Writer, critic and publisher of Adelphi Edizioni, Roberto Calasso condenses a lifetime's knowledge into this short, illuminating mediatation on beauty, literature and design. From wether you can judge a book without its cover to a future of universal digitization, and from the most beautiful book ever printed to the elusive notion of quality, Calasso creates a vision of publishing as 'a literary work in itself, belonging to a genre all its own'.

"All books published by a certain publisher could be seen as links in a single chain, or segments in a serpentine progression of books, or fragments in a single book"