The Humorously Dull History Of Books

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The Humorously Dull History Of Books

by Stephen Dalton

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Fall asleep as we explore the funny history of books. Why did humans draw on cave walls? When did humans first begin reading? When were the first books made and how? The history of books takes us across centuries and continents. We'll discover this and much more tonight. So enjoy this bit of history, presented in a calming, funny fashion, and nod off with a few laughs along the way to dreamland. This should not it be taken as an authoritative source of history. It's boring history, delivered in a satirical way that's soft and slow. Perfect to fall asleep with a smile on your face.

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Transcript

Hello my friend, Welcome to humorously dull history for sleep. My name is Stephen Dalton, And it is my hope that as I tell you lots of different facts about particular periods in history tonight, You find me so incredibly boring that you fall asleep very quickly, And maybe even with a smile upon your face. It is humorous history after all. Tonight I'll tell you. The Humorously Dull History of books. Yes, Books. Though experts remain divided over exactly when humans first began reading. They agree it wasn't long before someone said, You have to read this, " handed over their favorite book, And spent the next six months wondering when it was coming back. So, Just before we get started, Allow yourself to settle into this moment. Leave the day that was behind. Feel the support. Of whatever you lie upon. If your eyes aren't closed yet. Allow them to close. Whatever has been. Has been. It's history now. Whatever will be. Will be. All you have is this moment. And my voice. So allow your curiosity to be a part of this pleasant experience as I tell you the humorously dull history of books. Part one. In which humans make marks on wolves. And eventually start keeping receipts. Long before books. Long before libraries. And very long before people began arranging books attractively beside other books they also hadn't read, Human beings were already trying to leave things behind. We don't know when somebody first decided that a mark made deliberately on a surface could mean something to somebody else. It happened far beyond the reach of written history, Which is inconvenient. Since written history would have been extremely useful here. What we do have. Are the marks themselves. Across the world. Prehistoric people painted and engraved images onto rocks. Some surviving cave and rock arch. Dates back tens of thousands of years. There are animals, Human figures, Geometric patterns. Perhaps most immediately recognisable of all. Hands. At various prehistoric sites. People placed their hands against rocks. And created outlines around them using pigment. And there is something wonderfully direct about that. Someone stood in that exact place, Perhaps. 30 or 40, 000 years ago. Put a hand against the wall. And left its shape behind. We don't know their name. We don't know what they sounded like. Don't know what they were doing later that afternoon. We have their hands. " And the extraordinary thing is that if you gave a group of modern children some paint. And left them alone with a freshly decorated wall. There is every possibility we'd end up with broadly similar evidence. The meaning of prehistoric cave art. Remains a huge subject of research and debate. Some images may have had ritual significance. They may have been connected with storytelling. Hunting. Belief. Teaching. Or communication in ways we cannot now recover. The uncertainty. Has been extremely good for academics. A prehistoric person draws twelve marks beside a horse. 30, 000 years later. Several highly qualified people spend their careers discussing the 12 marks. The person who made them. May have had a perfectly straightforward explanation. Unfortunately. He has become very difficult to contact. What we can say. Is that humans were already doing something fundamental. To the later history of books. Replacing information. Ideas. And images. Outside themselves. For most human knowledge, However. The storage system. Was still another person. Stories could be told. Knowledge could be taught. A skilled hunter could show somebody what to do. An older member of a community could remember people, Places, And events. Stories could pass between generations through speech and performance. This works remarkably well. Humans maintained complex cultures for thousands upon thousands of years. Without writing. It does, However. Requires somebody to remember everything. And memory has certain characteristics which anybody who has walked upstairs and then forgotten why will recognize. As human communities become larger and more settled, A different kind of information begins demanding attention. Grain. Animals. Learn. Trade. The number of things. Civilization develops. And almost immediately. Somebody wants an accurate count. This is where our journey towards books ends. Becomes considerably easier to follow. In the ancient Near East. People were using small clay tokens for accounting purposes. Thousands of years before fully developed