A history of reading / Alberto Manguel.

Originally published in 1996; this edition has a new introduction.

The Last Page -- Reading Shadows -- The Silent Readers -- The Book of Memory -- Learning to Read -- The Missing First Page -- Picture Reading -- Being Read To -- The Shape of the Book -- Private Reading -- Metaphors of Reading -- Beginnings -- Ordainers of the Universe -- Reading the Future -- The Symbolic Reader -- Reading within Walls -- Stealing Books -- The Author as Reader -- The Translator as Reader -- Forbidden Reading -- The Book Fool -- Endpaper Pages.

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book - that string of confused, alien ciphers - shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the 6000-year-old conversation between words and that magician without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel lingers over reading as seduction, as rebellion, as obsession, and goes on to trace the never-before-told story of the reader's progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to CD-ROM.