Human beings build their worlds using metaphors. Just as computer technology has inaugurated a massive metaphorical transformation in the present era, in which we can 'reboot' social causes or 'program' human behaviour, books spawned new metaphorical worlds in the newly print-savvy early modern England. Pamphleteers appealed to books to stage political attacks, preachers formulated theological claims using metaphors of page and binding, and scientists claimed to leaf through the 'Book of Nature'. Jonathan P. Lamb shows how, far from offering a mere a linguistic tool, this astonishingly broad lexicon did no less than teach entire cultures how to imagine, giving early modern writers – from Shakespeare to Cavendish, and from the famous to the anonymous – the language to describe and reshape the worlds around them. He reveals how, at a scale beyond anything scholars have imagined, bookish language shaped religious, political, racial, scientific, and literary questions that remain alive today.

‘If the world were indeed a book you'd want it to be written by Jonathan Lamb, with his simultaneous attention to large themes and individual details, his whip-smart humour, and his commitment to the affordances of literary study. His humane, interrogative and generative study is a true manifesto for the discipline.'

Emma Smith - Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College Oxford

‘Lamb reveals the ways books were alive in the mind and in discourse: books provided a language for conceiving of, and writing about, love, literature, nature, race, and the world. Lamb's book is teeming with examples from writers familiar and little known, and Lamb writes with verve, wit and clarity.'

Adam Smyth - Professor of English and the History of the Book, Balliol College, Oxford University

‘Lamb has written a fascinating study of early modern England's ‘bookish lexicon'. Encyclopedic in scope and filled with engaging examples, How the World Became a Book shows us, as no other book has before, how the materiality of texts became a habit of mind and a way of imagining the world. This is a book that will be read and re-read by anyone interested in Renaissance books and their readers.'

Zachary Lesser - Edward W. Kane Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

‘Ever since writing was invented it has been used as a metaphor by human beings for themselves and who they are, or for the world and how they live in it. This is especially true at times of media change, such as the printed book in Renaissance Europe. Jonathan Lamb provides an enthusiastic and insightful survey of how Shakespeare and other writers describe the world as a book.'

Brian Cummings FBA - Anniversary Professor of English, University of York

‘An astonishing achievement. This is a work about book history and philology, about modernity, metaphor, and mythology; it is about mediation and imagination, about how we think and the concepts we use to think with. Lamb guides the reader through his vast intellectual territory with verve and wit. The result is entertainingly readable and endlessly illuminating.'

Laurie Maguire - Professor of English Literature, Magdalen College Oxford