Presences of the past: books, readers, and forms of reading.

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The relationship between books, readers, and memories of the past is a long story, full of technological shifts, power struggles, and intimate acts of reading that have changed the course of culture. From Mesopotamian clay to digital screens, passing through parchments, codices, and paperback books, each material form of the book has also shaped the way we think, believe, pray, study, and even do politics.

When discussing “presences of the past, books, and readers,” we enter a universe where historical research , such as that of Roger Chartier, coexists with the passionate gaze of readers like Alberto Manguel. On one hand, the history of reading practices and publishing circuits; on the other, the almost physical experience of choosing a book by its size, texture, cover, and how it fits in one's hand or in a suitcase. Together, these perspectives show how each era invented a type of book suited to its readers – and how we inherit, transform, and continue to give life to these objects.

Presences of the past: speeches, readers, and democracy.

The work of historians like Roger Chartier shows that texts from the past are not merely words preserved on paper , but discourses that originated in very specific social and cultural contexts. These discourses circulated through various material supports, were edited, cut up, translated, censored, commented on, and, above all, read in different ways in each era. It is in this chain of production, circulation, and reception that the past becomes a living presence.

Chartier insists on the importance of understanding not only what the texts say, but how they were received and used : who had access to them, in what spaces they were read, whether they were read aloud or silently, whether they served for prayer, learning, entertainment, or political persuasion. The materiality of the book – the typeface, the format, the price, the binding – conditions the possible audience. A huge choir volume, on parchment, with giant letters, implies a collective reading in church; a small octavo booklet, inexpensive, fits in a pocket and paves the way for individual and mobile readings.

Publishers and printers play a central role in transforming texts into tangible objects . By selecting what to publish, standardizing formats, deciding on print runs and prices, they shape the possible reading universe of an era. Publishing is not a technical detail: it is a cultural and political mediation. By reorganizing texts into chapters, collections, cheap or luxurious series, publishing rewrites, in practice, how the past reaches us.

For Chartier, the lesson of history and the "presences of the past" has a clearly political scope : to offer citizens critical tools to identify falsifications, dismantle manipulations, and build solid knowledge. Without this capacity for critical reading, fueled by books, archives, and written memory, democracy itself is threatened. Reading the past, in this sense, is not erudite nostalgia, but an exercise of freedom.

This perspective intersects with the intimate experience of ordinary readers , who choose books for vacations, for train rides, for the sofa at home. Summer vacations, for example, and the habit of building " reading piles " for summer leisure are recent achievements, as is the widely democratized access to books. There was a time when both extended leisure time and the possession of books were privileges of the few.

A journey through the material history of the book.

Alberto Manguel, in his passionate exploration of the history of reading , invites the reader to "go back in time" to the fourth millennium BC to investigate not only what was read, but also what reading materials physically resembled. From Mesopotamia to Victorian libraries, he shows how the medium – clay, stone, papyrus, parchment, paper – shaped the act of reading and the type of reader imagined.

The earliest Mesopotamian “reading units” were small clay tablets , usually square or rectangular, just over seven centimeters wide. Several of these, kept in leather pouches or boxes, made up a “book” that could be manipulated sequence by sequence. However, there were also very different texts, such as the monumental Assyrian legal code, inscribed on a monolith more than six square meters in size, written in columns on both sides, designed not to be held, but to be erected as a solemn reference – its size, in this case, reinforced the authority of the law.

From clay and stone, the written tradition progressed to papyrus and parchment scrolls . Papyrus, made from the dried stalks of a reed-like plant, was lightweight and rollable; parchment and vellum, produced from animal skins by different methods, offered strength and flexibility. This gave rise to the scrolls we associate with classical Greco-Roman texts and administrative documents. But these supports had limitations when it came to creating a book that was easy to consult and annotate.

The great turning point was the appearance of the codex , a set of folded and bound sheets in a rectangular format. A clay codex would be extremely heavy and cumbersome, and papyrus codices tended to break at the folds. Parchment, on the other hand, could be cut and folded into infinite dimensions, allowing for portable formats or true liturgical giants. From the 4th century onwards, the codex became dominant in Europe, rendering scrolls practically obsolete.

