Martyn Lyons, 'A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World'.

Abstract

Like the Tardis, Martyn Lyons’s latest book is much bigger inside than out. Unlike some recent door-stoppers in the field, this is a moderately-sized paperback. It has a magnificent Cézanne portrait of a professional reader (an art critic) glowering balefully from the front cover—or perhaps just lost in the thoughts provoked by the three open books on his desk and the shelves of well-used books at his back. The ambivalence of the image nicely evokes the mystery and complexity of the actively reading mind, a phenomenon of recurrent interest throughout the book. Inside the covers, however, the book expands mightily to fill the space promised by its wide-ranging and ambitious title. Remarkably, Lyons has managed to fit a history of reading and writing in the West into a mere 200 pages of text (plus references) with no pronounced sense of strain or compression. Indeed, though very systematically organized within each chapter, the text is liberally sprinkled throughout with illustrations and anecdotes which, if they do not produce an exactly leisurely read, certainly relieve the cognitive effort demanded by a necessarily dense narrative, while bringing complex historical arguments to life.