From Ovid to Chaucer, the ‘go, book’ refrain is a recognisable motif in the poetry of the classical tradition. This article collects evidence for the emergence and formalisation of the vade, liber formula from its antecedents in Catullus 35 and Horace Epistles 1.20 to its development in the exile works of Ovid and Martial and beyond. We see that the poetic envoi has its very origins in Latin poetry of the first centuries BCE and CE, without direct Hellenophone precedents. Attending to the dynamics of presence and absence, nearness and farness, fixedness and mobility that are highlighted in the poetic address to the book, the article argues that the personification of the book as an authorial messenger develops in response to the changing sense of spatiality of writers vis-à-vis their real and imagined audiences during the period of Rome’s imperial expansion. In the hands of these authors, the book becomes a moving object.
