When was it we were promised the paperless office? It seems we can’t do without the white stuff.

Dr Johnson loved books. He loved to pull them apart, rip the heart out of them, devour them.

In the late fifteenth century, the republic on the Adriatic was Europe’s most flourishing centre of publishing.

“The endless malleability of digital writing,” writes Nicholas Carr in the Wall Street Journal, “promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.” “When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books were handwritten by scribes, and no two copies were exactly the same. Scribes…

Italo Calvino, in his playful late novel (1979) If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, enters in the first chapter (or rather it is “you”, dear reader, who enters) a bookshop, with the settled purpose of buying Italo Calvino’s new novel, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller ‑ hoping perhaps that it might be a bit better…

Alan Bennett in the London Review of Books (July 28th) writes on the difficulty of presenting on stage a convincing library, library in this case meaning not the august municipal public institution, such as Armley Public Library in Leeds where Bennett says he was educated as much as at school, but a private collection of books, “someone’s…