The codex offers revolutionary advantages for the reader : it allows the use of both sides of the page, provides generous margins for glosses and commentaries, and enables rapid navigation between sections of the text, replacing the linear "rolling" of the scroll with almost instantaneous jumps between pages. The textual organization changes along with it: it goes from divisions based on the physical capacity of a scroll (like the 24 scrolls of the Iliad) to chapters, internal books, and volumes that can bring together several short works under the same cover.

Interestingly, our current screens retain some of the limitations of the scroll : they display only a portion of the text at a time, while we "scroll" up or down, losing sight of the whole. The codex, in turn, allowed one to hold almost the entire text in one's hands, reinforcing the feeling of totality. It is no coincidence that Martial, a 1st-century poet, marveled at the possibility of having the entire Iliad in a small volume of parchment, fitting in the palm of one's hand.

Formats, uses, and spaces for reading in the Middle Ages

The form of a book has always been linked to the space in which it would be kept and read . Scrolls were placed in cylindrical boxes, with clay or parchment labels, or aligned on shelves with visible indexes. Codices, stacked horizontally, required specific furniture, cabinets (armarii), low or high shelves, adapted to the size of the volumes. In the 5th century, Sidonius Apollinaris describes a country house in Gaul with various types of shelves, full of Latin classics for the men and devotional books for the women.

In a medieval Europe deeply marked by liturgy , one of the most popular private reading objects was the book of hours, a small manuscript or printed volume containing short offices dedicated to the Virgin Mary, psalms, biblical passages, the Office of the Dead, supplications to saints, and a calendar. These books, richly illuminated in many cases, functioned as portable prayer manuals, suitable for the daily life of pious lay people.

Books of hours were also objects of status and affection : they bore family coats of arms, portraits of the owner, and sophisticated miniatures that updated biblical scenes in contemporary settings. They served as wedding gifts among nobles and, later, wealthy bourgeois; specialized Flemish workshops dominated the market, offering catalogs of options to clients throughout Europe. One copy commissioned for Anne of Brittany was made to the exact size of her hand – a book literally molded to the reader's body.

At the other end of the scale, the Church produced gigantic liturgical books – missals, antiphonaries, choir books – intended for communal reading at altars and in choirs. Manuscripts such as the famous St. Gall antiphonary, with enormous letters legible by up to twenty singers around a lectern, show how the book could also be a visual “monument.” Some volumes were so heavy that they needed rollers to be moved, reinforcing the idea that they belonged to a fixed, collective, and solemn space.

To make reading more comfortable, ingenious furniture and devices emerged : articulated tables that allowed adjusting the angle of the book, rotating tables with multiple sides for simultaneously consulting several volumes, chairs with integrated reading support, such as the curious 18th-century English "cockfighting chair," in which the reader sat astride, with a lectern on the backrest and wide arms to support the elbows.

However, reading was not always a socially accepted practice . In times of religious persecution, such as during the reign of Mary Tudor in England, Protestants hid English Bibles under pews, secured with ribbons, so they could turn the seat around and read discreetly. One of the children would watch the door to warn of approaching officers. This material ingenuity – transforming a pew into a hiding place – shows how the desire to read could defy laws and concrete risks.

Gutenberg's typographical revolution

Until the mid-15th century, producing a book was a slow and expensive process , dependent on specialized copyists, illuminators, and bookbinders. This ensured, on the one hand, pieces of great beauty; on the other, it brutally limited the number of copies available and concentrated written knowledge in the hands of wealthy institutions, such as monasteries and universities.

Johann Gutenberg, a goldsmith and engraver from Mainz, realized that he could apply metallurgical techniques to the world of text : instead of carving entire blocks of wood, as was already done for images, he developed movable metal type, standardized molds, a printing press that combined solutions used in wine cellars and bookbinding workshops, as well as an oil-based ink suitable for the new system. Between 1450 and 1455, he printed the famous 42-line Bible.

A contemporary, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius II), described with astonishment the clarity of the script and the number of copies available for sale in Frankfurt. It is estimated that between 158 and 180 copies of this Bible were produced – an impressive number for the time. Within a few decades, the novelty spread: there were printing presses in Italy in 1465, in France in 1470, in Spain in 1472, in Holland and England in 1475, and in Denmark in 1489. In the New World, the first functioning printing press appeared in Mexico City in 1533 and, later, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638.

