Clarendon Lectures in English

Bibliophobia is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Bibliophobia is a global history, covering six continents and seven religions, describing written examples from each of the last thirty centuries (and several earlier). It discusses topics such as the origins of different kinds of human script, the development of textual media such as scrolls, codices, printed books, and artificial intelligence, the collection and destruction of libraries, the use of books as holy relics, talismans, or shrines, and the place of literacy in the history of slavery, heresy, blasphemy, censorship, and persecution. It proposes a theory of writing, how it relates to speech, images, and information, or to concepts of mimesis, personhood, and politics. Originating as the Clarendon Lectures in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, the methods of Bibliophobia range across book history, comparative religion, philosophy from Plato to Hegel and Freud, and a range of global literature from ancient to contemporary. Its inspiration is the power that books always (and continue to) have in the emotional, spiritual, bodily, and imaginative lives of readers.