El infinito en un junco

This is a book about the history of books. A journey through the life of that fascinating artifact that we invented so that words could travel in space and time. The history of its manufacture, of all the types that we have tried over almost thirty centuries: books of smoke, stone, clay, reeds, silk, leather, trees and, the latest arrivals, plastic and light. It is also a travel book. A stopover route on Alexander's battlefields and in the Villa of the Papyri under the eruption of Vesuvius, in the palaces of Cleopatra and in the scene of the crime of Hypatia, in the first known bookstores and in the handwritten copy workshops , in the bonfires where prohibited codices burned, in the gulag, in the library of Sarajevo and in the underground labyrinth of Oxford in the year 2000. A thread that unites the classics with the vertiginous contemporary world, connecting them with current debates: Aristophanes and the judicial processes against humorists, Safo and the literary voice of women, Tito Livio and the fan phenomenon, Seneca and post-truth ... But, above all, this is a fabulous collective adventure starring thousands of people who, throughout of time, they have made possible and protected books: oral storytellers, scribes, illuminators, translators, street vendors, teachers, sages, spies, rebels, nuns, slaves, adventurers ... Readers in mountain landscapes and by the roaring sea, in the capitals where energy is concentrated and in the most remote enclaves where knowledge takes refuge in times of chaos. Ordinary people whose names in many cases do not record history, those book saviors who are the real protagonists of this essay.