writing. Different shapes appear to have represented particular goods or quantities. Over time, Increasingly sophisticated systems of record-keeping developed. Which means that one of the roads towards literature. Begins with bookkeeping. I find this reassuringly human. Thousands of years from now there will be Shakespeare. Dickens. Tolstoy. And Agatha Christie. For the moment. Someone would just like to establish where the barley went. By around 3, 200 BC. In the great Mesopotamian city of Uruk. We find some of the earliest surviving examples. Of writing. Marks are being made on clay tablets. To record goods, Quantities. Workers. And transactions. Humanity has crossed an extraordinary threshold. A person can now put information somewhere and walk away from it. Another person can encounter that information later. The sword. No longer has to remain inside a living human memory. And the thought is Barley. There is something magnificent about this. We invent writing. One of the most consequential technologies in human history. And immediately give it a job in a camp. Nobody appears to have looked at the first tablet and thought at last. My novel. There are supplies to organize. A temple economy to administer. Someone had received something. Someone else owed something. And now, Crucially. There was evidence. This must have changed arguments forever. Before writing. I gave you eight measures. I thought it was six. After writing. It's right here, On the clay tablet. Conversation over. Writing has acquired one of the functions it retains to this day. Making it considerably harder to claim that nobody told you. The system used in Mesopotamia develops over centuries into what we call cuneiform. Cuneiform eventually develops into a writing system. Containing hundreds of signs. Used for languages including Sumerian and Akkadian. Learning it properly takes years. Which means that almost as soon as humanity invents writing. It also invents the person who can read something. While everyone else stands around waiting for him to explain it. This person is the scribe. Scribes are trained specialists. They learn science. Vocabulary. Mathematics, Copying, And the various skills required to keep an increasingly organized civilization organized. They record deliveries, Contracts, Debts, Letters and transactions. It is quite a position of power when you think about it. A farmer arrives with twelve sheep. The scribe writes 11. The farmer cannot read. We can only hope the scribe is a good man. Students training to become scribes practice by repeatedly copying signs and texts onto clay. Some of these exercises have survived. Along with ancient texts. Describing school life. Discipline. And the anxieties of pupils. And this is where ancient history began. Suddenly becomes wonderfully familiar. Because a child can live nearly 4, 000 years ago. In a civilization whose gods and kings and language have vanished. And still be worried because he's late for school. That's almost annoying. You'd think four thousand years would improve us. It hasn't even fixed mornings. And some of their actual school exercises survived. Imagine that being your contribution to history. You live, Perhaps, Sixty years. You have friendships. You fall in love. You raise children. You become quite respected locally. You once tell a joke at dinner that absolutely destroys the room. All gone. What survives is your homework that you messed up when you were eleven. It is excavated. Catalogue. Photograph. Placed carefully behind glass. A professor spends 20 years studying it. Your spelling mistake. Now has a bibliography. Clay, However, Is remarkably good at surviving. Once tablets are dried or fired. They can last for an extraordinary length of time. Some were even preserved accidentally, When buildings burned, And the heat baked the tablets harder. This is an unusual outcome for a library fire. The library has burned down. The tablets have had an upgrade. Thousands of years later. Archaeologists dig through the ruins. And discover that the accounts department is still there. Everything else has vanished. The furniture. The curtains. The people. The entire civilization. But we know that someone ordered barley on a Wednesday. And we have the paperwork. And because clay tablets survive so well, We don't merely have official records. We have letters. Complaints? Arguments. People asking other people to send things. People complaining that the things sent were not good enough. And this brings us to one of the finest characters in the entire history of the written word, Ea Natsir. Ea Natsir was a merchant living in the city of Ur. Around the 18th century BC. He dealt in copper, Among other things. And at least one of his customers was spectacularly unimpressed with the service. That customer was a man called Nanny. Nanny had apparently been promised good quality copper ingots. He was unhappy with what he received. And with the way his representative had been treated. So he complained. On clay. Nearly 4, 000 years ago. We can still read the complaint. I personally adore this. Err Nutsir presumably thought he was having a difficult week at work. He had no idea how difficult the week was going to become. Because nannies complain. Has now survived approximately 