David Pearson

I was a librarian by profession and worked in numerous places, mostly in London, from the 1980s onwards - the British Library, the National Art Library, the Wellcome Library, Senate House Library. I was Director of Culture, Heritage and Libraries for the City of London Corporation, and retired from that post in 2017. My books are about books, not books as words but books as things that people have owned, written in, done things to, to make objects that have histories in their own right. This was the theme of "Books as History" but I have also written more specialised books on the history of book ownership, and bookbinding, and how to recognise the evidence of these things. In a digital age, I think it's important to forge ahead with online reading, but also see that books may have all kinds of other qualities, beyond just texts, that give them lasting cultural value.