The so-called incunabula – books printed before 1500 – total more than 30 editions . Print runs rarely exceeded a thousand copies, and many were below 250, but the quantitative leap, in relation to the manuscript era, is extraordinary. For the first time, readers widely separated in space could handle virtually identical copies of the same text, creating a new form of reading community.

Interestingly, the printing press did not eliminate handwriting . On the contrary: early printers imitated the style of manuscripts, and many incunabula resemble codices copied by monks. In the 16th century itself, the height of printing, magnificent treatises on calligraphy emerged, showing that the aesthetic appreciation of handwriting coexisted with the fascination with print. Technological advances, far from killing previous practices, often renew their prestige.

Today, something similar is happening with printed books and digital texts . Despite the proliferation of e-books and databases on CD-ROM or online, statistics show that there has been no collapse in the production of paper codices. Readers continue to desire the gesture of leafing through pages, the smell of the pages, the physical weight of the volume – elements that make the book a cultural object with a strong material presence, and not just an abstract support for information.

Aldo Manuzio, portable formats and humanist readers

With the printing press consolidated, the problem ceased to be "managing to print" and became "how and for whom to print ." At the end of the 15th century, after the fall of Constantinople and the migration of Greek scholars to Italy, Venice became a center for classical studies. It is in this context that the humanist Aldo Manuzio decided to become a printer to offer his students reliable and manageable editions of Greek and Latin authors.

Aldo organizes a true humanist publishing laboratory : he invites specialists from all over Europe, revisits ancient manuscripts, compares variants, and chooses reference versions. He publishes Greek editions of Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides, among others, and later expands the catalog to include Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Dante, and Petrarch. His goal is for readers to converse "without intermediaries" with the ancient authors, therefore he prioritizes texts in the original language and minimizes commentary.

Aldo's great innovation is not only philological, but also formal . In 1501, attentive to the need for more practical books for private libraries and travel, he launched a series in octavo format, smaller and lighter, that fits in a pocket. To make better use of page space, he resorted to italic (or Aldino) type, designed by Francesco Griffo, which confers elegance and legibility, slows the gaze, and enhances the beauty of the text.

These “pocket classics” are transforming the relationship between readers and acclaimed works . It is no longer necessary to own a huge, luxurious volume to read Virgil or Petrarch; a relatively inexpensive, rustic copy fulfills the same intellectual role. Prestige is shifting, in part, from material luxury to the quality of the content and the symbolic capital of “carrying classics in your pocket”—to the point that, in satirical guides to 16th-century Venice, sophisticated prostitutes are described displaying Aldo editions as proof of refinement.

Manuzio's model spread throughout Europe : Elzevir, Plantin, Estienne, Gryphe, and other printers reproduced the compact and elegant format, making it commonplace to imagine the reader traveling with a small volume, instead of relying on large, fixed libraries. When Aldo died, fellow humanists regarded his books as guardians standing around his coffin – a symbolic tribute to the man who reinvented the way to give form to text.

From school textbooks to popular folk literature (cordel).

With the growth in the number of readers between the 16th and 18th centuries , new types of books adapted to early literacy and popular consumption emerged. A striking example is the "alphabet book": a small wooden board, often with a handle, onto which a sheet with the alphabet, digits, and, in some cases, the Lord's Prayer was glued. A transparent horn sheet protected the paper from the touch of children's fingers.

These alphabet books were, in practice, many children's first contact with a "book ." Simple, robust, and reusable, they allowed them to learn letters and numbers at home or in small schools. Similar structures, such as the "prayer boards" used in Islamic contexts in Africa to teach the Quran, show how different cultures created basic reading devices with readily available materials and similar forms.

Meanwhile, popular literature sold at fairs and on the streets flourished . These were short pamphlets – the famous chapbooks – containing ballads, love stories, moralizing tales, and sensational news. Folded eighth-fold, they made the most of a sheet of paper to generate 16 pages; later, when folded twelvefold, they reached 24 pages, a size similar to today's paperback books.

These pamphlets, inexpensive and with large print runs for the standards of the time, circulated widely among less privileged readers . Their modest form, often printed on low-quality paper with rudimentary printing, did not prevent them from being an important vehicle for imagination, songs, legends, and even social criticism. Their simple materiality helped to break down barriers to access: no one needed refined bookshelves to store a pamphlet that could be folded in a pocket or hung on a string.

