Between Glue and Life: A Phenomenology of the Book

Materiality and sensory experience

Michel Jullien, Le Format d'un livre (Éditions Verdier, 2026)

The classic Latin book formats (in folio, in fourth, in octavo etc.) do not denote abstract quantities, but rather concrete folds of a printed sheet. They originate from the practice of early book printing and describe how often a sheet of paper is folded, thus determining the number of pages, format, and handling. The term "format" is therefore originally a production term that makes a material operation visible. Jullien's title "Le format d'un livre" stands in this tradition, but takes it up not technically, but experientially. He expands the historical concept by showing that the "format" of a book also encompasses its sensory, physical, and temporal effect on the reader. The replacement of the volume by the codex marks the transition in book history from the ancient scroll—a roll of papyrus or parchment that required a continuous, circular reading motion—to the bound form of folded, paginated sections, which allowed for direct opening, turning back and forth, and thus a completely new, saccadic physicality of reading.

Jullien views the book as material, and he writes with his hands. His most powerful images arise where the body meets the object: the printer Roger in a small Loiret print shop, weighing and rocking a sheet of paper between his arms—"palmer les feuilles"—before it goes under the press; the author himself, feeling the spine of an old Zola paperback he read as an apprentice in Argenteuil, and sensing the weight of its unread pages. Cutting open uncut books becomes a liturgy, stocking a shelf a comedy, finding a business card in a Primo Levi volume a moment of shock. Jullien's account of book history is precise: the Dépôt légal of François I from 1537 (the systematic state legal deposit regulation as a humanist act), the invention of the Massicot paper-cutting machine by Guillaume Massicot of Issoudun, the history of the Pléiade editions (in which the craft tradition of bookbinding—sheepskin, thin paper, gold embossing, silk ribbons—is linked with the claim to philological completeness and a clear social signaling function), and the function of advertising as a typographic hinge between pages. But this information is never merely recounted, but rather experienced—it emerges like discoveries while leafing through the pages, casually and precisely at the same time, just as Pliny writes about papyrus and Jullien quotes him: from the reeds to the Nile marsh to the binding, all water, all pliability.

Jullien develops a phenomenology of the book from the outside in: from the smell of fresh binding, through the title page and the imprint (the printer's mark that simultaneously marks the object's birth and the end of reading), to the fingerprints the paper doesn't reveal, and the four-leaf clover a mother placed between the pages, its meaning now lost to time. The project is neither bibliography nor cultural history nor memory, but a genre unto itself—a tactile essay that combines Ponge's method of describing things with Perec's inquiry into the everyday and an autobiographical thread that stretches from the phonographer in Montmorency to the sleeping father in the Val-d'Oise. A central thesis is that the book, as a material object, already possesses meaning before it is read: through its format, its weight, its temperature, its position on the shelf. It is not the text alone, but the interplay of paper, typography, binding, reader's hand and time that makes the book what it is – an object that encapsulates life time and remains capable of giving it back.

Michel Jullien was born near Paris in 1962. After training as a lathe and milling machine operator—the very profession he describes in the book as being at fifteen—he studied literature and subsequently taught at the university in Belém, Brazil. Back in France, he initially worked for the publishing houses Hazan and Larousse before managing a publishing house specializing in decorative arts. He is thus a man who knows the book as a manufactured object from the inside out: he held galley proofs, negotiated formats, and selected papers—a craftsman of the book before he became its author. In parallel, he was a passionate mountaineer, climbing around one hundred peaks in the Mont Blanc, Écrins, and Pyrenees massifs; at about forty-five, he gave up climbing and devoted himself entirely to writing. The connection to the subject is therefore rooted in several ways: Jullien comes to literature from the outside – dyslexic as a child, diverted to vocational training as a teenager – and speaks about the book from a position of social and physical alienation, which sharpens his view of the object. This is not an insider's perspective of a lover, but that of a man who initially encountered the book as resistance and who nevertheless – or perhaps because of this – sees it more accurately than most.

