This is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Philippe De Tonnac by Umberto Eco | Hardcover 2011 Edition | Perfect for Book Lovers & Literary Discussions

Eco and Carriere do not intend to make a great brag of books they read and collected (they admit that there are books such as `War and Peace' and `The Thousand and One Nights' they have never read from beginning to end, P.269). The key objective of this book is to encapsulate their views on a variety of issues pertinent to the nature of book which are both thought-provoking and entertaining.To them, book is a medium for projecting the realm of human imagination. The value of book remains hazy with exponential acceleration in a cornucopia of new media formats in the digital world. However, Eco and Carriere strongly maintain that book is less ephemeral and more durable than other media formats (P.13) such as floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and DVD and likes the spoon and the wheel, it "once invented, it cannot be bettered" (P.4). They are not against information technology (Eco has a 250-gigabyte hard drive containing all his 30-year writing) but the current media formats can quickly become obsolete. Perhaps the use of cloud computing for data storage and group screenings can be a perfect solution if there is no chronic power failure and Eco does not mind wearing his pair of Polaroid glasses for unbroken onscreen reading!This book involves knowledge and understanding of "book" rarely heard and known by readers. Eco and Carriere are avid collectors of rare and ancient books on human stupidity which reflect "the mentality and culture" (P.207) of the time. According to them, book collection is a solitary and masturbatory phenomenon (P.327) and they need an "eagle eye" (P.148) to track around the world digging up interesting bits and pieces at less than market price. The most fascinating part of book collection is the search process instead of eventual ownership. Unlike other book collectors who consider antiquarian book as a financial object, Eco prefers his books to be in hands of an occultist seeking to understand human follies after his death. Carriere abhors book sellers to cut up books to sell the plates for profits. To him, they are the "sworn enemies" (P.169) of bibliophiles.The history of book is literally the history of book production and bibliocaust which represents a lengthy process of selection and filtering. According to Eco and Carriere, the whole process is rift with idiocy, bias, and other transient interests so that some books can survive for centuries whereas others are filtered out and destroyed. For example, The Nazis burned more books than anyone else in history (P.245) and Mao tse-tung invented the Little Red Book as an opiate to agitate people in participation of the dehumanizing political movement. Some of the magnum opus written by Proust, Orwell, Flaubert, and Colette had been rejected as utterly superfluous and nonsense by editors (P.199).This is a very impressive book with abundant anecdotes and thought-provoking ideas about book. Some of the anecdotes (i.e. history of book during the pre- incunabulum) might be arcane to readers who have never studied ancient and medieval cultural history. The hypothesis put forward by Eco and Carriere that the level of a state's political power is highly correlated with the rise and fall of book and art production (P.105) is definitely witty. Eco and Carriere also offer a caveat to readers that books can teach people about our past but readers need to check facts and exercise their critical faculties while reading books. They cannot take everything up at face value because books can be "misleading" (P.173) and "reading for the sake of reading, like living for the sake of living" (P.279) cannot turn book reading into something nourishing and sustainable.This book is highly recommended to librarians, archivists, bibliophiles, and e-book fans who are interested in western culture, history of books, and book collection.