At the same time, wealthier printers concentrated their efforts on high-demand editions : reprints of religious bestsellers, works by the Church Fathers, school textbooks, grammars, and legal texts. The publishing market thus became stratified: on one side, large, "safe" volumes for a stable audience; on the other, a plurality of smaller, agile, and experimental formats that test the tastes of new readers.

From the 19th century to the boom of the modern paperback.

In the 19th century, the book adapted to the era of the urban bourgeoisie, trains, and smaller houses . Cloth bindings replaced expensive leather, allowing titles and advertisements to be printed on the covers. The octavo format became standard for novels and essays, combining practicality and visual presence on the bookshelves that began to appear in middle-class apartments and townhouses.

With the advancement of railways, the "travel book" explicitly emerged . Publishers and bookstore chains like WH Smith in England set up kiosks in stations, offering collections called Railway Library, Traveller's Library, and other series designed to be purchased minutes before boarding. The reader began to associate certain book dimensions with use on trains, beaches, and hotels – a precursor to today's holiday reading lists.

In Germany, the Reclam publishing house took a decisive step in 1867 by launching the Universal-Bibliothek , beginning with Goethe's Faust and expanding to authors such as Gogol, Pushkin, Ibsen, Plato, and Kant. Small, rustic books with simple covers and negligible prices made classics accessible to students and workers alike. The focus was clear: sacrificing luxury in favor of the mass dissemination of literature.

In 1935, the English publisher Allen Lane radicalized this movement with the birth of Penguin Books . Dissatisfied with the lack of affordable, quality books at station kiosks, he conceived a rustic collection with colorful covers and low prices, to be sold not only in bookstores, but anywhere: department stores, tobacconists, cafes. The penguin on the cover became a symbol of a new form of reading citizenship.

The idea initially met resistance in the market – fellow publishers doubted it, booksellers feared lower margins, some authors worried about seeing their works "devalued." But the public responded well, large chains like Woolworth invested in the collection, and in a short time, millions of copies circulated around the world. Penguin brought to light something powerful: quality literature can be treated as an everyday consumer good, as ubiquitous as socks or tea.

For many readers, having a Penguin in their pocket means participating in a global reading community . The same titles are found in distant cities, on different continents, creating a kind of affective geography in which the inexpensive book, printed on modest paper, gains immense symbolic value. The modern paperback consolidates the idea that access to written culture should be as broad as possible.

Material relics of the past in the digital age.

At the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, the arrival of personal computers and on-screen reading fueled prophecies about the "end of the book ." Even so, the production of printed books did not stop; libraries like the Library of Congress in the USA continue to incorporate hundreds of thousands of new titles each year. The coexistence of paper codices and digital text revives the old tension between scrolls and codices, manuscripts and printed works.

Recent archaeological discoveries remind us that the essence of the problem has always been the same : how to create robust, portable, durable, and easy-to-use reading objects. In the Dakhla oasis in the Sahara, archaeologists found a 4th-century accounting codex, made of thin, perforated wooden strips bound together with cords – very similar, in spirit, to a rustic book. It records four years of agricultural transactions, proof that, from early on, the "bound notebook" format served to organize complex information into a single body.

These material continuities span millennia and connect the anonymous reader in the desert to the student underlining a Penguin on the subway, to the medieval devotee with his book of hours, to the Renaissance humanist leafing through an Aldo in italics. The materials, the reproduction technologies, the distribution networks change; what remains is the need to give the text a manipulable body, one that can be opened, closed, annotated, carried to bed, to the desk, to the beach, or into exile.

By traversing this long history of forms and gestures – clay tablets, legal monoliths, papyrus scrolls, parchment codices, tiny books of hours, giant antiphonaries, school alphabet books, chapbooks, pocket classics, cheap 20th-century collections – we realize that “remains of the past” are not merely preserved ancient texts, but reading practices, concrete objects, and editorial decisions that shaped society. Learning to critically read these traces, as Chartier proposes, and experiencing firsthand the physical pleasure of the book, as Manguel narrates, is a powerful way to keep historical memory alive and to sustain a democratic culture that still relies, today, on the encounter between books and readers.