Includes bibliographical references (pages 411-420) and index.

Greece imagines the future. The city of pleasures and books ; Alexander : the world is never enough ; The Macedonian friend ; Balancing at the edge of the abyss : the Library and the Museum of Alexandria ; A story of fire and passageways ; Books and skin ; A detective's task ; Homer : enigma and twilight ; The lost world of orality : a tapestry of echoes ; The alphabet : a peaceful revolution ; Voices from the mist, uncertain times ; Learning to read the shadows ; The triumph of unruly words ; The first book ; Traveling bookstores ; The religion of culture ; A man with a prodigious memory and a group of avant-garde girls ; Women, weavers of stories ; The other tells me my story ; The drama of laughter : our debt to rubbish dumps ; A passionate affair with words ; Poison and fragility ; The three destructions of the Library of Alexandria ; Lifeboats and black butterflies ; How we began to be strange
The roads to Rome. A city with a bad reputation ; The literature of defeat ; The invisible threshold of slavery ; In the beginning were the trees ; Poor writers, rich readers ; A young family ; Bookselling : a risky business ; The birth and triumph of books with pages ; Public libraries in palaces of water ; Two men from Hispania : the first fan and the aging writer ; Herculaneum : preservation amid destruction ; Ovid clashes with censorship ; Sweet inertia ; Journey to the center of books and how to name them ; What is a classic? ; Canon : the history of a reed ; Shards of women's voices ; What was believed eternal turned out to be fleeting ; Dare to remember
Epilogue : forgotten men, anonymous women. Part one: Greece imagines the future
Part two: the roads to Rome

"Papyrus is an enthralling journey through the history of books and libraries in the ancient world and those who have helped preserve their rich literary traditions. Long before books were mass-produced, those made of reeds from along the Nile were worth fighting and dying for. Journeying along the battlefields of Alexander the Great, beneath the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, at Cleopatra's palaces and the scene of Hypatia's murder, award-winning author Irene Vallejo chronicles the excitement of literary culture in the ancient world, and the heroic efforts that ensured this extraordinary tradition would continue. Weaved throughout are fascinating stories about the spies, scribes, illuminators, librarians, booksellers, authors, and statesmen whose rich and sometimes complicated engagement with the written word bears remarkable similarities to the world today: Aristophanes and the censorship of the humorists, Sappho and the empowerment of women's voices, Seneca and the problem of a post-truth world. Vallejo takes us to mountainous landscapes and the roaring sea, to the capitals where culture flourished and the furthest reaches where knowledge found refuge in chaotic times. In this sweeping tour of the history of books, the wonder of the ancient world comes alive and, along the way, we discover the singular power of the written word"--