Books - A Manifesto: Or, How to Build a Library

(Hardback)

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This is a book about books, about the subversive power of reading and the strange, enduring magic of books as objects.

Ever since childhood, books have been at the centre of Ian Patterson's life, as a poet, teacher, translator, bookseller and collector. As he constructs the last of many libraries, he makes an impassioned case for the radical importance of reading in our lives - from Proust to Jilly Cooper, detective novels to avant-garde poetry.

We are living through a time of deep cultural and political crisis. A crisis like this demands more than books - but without them, and without the breadth of knowledge, sense of history, awareness of alternatives and hope for the future they offer, things will not get better. Reading is not a luxury: it is a necessary part of reality, and of everyday life. We live within language, and when we think, it's with the tools that reading gives us.

At once a primer and a manifesto, this book is an invitation to a deeper, richer world of thought and feeling - and a reminder that books still matter.

Author Bio

Ian Patterson is a widely published poet and translator, and a former academic. The translator of Finding Time Again, the final volume of the Penguin Proust, he is also the author of Guernica and Total War and Nemo's Almanac. He won the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2017, with an elegy for his late wife, Jenny Diski. He worked in Further Education between 1970 and 1984, had a second-hand bookselling business for ten years after that, and from 1995 until 2018 was an academic, teaching English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Many of his students have gone on to shape the world of publishing and writing, both in the UK and the US.