The author takes an undulating approach characterised by imaginative leaps, moving swiftly from the contemplation of ancient writers including Herodotus and Plato to contemporary references to Orwell and the matrix movies.

She also incorporates personal anecdotes, such as her experience navigating the arcane requirements of the Bodleian Library as a graduate student at Oxford.

The result is a dense but rewarding narrative that, while loosely chronological, is also fragmented, exploring the odd confluences of history.

Reflecting on the transition from oral to written culture, for example, Vallejo finds a pleasing historical circularity in Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature:

"A Nobel Prize for oral culture. How ancient the future can sometimes be."

Vallejo draws attention to the contradictions of life as a bibliophile.

She recollects that as a child she was reluctant to learn to read because she enjoyed being read to by her mother and relates the longstanding mockery endured by bookish children, including the cruelty she experienced in the schoolyard, despite the fact that learning to read is a rite of passage.

Libraries are a central focus, with Vallejo turning repeatedly to the Great Library of Alexandria.

She also reports that one of the internet's creators, Tim Berners-Lee, was inspired by the structure of libraries, ironic considering the internet was later blamed for the potential death of books.

Vallejo firmly believes in the longevity of the book as a physical artefact, asserting that "although today we have learned to write with light on an LCD or a plasma screen, we still feel the primal call of trees; we keep writing the scattered story of human love on their bark".

However, an interrogation of this belief would have been productive, given that paper production involves both deforestation and considerable energy consumption, and is therefore implicated in climate change.

Such an exploration would also have constituted a fruitful parallel with her focus on the book's evolving materiality, which is encapsulated in its title.

Papyrus is, ultimately, a celebration of books and reading best summed up by an epigraph from the Spanish writer Emilio Ledl:

Above all, a book is a repository of time. A prodigious trap with human intelligence and sensitivity that overcame that ephemeral, fleeting condition that led the experience of life into the oblivion of nothingness.