This book celebrates a lifelong love affair. Like the previous round-ups of his nonfictional prose that John Updike has published every eight or nine years since 1965, it brings together a diverse-looking assortment of material: forewords, obituaries, essays, transcripts of talks, reviews and reminiscences. Running through it all, though, is a prevailing passion: near-ecstatic enthralment with literary concerns.

In his adolescence, Updike yearned “to enter in some guise into the mass of printed material that hung above the middle-browed middle class in the middle of the last century like a vast cloud gently raining ink”. The ways in which he did so are vividly recalled here: as an office boy amid the thunderous rotary presses and “clattering hail” of little brass printing blocks at his local newspaper in Pennsylvania; as a Talk of the Town writer, then book reviewer, for the magazine he venerated, The New Yorker; as an increasingly acclaimed author; and as a reader endowed with almost voluptuous responsiveness.

“The average book,” he remarks with connoisseur appreciation, “fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paper-back.” Other sensuous pleasures printed matter can supply are relished too. The glossy paper of the Christmas albums The New Yorker published during his youth “gathered sheen from the snow (or hopes of snow) outside the living-room windows; the scent of fresh binding glue mingled with the resin of the family Christmas tree; the elegance of the drawings glittered like the paper star topping the tree”.

Now in his seventies and conscious of being an “ageing reader”, he includes a thoughtful piece on authors’ late works. More often, he harks back evocatively to long-ago emotions when turning pages: his childhood fears of “the spidery, shadowy, monstrous illustrations” in Alice in Wonderland; the elation of lounging, as a 14-year-old, on a red caneback sofa eating peanut-butter and raisin sand-wiches and racing through one crime novel after another (which gives rise to keen reflections on Agatha Christie’s “brilliantly compact, stylised, and efficient” who-dunits and how the murder-mystery genre “in its lean classic English form fits her like a cat burglar’s thin black glove”).

Cover designs, typeface, margin size, styles of punctuation, editors, publishers, sources of inspiration, tools of the trade and working methods (Keats putting on his best clothes before sitting down to pen a poem; Edith Wharton writing in bed and tossing the pages on to the floor for a secretary to pick up and transcribe) all fascinate Updike. In particular, of course, he is engrossed by the finished products. Demonstrating this, the 62 book reviews gathered here gleamingly enhance his status as one of our finest critics. Suavely accomplished in style, they are also crisp with close attentiveness. A temperamental disposition towards generous enthusiasm never inhibits his mannerly, affably toned pieces from bristling with sharp perceptions and critical rigour.

“This is my element, ink on paper,” Updike declares. Due Considerations richly convinces you of this. Often ravishingly written, glowing with imagination and intelligence, its 700 or so pages don’t only pay handsome tribute to the pleasures of reading. They abundantly provide them.

Due considerations: Essays and Criticism by John Updike
Hamish Hamilton £30 pp709

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