A HISTORY OF THE BOOK IN 100 BOOKS
Roderick Cave and Sara Ayad
Crows Nest, $35
The title of this magnificently illustrated book tends to beg the question: Which 100 books? And of course, Roderick Cave and Sara Ayad's choices may not satisfy everyone.
After all, there is no King James Bible and no Shakespeare, which may surprise many readers and book lovers. However, the authors explain they omitted some works – such as the King James and the Bard's – as they were so well known they needed no further publicity.
Instead, they have included other books "equally important or influential in their milieu". For example, they have the Gustav Vasa Bible, which they explain was highly influential in the spread of Lutheranism in northern Europe and the formation of the modern Swedish language.
Cave and Ayad's great journey begins with "book one", the Palaeolithic El Castillo cave paintings of northern Spain, dating back at least 40,800 years and produced by the earliest humans, the Neanderthals.
It ends with their book 100, a pre-1907 reel-to-reel, dried-leaf manuscript from Sulawesi, Indonesia, which is discussed in the chapter on digitisation and the book's future. This apparent anachronism is cleared up when the authors draw attention to the common problem in reading the reel-to-reel, scroll or e-book, compared to the codex (or page) book. This is, you can't "skip around easily", but instead have to roll (or scroll) laboriously back and forth.
Between times, the range is wide and varied. From the East, a million incantations (or dharani) ordered by Japanese empress Shotoku circa 770 AD, as book seven; the great classics offer Homer's Iliad (14); the mediaeval world brings the Book of Kells, "Ireland's greatest treasure" (18); again from the East, Al-Sufi's Book of Fixed Stars, the standard Islamic book of astronomy (29); in 1511 came Demaundes Joyous, the first English adult-jokes book (36); John Cleland's once-scandalous Fanny Hill is No. 64; then an "Australian classic", Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms, (80); while Marie Stopes' Married Love is seen as "hugely important in changing ideas" (91).
Cave and Ayad's selection principle was to produce a mix from the great, good, less great and not so good, intended to "stimulate readers' interest enough to persuade them to go farther".
Even if some don't take another step, this trek alone is well worth taking.
