Read-alikes: The Lives of Books.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:57:09 GMT

Olson, Ray (author).
FEATURE. First published July, 2009 (Booklist).

People aren’t the only human things that can be said to have lives. Quite obviously, buildings endure, as long as no one “kills” them. Books may also last long and, unlike towers and shelters and bridges, books are highly mobile. As Paul Collins’ gleefully astonishing The Book of William repeatedly demonstrates, individual volumes make their ways all over the world. The subjects of the half-dozen other book biographies below may not be as footloose, or at least, their waywardness isn’t as important to their histories. But just as the first folio collection of Shakespeare’s plays inspires Collins to write with verve and creativity, the subjects of these other “life stories” inspire their authors, too.

The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World. By Paul Collins. 2009. Bloomsbury, $25 (9781596911956).

Collins provides one of the most enjoyable examples of a most enjoyable genre, the book biography, as he tells the stories of individual Shakespeare first folios, their owners, their uses, and their travels. It’s a supremely enlightening journey that Collins’ convivial manner makes thoroughly gratifying.

Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson. By Adam Sisman. 2001. Farrar, $25 (9780374115616); Penguin, paper, $15 (9780142001752).

To write the life of Samuel Johnson, eighteenth-century England’s foremost man of letters, James Boswell created modern biographical procedures. He needed a partner to coach and edit him, and the hectoring of friends to finish. He died only four years after its publication—200 years before the artistry of his work was fully recognized.

Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. By Henry Hitchings. 2005. Farrar, $24 (9780374113025); Picador, paper, $14 (9780312426200).

Samuel Johnson created the first authoritative English lexicon. Hitchings tells its story and those of Johnson, English lexicography, and the trades of writer and publisher in eighteenth-century England in an alphabet of topical chapters. That procedure may seem overly clever, but it produces a sparkling, heady brew of a book.

Enlightening the World: Encyclopedie, the Book That Changed the Course of History. By Philipp Blom. 2005. Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95 (9781403968951).

The most notorious European publication of the eighteenth century was the Encyclopedie, which advanced materialism, atheism, and republicanism against the church and the monarchy. Though harassed by Louis XV, it was an enterprise too big to fail and eventually validated venture capitalism. Its bookseller-financiers made out like bandits. The intellectuals who wrote it had to settle for fame.

God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. By Adam Nicolson. 2003. HarperCollins, $24.95 (9780060185169); HarperPerennial, paper, $13.95 (9780060838737).

The English Bible King James I commissioned in 1604 was made by six committees, whose members were selected to exclude radical Puritan sentiments. Intended to be the preferred pulpit Bible, it had to be accessible in vocabulary and tone. Yet its primary original purpose was to help James bring harmony to a fractious realm. In that it failed. Ironically, only after the Puritan American colonists embraced it did England accept it.

The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortunes, Fame. By Ruth Richardson. 2009. Oxford, $29.95 (9780199552993).

The most famous modern teaching text was created by calculating careerist Henry Gray, who wrote it, and decent, humane H. V. Carter, who drew the greatest anatomical illustrations ever. Besides the dramatic contrasts of those two personalities and their fates, the vicissitudes of Victorian publishing and the many crafts it involved as well as the business of mid-nineteenth-century corpse procurement make a scholarly masterpiece magnetically readable.

So Long as Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. By Clinton Heylin. 2009. Da Capo, $24 (9780306818059).

In May 1609, enterprising printer Thomas Thorpe published the best-known sonnets ever written. There was no second printing. Thorpe’s edition was probably suppressed, but controversy over the wee book goes marching on. Who gave the sonnets to Thorpe? Who wrote the inferior poem appended to them? Who are they all about? Call Thorpe’s stab at making a killing a bookleg, says Heylin, who, as the world’s foremost Bob Dylanologist, knows something about unauthorized editions.

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Read-alikes: The Lives of Books.