the fate of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses showed. But the title gives too limited an impression of Cummings’s true agenda. He is not only interested in darkness, but also in the ways books have offered a continuation of life in the face of extremity: here, on the side of hope and optimism, he could have cited Dita Kraus, the young clandestine librarian of the Auschwitz death camp, or the books rescued by the Damascus underground resistance from the ruins in the Syrian civil war.Although he is a literary specialist, Cummings takes a philosophical approach, which sometimes makes his text difficult reading. One passage on Hegel is especially opaque (340–41), which is probably mainly Hegel’s fault. The volume weighs in at over one kilogram, which also does not make for an easy read. He wants to discuss all that we invest in a book, how we live inside books, and how they live inside us. Books are invested with our anxieties and fantasies, and they can engender pathological reactions (leading to book burning). Writing, he argues, is a form of mimesis, creating a double of ourselves, ensuring survival and transcending the death of the self. Writing creates a substitute world, a fake representation of “real” speech (as in Plato, whose version of Socrates prioritized verbal communication). Cummings’s treatment repeatedly returns in cyclical fashion to the contradictions and antitheses of writing: writing is both life and death, at once sacred and taboo, power and resistance; it leads to emancipation, but it is also an agent of enslavement, especially in the colonial context.Books are immortal, but they are fragile and prone to destruction. Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh aimed to encapsulate universal knowledge, but invaders destroyed it; the fabled library of Alexandria also suffered extinction, for reasons that are disputed. Libraries organize knowledge but have built-in obsolescence—now they are everywhere seeking off-site storage depots because they are no longer fit for purpose. Moreover, paper decays and books gradually crumble.Cummings produces a chaotic encyclopedia of biblioclastic moments, and some of them are cited more than once. Several examples of biblioclasm are well known: ISIS burning the library of the University of Mosul, the British in Burma, the Japanese in Korea, the Germans in Louvain (1914), the dissolution of monasteries, the nationalization of church property by the French Revolution. Others will be less so, for Cummings takes the grim story of book burning back to the Qin empire. The tale includes (in no particular order) Nazi book burnings, the papal Index, book burning by Catholics and Protestants, Fahrenheit 451, The Name of the Rose, the Crusaders burning the imperial library of Constantinople (1204), and Cardinal Cisneros burning books of the madrasa at Granada in the Reconquista (1499). Fire is not the only medium of destruction. Cummings might have added that during the Parisian Revolution of 1830, an angry crowd ransacked the archbishop’s palace and threw precious books into the Seine; books could be drowned as well as burned.Cummings gives an interesting reading of artistic representations of the Tower of Babel, a symbol of human ambition but also of failure. The dream of universal knowledge often ends in annihilation—another Cummingsian paradox. A fine line separates bibliophobia from bibliolatry, the veneration of the book as a sacred object. Cummings discusses the book’s healing powers, its miraculous survivals, the ritual of kissing a Bible to confirm an oath. The book is treated as an object, not a text to be read—the prophet Ezekiel ate a scroll at God’s command, while a Hampshire woman suffering from fits ate a whole New Testament, putting every page in the middle of her sandwiches. The book is reified and fetishized.Cummings is interested in sacred writing and the mystery of meaning. He devotes a section to Arabic script and Koranic calligraphy, and he introduces the Cairo genizah—a place of paper internment where ancient texts are forgotten (anything containing the name of God could not be thrown away)—as well as Torah scrolls and Egyptian hieroglyphics. And he reminds us of all the arcane scripts that cannot be deciphered. Forget his bookish title: this work is as much about writing as it is about books. We are writing, he seems to say; for John Locke, the human mind at birth is conceived as a writing surface.Some of this is exhilarating. It is immensely erudite and refreshingly takes book history outside its European comfort zone. But who is it aimed at? Book lovers, obviously. Librarians, certainly. But untranslated epigrammatic citations in Latin, German, French, and Spanish make the desired readership hard to discern. There is little here for the literary critic; the historian will find much that is familiar and some that is not, and will be dismayed by the book’s loose and disorganized structure. Apart from a detour with Lévi-Strauss into Amazonia, the anthropology of writing is not seriously addressed.As a book historian, I felt dazzled but frustrated by this book. It is full of treasures and sparkling insights, but many of them demand further contextualization. Be prepared to be led through a rich gallery of intriguing scenarios at a cracking pace. I advise taking a deep breath before diving in. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724889 HistoryPublished online March 21, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.