38 centuries. There are businesses today terrified of a one-star Google review. Eannatzir has had one sitting in the archaeological record since before the Roman Empire existed. And our friend Nani really commits to it. He complains about the quality of the copper. He complains about the treatment of his messenger. He wants his money handled properly. The general mood of the tablet is that Nani has heard enough. There is no customer service department. No automated response. No little box asking. How did we do today? Nani has already answered. Badly. And consider, If you will, The effort required to complain in roughly 1750 BC. Today. You can become furious with the company while lying on your sofa. One star. Terrible service. Send. Nani needs a clay tablet. Someone has to write the complaint. Then the physical complaint has to reach a Nazi. There is a substantial cooling off period built into this system. Nani remains angry. There is commitment. And apparently other complaints involving nuts here survive as well. Suggesting that Nani may not have been the only person finding the copper-buying experience less than ideal. Which raises the wonderful possibility that Ea Natsir had a reputation. You can imagine someone in Ur mentioning that he needs copper. Where are you getting it? Uh, Not to. Pause. Oh, Right. Nothing more neat saying. And certainly. These clay tablets don't feel very distant at all. That is one of the great pleasures of old writing. Kings and battles can make the ancient world feel remote. A man furious because the thing he bought isn't as good as he was promised. Brings the whole civilization straight. We know this, Man. Maybe we have been this man. Nani would understand online reviews immediately. You'd only have to explain electricity, Computers, The internet. . . And Google first. After that he'd be away. But writing is also beginning to preserve something much bigger than commercial disappointment. Stories. One of the greatest surviving works from ancient Mesopotamia. Is the epic. Of Gilgamesh. Its stories developed over a long period. And versions survive on tablets written in cuneiform. Gilgamesh gives us a king. Adventure. Friendship. Loss. And the fear of death. Human beings have now discovered. That writing can preserve an imagined world. As effectively as it preserves a copper complaint. And I rather like that these things coexist. On one tablet? What does it mean to be mortal? On another. Where is my decent copper? It a nut to you. This feels like a fairly complete summary of humanity. We want to understand death. We also want a refund. The stories of Gilgamesh are copied and recopied. Different versions exist. Tablets become damaged. Pieces disappear. Modern scholars reconstruct the work from surviving fragments. So, Reading ancient literature. Can occasionally resemble receiving a second-hand book. From which somebody has removed pages 37 to 52. Except the person who removed them has been dead for 3, 000 years. And there's no point becoming angry. The important development, Though, Is enormous. Writing can now carry a story. Beyond the person telling it. The storyteller can disappear. The audience can disappear. The city itself can disappear. And the words can still turn up thousands of years later and make sense to another human being. Books are beginning here. In that basic bargain between a person who records something. And another person who encounters it later. There is only one fairly obvious problem with the current model. It's a rock. Clay tablets are excellent for durability. And considerably less impressive for portability. Nobody is heading off for a relaxing weekend, Carrying twelve chapters of Gilgamesh in a sack. And so. . . The next stage in the history of books. Will involve a breakthrough that anyone who has ever dropped a heart back on their face in bed and appreciate. Making the reading material a little lighter. Part 2. In which books become lighter, And everyone immediately starts collecting them. Clay had done something extraordinary. It allowed human beings to preserve words for thousands of years. Unfortunately. It had also made reading rather heavy. The ancient Egyptians had a considerable advantage here. Because along the Nile grew papyrus. The inner part of the papyrus plant. Could be cut into strips. Arranged in layers. Pressed together. And dried. To produce a smooth writing surface. Certainly. Words could travel without requiring so much. Upper body strength. Papyrus was light. Sheets could be joined together into long rolls, Producing the scroll. And for centuries, The scroll became one of the principal ways of storing longer texts around the Mediterranean world. This is much closer to something we would recognise as a book. You could carry it. You could own several without reinforcing the floor. You could even take one somewhere pleasant and read it. And presumably, For the first time, Somebody could carry a scroll around all day, With absolutely no intention of opening it. Now we're getting somewhere. The Egyptians used papyrus for administrative, Religious and literary texts. The Greeks adopted it too. And eventually the Romans became enthusiastic users of scrolls. A scroll could contain a substantial piece of writing. Although reading