Books – A Manifesto

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What to expect

This is a book about books, about the subversive power of reading and the strange, enduring magic of books as objects.

Ever since childhood, books have been at the centre of Ian Patterson's life, as a poet, teacher, translator, bookseller and collector. As he constructs the last of many libraries, he makes an impassioned case for the radical importance of reading in our lives - from Proust to Jilly Cooper, from golden-age detective novels to avant-garde poetry.

Wise, irreverent and exhilaratingly wide-ranging, Books: A Manifesto reminds us that poems know things that we might not yet know ourselves, urges us to seek out the puzzles alive in the art of translation and celebrates the singular elasticity of the 'bookshop minute'. But even more than this, the book insists on reading not as a luxury but a necessary part of reality: we live within language, and when we think, it's with the tools that reading gives us.

Our time of cultural and political crisis demands more than books - but without them, and without the breadth of knowledge, sense of history, awareness of alternatives and hope for the future they offer, things will not get better. At once a primer for enriching your own library and a manifesto for why that matters, this book is an invitation to a deeper, richer world of thought and feeling - and a reminder of just how much books matter.

Critics Review

What a magnificent achievement Books: A Manifesto is. Now more than ever we need the companionship of the printed page and the rough, smooth, dark, light, troubling and sublime magic that books alone can weave. Despite his formidable academic and poetic standing, Ian Patterson has written this for everyone. There is no snobbery or scholastic grandiosity here. He's as good on Enid Blyton, Jilly Cooper and Agatha Christie as on William Blake, Hardy and Proust. A lifetime of lively and open reading distilled into a marvellous and timely apologia for buying, loving, collecting, cradling, cooing over - and of course reading - books, books of every imaginable kind. Hugely recommended
STEPHEN FRY
I simply adored this book. Despite being a towering intellectual, Ian Patterson writes like an angel. Magic rises from every page, as his manifesto underlines the crucial importance of reading from a physical book held in the hands
JILLY COOPER
Just what I needed. Passionate, erudite but accessible, it will send you rushing back to your bookshelves
DAVID NICHOLLS
It really is a pleasure to engage with Ian Patterson's close, alluring reading of various very different writers; light on its feet and scholarly; a kind of autobiography as well
DEBORAH LEVY
It is my firm belief that books about books are generally the best books; and of those Ian Patterson's Books: A Manifesto is amongst the most enjoyable, enlightening and democratic I've ever had the pleasure to read. A marvel
ANDY MILLER, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and co-host of Backlisted
A bibliophile's autobiography, a supremely generous instruction in reading and collecting, a short history of antiquarian bookselling, a celebration of unserious pleasures and a polemic for the most serious ones - Books: A Manifesto is all of this and more. Of course Patterson hasn't read everything: he's reread it, bought and sold it a few times, might even have translated it, and has profound and genial thoughts
BRIAN DILLON
A gentle and beguiling account of what it means to enter and inhabit the myriad worlds contained in books. The library that Ian Patterson has created in his Suffolk home made me think of an aviary, in which his chosen books are all singing their various songs of enchantment
JULIA BLACKBURN
I didn't want to finish this marvellous book because its urgent message is communicated so compellingly. Patterson ties an aesthetic awareness with an acute critical eye to engage deeply with all forms of literature: detective novels are dealt with as seriously as philosophy and poetry. Books: A Manifesto proves by the democracy of his beautiful language that the publication of books is more necessary now than ever
CELIA PAUL
I was fascinated by the glimpses of the author between the stacks - from the lonely child and precocious schoolboy obsessively collecting books to the widower remaking his life as he builds a library yet again
ALISON LIGHT

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