Opened chapters

Eleanor

The statue of Aliénor d'Aquitaine in Fontevraud becomes the founding scene of the text: a reader made of stone, holding a book of stone, her eyes closed. Jullien develops the term "livre de chevet" from Furetière's dictionary—pillow, weapon, book—and arrives at the paradox that the book continues to read the queen after she has stopped. The book as an object outlives the reader and carries on their time. The scene is not an allegory, but a literal finding: stone is the oldest writing material, and in stone everything remains open. The chapter establishes a material history of the book from below—not from the text, but from the object, and the object begins with the body that holds it.

La fenêtre en carton

A child who cannot read is given a cardboard window by a speech therapist, which is slid across the line word by word, revealing only one word at a time. The method is both a reading aid and a poetic principle: reading as a successive unveiling, word by word, without anticipation. The child initially understands reading as a manual task, a coordinated use of finger and eye, long before it carries meaning. The scene recurs at the end of the book when the adult reads "Oui-Oui" in half an hour—without the cardboard window, without effort, but with the memory of the effort. The chapter shows that the materiality of reading is not self-evident, but is learned—and that the book as an object initially confronts the reader as resistance, not as an invitation.

Argenteuil

As a fifteen-year-old, the author reads Zola in a metalworking factory—at the machine, on a crowded bus, late at night. His colleagues mock him; he pointedly places the book on the machine. Reading here is not yet a pleasure, but a gesture of self-assertion against a world that knows no books. Jullien describes how he first experiences what it means to cross the middle of a book—when the weight of the read pages outweighs that of the unread ones. The book becomes physically tangible as a journey, as a temporal structure, as a physical promise. The chapter makes it clear that the book, as a material object, embodies temporality—the pages on the left represent lived time, the pages on the right are still open.

En ouvrant, en fermant

A precise description of the paratext: the blank endpaper, the faux-title, the title page with its typographic hierarchy, the imprint with its legal deposit and copyright, the completion at the end. Jullien reads these pages like an anthropologist reading ritual threshold objects—they are transition, protocol, promise. The word "achevé" carries both meanings: completed and killed, and Jullien maintains this tension. The book begins and ends with pages that no one reads: they frame the time of reading. The chapter offers a brief history of the book's paratext as a material institution—from the legal deposit as a humanist invention to the copyright symbol as a lifeless smile.

Manifestation

Jullien observes readers: how they hold the book, how they turn the pages, how they fall asleep. He distinguishes between the "pincée" and "ressort" methods, describes reading while lying down as a geometric problem, and quotes the scene from Haneke's film "Amour" in which Emmanuelle Riva, as a partially paralyzed woman, opens the book with one hand—a scene that demonstrates how much physical effort is involved in even the simplest act of reading. This chapter is the most physical in the book: book and reader form a unit that is configured differently for each individual. Reading is a motor activity before it becomes a cognitive one. The chapter complements the material history of the book with a history of the reader's body—and shows that the format and weight of a book determine the reading posture, not the other way around.

Des signes parmi nous

On printing errors, typographical random patterns, and three experiences in which books communicated something to the author unprompted—a Faulkner passage, a La Bruyère quote, a business card announcing the death of a friend. Jullien avoids occultism, but he allows the wonder to linger. The book as a repository of time and chance: what lies between the pages—receipts, flower petals, postcards from Budapest—is a stratigraphy of lived experience. The coquille, the printing error, becomes a sign of the typesetter's life. The chapter opens the material history of the book to the accidental and the ephemeral—the book as an archive not only of text, but of all things that have ever lain between its pages.

Au prottoir

Books aren't stolen—that's Jullien's starting point. They're turned in, left on sidewalks, placed in bookcases, or destroyed. A box of banned Soviet literature on a Parisian pavement becomes a symbol for the book as a political object: Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Akhmatova in the rain. The pilon—the industrial-scale destruction—is described in an almost grotesque scene: books tipped into trucks, sprayed with bright colors, and shredded. The book is mortal, but its death is elaborate. The chapter continues the material history of the book to its end—and shows that even the destruction of the book is a cultural practice that carries meaning.

On the boards

The longest chapter is a comedy of sorting: moves, overflowing shelves, sagging wooden planks, falling books, failing classification systems. Jullien describes the library as a living organism, imperceptibly growing and migrating—tectonic, as he puts it. Alongside this is the library of the widow Annie H., spread across three houses: a mapped married life in books. And Shalamov's "Mes bibliothèques," read in Uzerche while the hostess stirs béchamel—a book about a library written in ten words on a fingernail. The chapter considers the material history of the book as a social history of space—the bookshelf as autobiography, the library as a microcosm of memory.