one required a slightly different technique from ours. You generally held it with both hands. Unrolling from one side. While rolling it on to the other. This works beautifully when you're proceeding through the text in order. Let the problems begin when you want to go back. You remember a particularly useful passage from earlier? You know roughly where it was? So you roll backwards too far. Over it again. Back slightly. And here. More than 2, 000 years ago. Humanity discovers one of the permanent features of reading. I know it's in here somewhere. There is no search box. There is no index taking you directly to the subject. And there is certainly no helpful electronic device, Remembering where you stopped three months ago, When you were apparently still interested in this book. To scroll. Remember is nothing. That's your responsibility. Books are also valuable because producing them requires labour. Every copy has to be written out by hand. If you want another copy of a work. Another human being has to copy the words. All of them. This makes the modern complaint that a book is taking a long time to arrive seem rather mild. Your order has been dispatched. Estimated delivery. After Demetrius finishes copying chapter 12. Do not contact Demetrius. Demetrius is doing his best. Professional scribes and copyists help texts circulate through the Greek and Roman worlds. And booksellers operate in major cities. Wealthy people can assemble private libraries. And this is where another very familiar human behaviour begins to appear. Owning books and reading books. Are not necessarily the same activity. The Roman philosopher Seneca complained about people collecting enormous numbers of books for display. Rather than study. That was nearly two thousand years ago. If you have ever looked at a shelf containing twelve books you fully intend to read, And then bought another one. You are participating in an ancient intellectual tradition. This is comforting. The unread pile is not a person of failure. It has historical precedent. And wealthy Romans could take this quite far. A good private library displayed education and culture. Books could say something about the person who owned them. Which means that Somewhere in ancient Rome there must have been a visitor looking along somebody's shelves and thinking, He's definitely not read all of these. Again, We know this person. Libraries themselves could become enormous. The most famous of the ancient world was the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Founded in the early Hellenistic period. And associated with the Ptolemaic rulers. The exact size of its collection is uncertain. And many later stories about its destruction. Have become tangled with legend. But Alexandria became one of the great centers of scholarship. In the ancient Mediterranean. Its ambition was extraordinary. To gather texts on a vast scale. Ancient accounts even describe books being taken from ships arriving at Alexandria so they could be copied. Although the precise details of these practices come through later sources, And need some caution. The idea is magnificent. You arrive in Alexandria. You have brought a book. The authorities would like to see it. This is perhaps the most aggressive library policy ever devised. Modern libraries ask you to return books. Alexandria is interested in the ones you arrived with. Scholars work there, Studying, Editing. And comparing text. And once you have multiple copies of old works, Another problem becomes apparent. They don't always agree. A line differs. A word has changed. The copyist has made a mistake. Someone now has to work out what the original probably said. Ancient scholarship develops partly because human beings have discovered that giving the same text to several people to copy by hand eventually produces several slightly different texts. Anyone who has ever forwarded an address through four members of a family. Will understand how this happens. Meanwhile. . . Ordinary written communication continues too. Letters move around the ancient world. Business is conducted. People write requests and invitations. And sometimes surviving letters. Give us tiny pieces of everyday life. That are much more revealing than grand monuments. One Roman-era letter found in Britain, For example. Contains an invitation from Claudia Severa to Salpiccia Lepidinia. To attend her birthday celebration around 100 A. D. A birthday invitation, Nearly two thousand years later. We still have it. Imagine knowing that. When you wrote. Please come to my birthday. People would still be reading it. In the 21st century. You'd put slightly more effort into the wording. And this is what books and writing are increasingly doing. They're allowing ordinary voices to survive. Alongside emperors and generals. Someone can complain. Someone can invite a friend over. Someone can write a poem. Someone can record an account. Someone can compose a work of philosophy. The ancient written world becomes enormous. But the scroll itself still has limitations. And eventually. Another format. Begins gaining ground. The Codex. Instead of joining sheets into one long roll. Pages are placed together and bound. Along one edge. And suddenly, Well look at that You can turn pages. You can jump