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Papyrus by Irene Vallejo review: a mindboggling history of the earliest books

Scroll of Hunefer, Egyptian Book of the Dead
Scroll of Hunefer, Egyptian Book of the Dead

In the early morning light, Egyptian artisans cut armfuls of reeds on the shores of the Nile. In a workshop the reeds are peeled, sliced and laid in a lattice. The workers use mallets to fuse them into sheets and then burnish the surfaces with pumice and shells. This is how papyrus is made and this scene is one of the many evocative vignettes that Irene Vallejo plants throughout Papyrus.

The process of making papyrus mirrors the way she approaches her book. On one level, Papyrus is the story of the invention of books, from the cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia to the scrolls of the Library of Alexandria, the animal-skin parchments of Pergamum in Ancient Greece and the earliest codices of Imperial Rome, but on another, it is a memoir, a love song, a confessional and a manifesto. Vallejo fuses these strands seamlessly and polishes the surface until it shines.

Originally published in Spain as “El infinito en un junco” (Infinity in a Reed), Papyrus has been a surprise bestseller. It’s easy to see why: Vallejo is a novelist and she has a storyteller’s ability to animate her subjects. She opens with an intriguing set-up: bands of armed horseman are scouring the Greek countryside, scaling mountains, fording rivers, hunting a very “special kind of prey”. These are the bandito-librarians of the Library of Alexandria, dispatched by Ptolemy to seize every book they can find.

Vallejo sets out to “continue the adventure of those book hunters”, and the story she tells is impressively rip-roaring. There are familiar names, such as Alexander the Great (who slept with a copy of The Iliad under his pillow) and Julius Caesar (who narrowly escaped a burning library), as well as less familiar heroes, like the poet Callimachus, compiler of the first library catalogue, and Livius Andronicus, a Greek slave who wrote the first work of Latin literature.

Her chapters are short and pacy, stuffed with bibliographical nuggets: the unprecedented precision of the Greek alphabet, the fact that we describe big books as “long” because scrolls literally were, the structure and design of the internet being based on a library classification system. She repeatedly reminds us how vulnerable books were before the age of printing. They were continually crumbling or burning faster than they could be copied. For Vallejo, the classics are a “filament of words balancing above the void”.

She features an inspiring number of women writers, from Enheduanna, the first named author in history, to Sappho, the only female in the Greek literary canon, and Sulpicia, an Augustan noblewoman who had to smuggle her provocative, erotic Latin poems into posterity. Despite their relative absence from the canon, women have always been “weavers of stories”, Vallejo reminds us, and she pays a personal tribute to the bedtime stories told by her own mother, to whom the book is dedicated.

In fact, she frequently brings herself into her narrative and often pauses to reveal her workings. “I am always afraid to write the first lines,” she writes, after the first few lines, and she interrupts a discussion of wandering minstrels to tell us that Bob Dylan has just won the Nobel Prize – “A Nobel Prize for oral culture. How ancient the future can sometimes be.” In one central chapter, she describes being severely bullied as a child. “The roots of writing are often dark. This is my darkness, the darkness that nurtures this book, and perhaps nurtures everything I write.”

One of the book’s sections is called “Greece Imagines the Future”. For Vallejo, the greatest innovation of the Alexandrian librarians was their foresight in preserving books for unborn generations, books that would inspire future rebellions, remind us of painful truths and reveal the darkest recesses of ourselves. She draws a six-thousand-year line from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia to the e-reader tablets of today and leaves her readers inspired, invigorated and sincerely grateful for the invention of the book.


Papyrus is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £25. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books