Includes bibliographical references (p. 323-353) and index.

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book?that string of confused, alien ciphers?shivered into meaning, and at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist and editor Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the six-thousand-year-old conversation between words and that hero without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel brilliantly covers reading as seduction, as rebellion, and as obsession and goes on to trace the quirky and fascinating history of the reader?s progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to CD-ROM.