backwards. You can jump forwards. You can find a particular section without re-rolling 20 feet of material. You can write on both sides of the page. You can put several works into one volume. You can even place it on a table. And it remains there without attempting to become a tube again. It is difficult to overstate how familiar this object would eventually become. Early Christians become particularly enthusiastic adopters of the Codex. And during the first centuries AD, It grows increasingly common. Over time, It overtakes the scroll as the dominant format for literary texts. And I like imagining the transitional period. Because technologies rarely disappear the moment something better arrives. There must have been people who preferred squirrels. They had always used scrolls. Squirrels were perfectly good. They liked the feel of a screw. Codex didn't feel the same. And some younger person. Was presumably standing nearby saying, You can literally just turn the page. It doesn't matter, He prefers the scroll. Every technological revolution eventually produces this man. Gradually though. The Codex wins. And by late antiquity. The basic physical idea of the book we still use today is firmly established. Pages gathered together. Rising on both sides. Binding. Something you can open is roughly the place you want. Something you can close and put on a shelf. And perhaps most importantly, Something you can buy with tremendous enthusiasm. Place beside the bed. And continue meaning to start. For the next 11 months. Has finally become. Recognizably. Making one, However, Is still painfully slow. And soon. Much of the work of preserving and copying books in Europe. Will fall to people with an almost ideal lifestyle for the task. Monks. They have the books. They have the handwriting. And crucially. They have nowhere else to be. Part 3 In which monks copy everything by hand. And nobody is in a hurry. By the early Middle Ages. The book has acquired a shape we would recognize. Pages are bound together. Words sit comfortably inside them. And you can open one roughly where you want, Without unrolling several feet of papyrus first. There is, However, Still one fairly serious problem. If you want another copy of a book. Somebody has to copy it. All of it. By hand. This makes books extraordinarily valuable objects. A substantial manuscript might require months or even years of labour, Particularly if it is richly decorated. The writing surface itself is expensive. Papyrus becomes harder to obtain in much of medieval Western Europe, And parchment, Prepared animal skin, Becomes increasingly important. Particularly fine parchment is often called vellum. Although historical terminology varies. Producing it is an undertaking. Before anybody has written a single word. Animal skins are involved. And a considerable amount of work. And a large book can require the skins of a considerable number of animals. So when somebody in the Middle Ages says, I have a book. This is significant information. Today, Somebody says. I have a book. And do you say, Right. In the early medieval world you may wish to see it. Monasteries become enormously important centres for producing and preserving books. Monks need religious texts for worship and study. And some monasteries develop collections containing biblical writings. Theology. Commentaries. Histories. Grammatical works. And surviving classical texts. Books are copied in monastic communities by hand, Line after line. Page after page. This is one of those activities that looks. . . Wonderfully peaceful when depicted in a modern illustration. A monk sits beside a window. Soft daylight, Quill in hand. A beautiful manuscript slowly appears. What the illustration tends not to mention. Is that he has been writing since breakfast. And his back hurts. Medieval scribes occasionally left comments in manuscripts which give us wonderful glimpses of the person behind the writing. Some complain about difficult work, Bad weather, Uncomfortable conditions. Others express enormous relief when a text is finally finished. One famous Scribo sentiment compares reaching the end of a manuscript. To a sailor finally reaching harbour. Which tells you quite a lot about copying books by hand. Nobody reaches the final page of a relaxing activity and thinks, Land. Thank God. Imagine copying an entire book. You reach page 300. You cannot reward yourself by checking your phone. There is no phone. You cannot put on a podcast. There is no podcast. You cannot even become distracted by another book. Without creating considerably more work for somebody. You continue writing. And because every copy is made by a human being. Mistakes happen. A word gets missed. A line is repeated. The eye jumps from one similar phrase to another. Corrections appear. Sometimes a later copyist reproduces an earlier mistake. Giving the mystique a surprisingly successful career. This is one of the stranger features of manuscript culture. A monk makes a small error in the 9th century. Another monk copies it in the tents. Someone copies him. The mistake is now doing rather well. By the 12th century. It has travelled further than the monk who originally made it. There is no undo button. There is another monk. Ireland, My homeland, Becomes particularly