Books - A Manifesto

Or, How to Build a Library

Ian Patterson

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Hardback

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English

Weidenfeld & Nicolson
11 September 2025

Literary essays; Literature: history & criticism; Literary studies: poetry & poets; Library & information sciences

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.

By: Ian Patterson
Imprint: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 218mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 30mm
Weight: 420g
ISBN: 9781474618984
ISBN 10: 1474618987
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 11 September 2025
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Ian Patterson is a widely published poet and translator, and a former academic. The translator of Finding Time Again, the final volume of the Penguin Proust, he is also the author of Guernica and Total War and Nemo's Almanac. He won the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2017, with an elegy for his late wife, Jenny Diski. He worked in Further Education between 1970 and 1984, had a second-hand bookselling business for ten years after that, and from 1995 until 2018 was an academic, teaching English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Many of his students have gone on to shape the world of publishing and writing, both in the UK and the US.

Reviews for Books - A Manifesto: Or, How to Build a Library

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