The Love of Books

The love of books explores the bond between people and books in the UK. Using interviews and archive material it investigates the attachment to the practice of reading for pleasure and to books as objects. It focuses on the aesthetic, ethical, and existential impacts of the encounter with books.

The love of books explores the bond between people and books in the UK, investigating the attachment to both the practice of reading for pleasure and books as objects. This attachment is understood as a meaningful connection and a key dimension of the reader’s sense of self.

Drawing on interviews and archival material, The love of books focuses on the experiences of leisure readers from diverse backgrounds and with varied reading preferences. In an era of digitisation and an unprecedented abundance of media offering information, storytelling, and entertainment, expressions of book love might appear as little more than quests for social status or a nostalgic trend. However, this study develops a novel cultural sociology of reading that takes seriously the aesthetic, ethical, and existential meanings of reading and books. While the social value of reading for social mobility or democracy is widely acknowledged, the non-instrumental role of pleasure in the interaction with books is often critiqued or ignored. This study demonstrates how reading and books can make life liveable and meaningful.

As cultural objects full of potential and possibility, books are far from just inert signs of highly valued goods. The stories readers share show how their situated encounters with books bring these goods to life. The love of books explores how attachment emerges from the practical fusion of three elements that have so far been examined separately: the act of reading, the material, surface properties of books, and the symbolic power they hold.

The Love of Books examines the affective bond between people and books in the UK. In the context of the unprecedented abundance of media offering information, storytelling and entertainment, it investigates the attachment to print and digital books amongst readers from a range of backgrounds who read for pleasure, wish to be surrounded by print copies of books, and have trouble discarding books. Unlike existing research, which focuses on prestige, social status, and cultural capital, this study centres on meaning, materiality and emotion. Drawing on interviews and archive material, it shows how attachment emerges from the practical fusion of three elements that have so far been examined separately: the material, surface properties of books, the act of reading, and books’ symbolic power.