important in this story. After the decline of Roman political authority in Western Europe, Monasteries in Ireland develop as significant centres of Christian learning. And manuscript culture. Irish scholars preserve and copy texts. And Irish monks and missionaries. Later travel into Britain and continental Europe. Establishing monasteries and participating in wider networks of learning. The older popular version of this story. Sometimes becomes. Rome fell. Europe forgot everything. Ireland saved civilisation. The reality is much broader. Learning did continue elsewhere in Europe. The Byzantine world preserved a vast body of Greek learning. And later scholars in the Islamic world, Would play an enormous role in preserving, Developing, And transmitting ancient knowledge. Ireland's contribution is important. And perhaps nothing represents Irish manuscript culture. More famously. Than the Book of Kells. Created around 800 A. D. Probably involving a monastic community. Associated with Iona and later Kells, The Book of Kells contains the four Gospels in Latin. Calling it a book. Is perfectly accurate. It also feels slightly inadequate. The manuscript contains extraordinarily elaborate decoration. Letters become enormous compositions. Filled with interlacing forms. Animals, Human figures, And minute details. Some pages are so richly decorated that the text itself almost seems to have wandered into an artwork. And remember, All of this is being done by hand. There is no zoom. This bothers me. Look at reproductions of some of the details in the Book of Kells. And they are astonishingly small. And precise. A modern person trying to achieve the same thing would enlarge the image to 400%, Make the adjustment, Enlarge it again, Undo something, Complain that the software has frozen, And eventually go for coffee. The medieval artist as a page, His eyes and confidence. Some of the decorated initials are so elaborate. That finding the actual letter becomes an activity in itself. Imagine opening a modern novel. And discovering that the first letter of chapter three has taken up most of the page, Because somebody spent six weeks decorating it. You would respect the effort. You would also quite like to know what happens next. The Book of Kells was never an ordinary reading cubby. Its lavish production suggests a prestigious sacred object, Probably intended for important liturgical uses. The care invested in it. Tells us something about the value attached to the words it contains. It also demonstrates something books can now become. A book doesn't merely carry information. The physical object itself. Can matter enormously. Its materials measure. Its appearance matters. Its craftsmanship matters. More than 1200 years later. People travel to Dublin. Specifically to look at the Book of Chaos. This is an extraordinarily successful publication history. Most authors would accept twelve centuries in print. Meanwhile. . . Considerably plainer books are being copied across medieval Europe. And libraries are growing. Slowly. Well, Very slowly. A monastery cannot order 40 new titles and expect them on Tuesday. Acquiring a book may mean borrowing another institution's copy and having somebody reproduce it. Imagine lending somebody a book under these circumstances. Can I borrow this? When will you return it? When we've copied every word. Alright. See you next year. As universities develop during the Middle Ages. Demand for books increases. Systems emerge to speed up copying. Including the PCS system. Used around some medieval universities. In which approved manuscripts could be divided into sections. And copied simultaneously by different scribes. Humanity has discovered parallel processing. Give one person an entire book. And you wait months. Give different sections to several people. And suddenly things move faster. The only danger is that Gerald has Section 4. And Gerald is behind. Everyone else is finished. Gerald has had plenty of time. Gerald says the lettering is difficult. The 13th century has invented the group project. Books remain valuable enough that theft is a serious concern. Medieval manuscripts sometimes contain curses warning anyone considering stealing them of terrible consequences. This is much stronger than. Property of St. Mary's Library. Please return. A book thief might be threatened with excommunication. Damnation. Or some imaginative combination of physical and spiritual disaster. What modern libraries find you? Medieval libraries occasionally bring God into it. Later medieval libraries also sometimes secure valuable books with chains. Particularly as collections become available for consultation. Chained libraries survive in a few historic locations today. The chain is long enough for the reader to take the book from the shelf and use it nearby. You just cannot leave with it. There is something refreshingly clear about this arrangement. The librarian does not need to trust you. The book is attached to the building. Try forgetting to return that. And yet people clearly love books. They commissioned them. Donate to them. Copy them. Decorates them. Collect them, Carry them between monasteries and courts and universities. A single manuscript may pass through generations of hands. Readers add notes. Owners write