This is Not the End of the Book [Hardcover]

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.

Have you wondered what it would be like to sit in on a bull session with two very classy and informed cultural icons? Read this book and find out. Umberto Eco says that the one thing he would rescue from his burning house would be the terabyte drive on which he has backed up all his writing. He is grounded in history and classical philology but also fully of these times.

This book is a series of digressions from the general subject of books, including comments by Jean-Claude Carriere about film makers and students he worked with and comments by Eco on teaching, students, and other scholars. Extensive verbatim quotes from published works suggest that Carriere went over these transcripts with care after the fact, and presumably so did Eco. These sessions were delicately guided by questions from Jean-Philippe Tonnac.

Interesting, informative and amusing - sometimes unintentionally so. Recommended.

Two of the wisest men in the planet, Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrier talking about an infinity of topics. From their love of books, they talk about life and death, the preservation of knowledge in future times...
They share with the reader anecdotes of their experienced lives, and tell example stories related to the topics.
It is a book to enjoy with pleasure. To read one page, stop, and think about it.
It opens 100 windows in your mind with every opinion or idea.

About Amazon: I am and I always will be against Amazon politic of selling books only in kindle format. This is an evident blackmail to buy its specific product. OK, it is one of the bests products in the market, but I am a defender of freedom, and this politic is clearly against that. It is the same as if Nike only would sell me its sport shoes, only if I dress Nike t-shirts and trousers. Or as if I buy a computer, and only could be running with windows, without the possibility to choose another operative system.
By the way: how is that I pay quite the same for the printed book than for the digital one... but I can not print even one page of the book that I bought?: MY book.
I am very disgusted with Amazon. As a librarian, as a teacher and as a book's lover, this is an attempt to use culture to monopolize the market.