Indiscretion

On the impossibility of knowing what someone is reading: in painting, where the title is absent, and in life, where one cranes one's neck. Fragonard, Courbet, Daumier, Morisot – Jullien reads the paintings as documents of book history: posture, light, furniture, clothing reveal the format and genre of the book, if not the title. Then there is Godard, who loves books like no other film director and yet never treats them with reverence. For Jullien, curiosity about the other person's reading material is a form of intimacy. The chapter extends the material history of the book into pictorial space – the book in painting as a source for reading habits, formats, and social contexts.

Your papers

Paper as a living being: its production from rag pulp, its fibers, its weight, its scent, its reaction to moisture. Roger the printer is the main character—a man who recognizes paper with his eyes closed, who adds a pinch of chestnut flour to his ink, who rocks a sheet of paper like an infant. Pliny on papyrus, Irene Vallejo's title "L'Infini dans un roseau" as an echo. Paper is the oldest and most physical element of the book; it comes from water and has never quite forgotten water. This chapter is the densest in the book in terms of material history—a history of paper as a substance that shows that every book is a transformation of plant fibers, water, and human gesture.

Couper, trancher

The cutting open of uncut books as a ritual. Guillaume Massicot and his machine. José Corti, the publisher who insisted on uncut books until customer complaints forced him to give up. Jullien describes the technique and spirit of cutting with a precision reminiscent of cookbooks: no sawing, a single long stroke, the knife not too sharp. The uncut book has a natural breathing between the pages, which the Massicot destroys. The chapter traces a brief history of the book format as a relationship between maker and reader—the uncut book transfers the final step of bookmaking to the reader.

De bon ton

The Pléiade editions are a special case: their elegance, their New Zealand sheepskin binding, their thin paper, their history of the Jewish founder Jacques Schiffrin, who was dismissed in 1940. Jullien describes three reader typologies—the snob, the student, the enthusiast—and observes that the Pléiade paper reveals fingerprints: a detective could read how far someone has progressed. A bookstore scene, in which a woman searches for a gift without knowing what the recipient reads, ends with a Steinbeck. The chapter demonstrates that a book's format carries meanings that extend beyond the text—social, historical, political.

Traveling by my room

Books on journeys lose their dignity and gain character: a Dostoevsky through West Africa, "La Duchesse de Langeais" in Amazonian machine oil, Proust in Thailand, the last notebook left behind on a bus. An antiquarian bookseller in Istanbul wordlessly selects a book for the author based on the weight of his last coins—a pastoral comedy from 1762 that has accompanied him on every move since. Books in mountain huts, on tankers: the book travels along and changes in the process, both physically and symbolically. This chapter traces the material history of the book as a history of migration—the book as an object that connects places, times, and people, not through its text alone, but through its mere presence.

Un dimanche au Val-d'Oise

The final image: the 95-year-old father is asleep after lunch, a cardboard screen leaning against the sofa to block the light—an echo of the cardboard window scene from his childhood. The son finds "Oui-Oui" in a chest of drawers, reads the entire book in half an hour, trying to recall the old difficulty. Then he returns to the living room and sees his father reading—his hands like a shell, motionless, the title invisible. The book ends as it began: with a reader made of stone, whom no one is to disturb while reading. The chapter connects the material history of the book with the human body—the old man's hands and Aliénor's hands are the same hands, and the book lies between them.

Why the book remains

Jullien's essay appears at a moment when the question of the future of the printed book is no longer merely academic. His answer is neither sentimental nor defensive: he doesn't argue for the book against the digital, but rather reveals what the book is that no other medium is—an object that embodies time. The reading marks on the thin paper of the Pléiade, the oil stains on the Amazon Balzac, the mother's lucky clover: all these are forms of temporality bound to the object's substance and intransitable. A digital text can be read, shared, commented on—but it doesn't age, it doesn't smell of chestnut flour, it doesn't preserve a business card. The book is a container for lived time, and it is the only medium that can physically return that time. Jullien demonstrates this not through argument, but through attention—the same attention with which Aliénor d'Aquitaine in Stein holds her book, eyes closed, reading on.