’This book is a delight. It can charm almost anyone of any age. Lucid and enthusiastic, it draws you into the wonder Bragg plainly feels at the sheer scale of the impact of these works. Above all, this is a celebration of the book, that strange, low-tech device that still dazzles and changes our high-tech world.’

Christena Appleyard, Daily Mail

The idea for this book came from a single image. About nine years ago, when I was reading about Isaac Newton, I imagined this awkward, unhappy, driven young man, sitting alone and in silence in his home, a farmhouse, forcing his mind to construct theories which eventually changed the world and changed it radically. Out of the unlikely context of that Lincolnshire farmhouse would come revolutions in thought whose force and consequences re-ordered human life. The juxtaposition of the solitary figure working to produce such a modest and harmless-looking object as a book and the explosion this caused in the minds of men and women then and since led me to look for others whose intense preoccupation posted in placid pages had seized the story of our species. That a mere book should have such power!

Introduction

Principia Mathematica (1687) by Isaac Newton

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes

Magna Carta (1215) by Members of the English Ruling Classes

The Rule Book of Association Football (I863) by A Group of Former English Public School Men

On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin

On the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789) by William Wilberforce in Parliament, immediately printed in several versions

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft

Experimental Researches in Electricity (3 volumes, 1839, 1844, 1855) by Michael Faraday

Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769) by Richard Arkwright

The King James Bible (1611) by William Tyndale and Fifty-four Scholars Appointed by the King

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith

The First Folio (1623) by William Shakespeare

Acknowledgements