names. Scribes make corrections. People leave little traces of themselves around the text. Sometimes medieval marginalia become wonderfully unexpected. Manuscripts can contain drawings of animals, Strange creatures, Faces and scenes. That seem startlingly lively beside serious texts. There are knights fighting snails. Rabbits behaving aggressively. Odd hybrid creatures. And little figures getting on with whatever inexplicable business medieval imagination has assigned them. The Snail Fighting Knights. Of inspired considerable scholarly discussion. There are theories. Naturally there are theories. We don't know with certainty why medieval manuscripts contain so many confrontations between armed men and snails. But they do. And I for one am glad. A monk or professional artist has access to precious parchment, Expensive pigments, And a manuscript intended to survive. He draws a knight confronting a snail. 800 years later. We are still asking why. The snail has won. By the later Middle Ages. Books are becoming increasingly common. Particularly in towns and universities. But they remain expensive by modern standards. Because human labor is still built into every copy. Every additional book requires more writing. Every page needs somebody's attention. Every letter has to appear because a human hand put it there. For centuries. This is simply how books work. In the 15th century. Something changes. A German craftsman begins experimenting with metal letters that can be arranged. Pressed onto paper. Taken apart and used again. His name is Johannes Gutenberg. Somewhere in Europe. Thousands of scribes are about to discover. That technology. Has been sinking. About their jobs. Part Four In Which China Invents Paper and Europe. Eventually hears about it. Before we get to the guy I mentioned in part three, Gutenberg, We need to go to another part of the world. While monks in Europe are carefully copying manuscripts by hand. Another history of the book. Has already been unfolding. Thousands of miles to the east. And China. Has been extremely busy. By the early centuries of the Han dynasty. Chinese writers had already used a variety of materials for writing. Including bamboo. And wooden slips. These could be tied together into collections. Bamboo had the considerable advantage of being available. It also hurts the disadvantage of remaining bamboo. A lengthy work could become extremely heavy. Ancient Chinese texts sometimes required bundles containing large numbers of slips. So being well read. Could become physically apparent. If a scholar arrived carrying his library. You help. Silk was another possible writing surface and was considerably lighter. But silk was expensive. Using large quantities of it for everyday documents. Was rather like deciding that ordinary office correspondence should henceforth be written on Kashmir. China needed something cheap, Light and practical. And eventually, It got. Paper. The traditional story gives an important role to Kai Lun. An official at the Han Imperial Court. Who, In 105 AD, Reported an improved method of making paper. From materials including tree bark, Hemp, Old rags and fishing nets. We now know from archaeological evidence that forms of paper existed in China before Kailun. So it is safer to regard him. As an important figure in the development and promotion of papermaking rather than the lone inventor. Which is slightly unfortunate for Kyloon. Being the man who invented paper is excellent. Being an important administrator in the improvement and reporting of existent fiber processing techniques, Is harder to fit on a statue. Either way. Chinese paper making. Became enormously important. Plant fibres could be broken down. Suspended in water. Lifted on a screen. And dried. Into sin sheets. Flexible. Relatively inexpensive. Humanity had spent thousands of years putting words onto clay. Stone, Bamboo, Silk, Papyrus, And animal skin. Paper looked at all of them, And quietly got the job done. And once China had paper. Another question eventually presented itself. Why keep writing every copy by hand? By the Tang Dynasty. Woodblock printing. Was being used in China. An entire page of text. Could be carved in reverse. Onto a wooden block. Inked. And pressed onto paper. There is a small detail here worth appreciating. The whole page has to be carved backwards. Anyone who has ever written three words on a birthday cake? And discovered there isn't enough room for the fourth. Should spend a moment respecting the woodblock carver. One mistake near the end, And you don't press CTRL-Z. You stare at the wood. The wood stares back. Eventually, Though, The carved block can produce many copies of the same page. This changes the arithmetic of books completely. The first copy is an enormous nuisance. The hundredth is certainly rather efficient. By 868 A. D. We have the famous Chinese Diamond Sutra. A Buddhist text printed from woodblocks. And now generally described. As the earliest complete, Surviving, Dated, Printed book. 868. This is important. Johannes Gutenberg will not produce his famous Bible until the 15th century. So, While medieval European scribes are still sitting down with quills. And preparing themselves emotionally for another several hundred pages. China has already been