A journey through the life of the book and those who have safeguarded it for almost thirty centuries.

This is a book about the history of books. A journey through the life of this fascinating artifact that we invented so that words could travel in space and time. The history of their manufacture, of all the types that we have tried over almost thirty centuries: smoke books, stone, clay, reeds, silk, leather, trees and, the latest arrivals, plastic and light.

It is also a travel book. A stopover route in the battlefields of Alexander and in the Villa of the Papyri under the eruption of Vesuvius, in the palaces of Cleopatra and the scene of the crime of Hypatia, in the first known bookstores and in the workshops of manuscript copying , at the bonfires where forbidden codices burned, in the gulag, in the Sarajevo library and in the Oxford underground labyrinth in 2000. A thread that links the classics with the fast-paced contemporary world, connecting them with current debates: Aristophanes and the judicial processes against humorists, Safo and the literary voice of women, Tito Livio and the fan phenomenon, Seneca and the post-truth;

But above all, this is a fabulous collective adventure starring thousands of people who, over time, have made possible and have protected books: oral narrators, scribes, illuminators, translators, street vendors, teachers, wise men, spies , rebels, nuns, slaves, adventurers; Readers in mountain landscapes and next to the roaring sea, in capitals where energy is concentrated and in the most remote enclaves where knowledge takes refuge in times of chaos. Ordinary people whose names in many cases history does not record, those book saviors who are the true protagonists of this essay.

The Critical Eye of Narrative Award 2019. The Libraries Recommend Non-Fiction Award 2020. The Owl Award for the Best Book of 2019, awarded by the Aragonese Association of Friends of the Book. Civic Action Award. THE REVIEW OF THE SEASON

Smoke, stone, clay, silk, leather, trees, plastic and light ... A journey through the life of the book and those who have safeguarded it for almost thirty centuries.

«Very well written, with really admirable pages; the love of books and reading are the atmosphere in which the pages of this masterpiece unfold. I am absolutely sure that it will continue to be read when its current readers are already in the afterlife. MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

«Vallejo has wisely decided to free himself from the academic style and has chosen the voice of the storyteller, the story understood not as a string of cited documents, but as a fable. Thus for the common reader (whom Virginia Woolf claimed) this charming essay is more moving and more immediate, because it is simply a tribute to the book on the part of a passionate reader ». ALBERTO MANGUEL, Babelia, El País

"It is a delight to read the prose of Irene Vallejo, creative, brilliant, full of sensitivity." LUIS LANDERO