Books - A Manifesto

What a magnificent achievement Books: A Manifesto is. Now more than ever we need the companionship of the printed page and the rough, smooth, dark, light, troubling and sublime magic that books alone can weave. Despite his formidable academic and poetic standing, Ian Patterson has written this for everyone. There is no snobbery or scholastic grandiosity here. He’s as good on Enid Blyton, Jilly Cooper and Agatha Christie as on William Blake, Hardy and Proust. A lifetime of lively and open reading distilled into a marvellous and timely apologia for buying, loving, collecting, cradling, cooing over - and of course reading - books, books of every imaginable kind. Hugely recommended – STEPHEN FRY
I simply adored this book. Despite being a towering intellectual, Ian Patterson writes like an angel. Magic rises from every page, as his manifesto underlines the crucial importance of reading from a physical book held in the hands – JILLY COOPER
Just what I needed. Passionate, erudite but accessible, it will send you rushing back to your bookshelves – DAVID NICHOLLS
It really is a pleasure to engage with Ian Patterson’s close, alluring reading of various very different writers; light on its feet and scholarly; a kind of autobiography as well – DEBORAH LEVY
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
A bibliophile’s autobiography, a supremely generous instruction in reading and collecting, a short history of antiquarian bookselling, a celebration of unserious pleasures and a polemic for the most serious ones - Books: A Manifesto is all of this and more. Of course Patterson hasn’t read everything: he’s reread it, bought and sold it a few times, might even have translated it, and has profound and genial thoughts – BRIAN DILLON
A gentle and beguiling account of what it means to enter and inhabit the myriad worlds contained in books. The library that Ian Patterson has created in his Suffolk home made me think of an aviary, in which his chosen books are all singing their various songs of enchantment – JULIA BLACKBURN
I didn’t want to finish this marvellous book because its urgent message is communicated so compellingly. Patterson ties an aesthetic awareness with an acute critical eye to engage deeply with all forms of literature: detective novels are dealt with as seriously as philosophy and poetry. Books: A Manifesto proves by the democracy of his beautiful language that the publication of books is more necessary now than ever – CELIA PAUL
I was fascinated by the glimpses of the author between the stacks - from the lonely child and precocious schoolboy obsessively collecting books to the widower remaking his life as he builds a library yet again – ALISON LIGHT
A sharp and political bibliomemoir scrutinising what it means to live a life built of and from books. Rich with the glorious pleasures of close reading from Jilly Cooper to modernist poetry – LUCY CALDWELL
Powerful * Sunday Times *
In a series of fascinating essays, Patterson explains his love of detective fiction, muses on the meaning of culture, gives a masterclass on how to appreciate poetry, and draws a line from Evelyn Waugh to Brexit via Philip Larkin – IRISH TIMES
Captivating … wonderful … his message is one worth emphasising to everyone – Sarah Moorhouse * THE CRITIC *

Ian Patterson is a widely published poet and translator, and a former academic. He is 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. In 2017, he won the Forward Prize for Best Poem with an elegy for his late wife, Jenny Diski.

Patterson worked in Further Education between 1970 and 1984. He then ran a second-hand bookselling business for ten years, and from 1995 until 2018, he 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 in both the UK and the US.

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