Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack
RICHARD OVENDEN
(JOHN MURRAY, 320 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops
Shaun Bythell
(profile books, 144 PP, £7.99)
Tablet bookshop price £7.19 • tel 020 7799 4064

The Bookseller’s Tale
MARTIN LATHAM
(PARTICULAR BOOKS, 368 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books
CATHY RENTZENBRINK
(PICADOR, 240 PP, £12.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.69 • tel 020 7799 4064

When Philip Larkin was researching his 1973 anthology The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, he was granted a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls and his own key to the Bodleian Library – a passe-partout to the stacks of one of the world’s greatest repositories of printed books and manuscripts, opened to the scholars of Oxford University in 1602.

The Bodleian is a national monument, a symbol of cultural permanence. Yet it was not Oxford’s first university library. In 1549–50, 10 years before its founder, Sir Thomas Bodley, attended Oxford as an undergraduate, King Edward VI’s commissioners paid the university an ominous visit; by 1556, more than 200 years’ accumulation of books had disappeared. Of those, 11 survive, only three of them on the Bodleian’s shelves. Libraries are more fragile than one might think.