Books - A Manifesto

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.