For the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra, the topic is ‘The Book’. We have gathered together texts that address important issues in a prominent field within cultural history: the history of the book and its dissemination, from the invention of the printing press to the ebook, to the changes in the publishing world and in the ways of reading, and to the ‘penalisation’ of books by the historical mechanisms of censorship. The authors of these texts are scholars and experts in various fields, since no other subject demands such a degree of interdisciplinary collaboration as this one. In alphabetical order, here are their names: Roger Chartier, Diogo Ramada Curto, Robert Darnton, Adam Garfinkle, Rita Luís and John B. Thompson. So this, then, is the enormous topic which they all approach: ‘The Book’. Although inefficiently, the inverted commas serve to suggest that when we refer to this topic in the abstract, we are evoking two different but inseparable things: books, those objects of great cultural prestige, serving as the instruments and foundation of the ‘civilisational project’; and the Book, with a capital letter, which immediately makes us think of the Bible, but also refers to a trans-historical entity that exists beyond its material manifestations. The Book is more than individual books; it transcends the printed book, generating a grandiose family of metaphors, such as, for instance, the ‘Book of Nature’. What this demonstrates is that throughout the history of the book as an object, it has been seen as powerful and as carrying great symbolic weight. Therefore, ‘The Book’, the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra, is both books and the Book.