printing books for centuries. Nobody in China is waiting for Gutenberg. They don't know they're supposed to. Printing expands greatly in China. Buddhist texts, Confucian classics, Calendars, Dictionaries, And other works can be reproduced in substantial numbers. And we'll leave China there for now. Having established something important. Centuries before Gutenberg. People in China. Already have paper and printing. Gutenberg will later become vastly more famous in the Western version of this story. Which is one of history's occasional reminders. That being first. And being the person everybody remembers. Are entirely separate competitions. Back in medieval Europe. Books are still being copied largely by hand. Slowly. Painfully slowly. If you want a copy of a book. Someone has to sit down and make you one. There is no warehouse containing 600 identical copies. There is a man called Bernard. Bernard has reached page 84. Please stop asking Bernard when it will be ready. Paper does gradually make its way westward. Through Central Asia. And the Islamic world. And eventually into Europe. Where its use grows during the later Middle Ages. It is cheaper to produce than parchment. And that matters. Because Europe is becoming increasingly interested in books. More people are reading. Merchants need records. Universities are growing. Governments need documents. Churches need religious texts. And people having discovered reading. Are beginning to develop the inconvenient habit of wanting something else to read when they've finished. This creates pressure. Books are wanted faster than Bernard can produce them. Burner doesn't even huddle up. By the 15th century. Europe is therefore in an interesting position. There is growing demand for books. And there is paper to make them on. But producing a poop. Still involves an alarming amount of handwriting. As mentioned earlier. Along comes Johannes Gutenberg. Gutenberg is a German craftsman working in Mainz. And during the mid-15th century. He develops a printing system. Using movable metal type. Suitable ink, And a press. The clever bit is that individual metal letters can be arranged to form a page, Inked, And pressed onto paper repeatedly. Then the letters can be taken apart and rearranged for the next page. Suddenly, One page can become 50 pages, 100 pages, 200 identical pages. Somewhere, Bernard looks up from page 84. This feels personal. Gutenberg's great famous project is a Bible. Produced in the 1450s. It is beautifully made. With pages designed to resemble the handsome manuscript. People already value. And I love that. Europe has acquired revolutionary technology. Capable of transforming human communication. And one of the first concerns. Appears to have been making sure it doesn't look too new. We do this constantly. When e-readers arrive centuries later. They display little pages that appear to turn. There is nothing there to turn. The electronic device could make the previous page disappear in a puff of smoke if it wanted. But apparently humanity needs to be reassured. Look, It's still a book. See? The page went over. Printing spreads rapidly through Europe. Printers establish workshops. Books become available in much greater numbers. And now. Something rather strange happens to the experience of being an author. Previously. If you wrote something foolish. The foolishness had fairly limited distribution. Perhaps. Six people saw it. One of them was your cousin. Printing gives bad ideas ambition. You can now be wrong in several cities simultaneously. This is a tremendous advance. It also means writers can become famous. Far beyond the places where they live. Readers can encounter exactly the same words hundreds of miles apart. And books begin appearing on more shelves. Which creates another ancient problem in a new form. Other people's books. People lend books. People borrow books. And somewhere in Europe. Almost certainly. Somebody says. Have you still got my book? The answer is yes. The answer has been yes for 11 months. The borrower knows exactly where it is. It's besides the bed. They haven't quite finished it. They haven't quite started it either. But returning it now would somehow amount to admitting defeat. Printing also gives people the opportunity to put their own thoughts into circulation. On a scale previously impossible. Religious arguments. Political arguments. Scientific ideas. Satire. Pamphlets. Opinions. A lot of opinions. The printing press has barely got going before authorities realise that allowing people to reproduce their thoughts cheaply. May have drawbacks. This is perhaps the most predictable development in the entire history of communication. We've invented a machine that allows ideas to spread rapidly. Wonderful. Anyone can use it. Anyone. And so, Censorship, Licensing, And restrictions grow alongside printing. Certain books are forbidden. Certain ideas are dangerous. Printers can get into serious trouble. Which, Of course, Gives forbidden books one of the finest marketing advantages available. You are not allowed to read this. There are few sentences more effective at making a human being want to read something. Nobody has ever hidden a forbidden book beneath the floorboard because the authorities announced You can read it if you like. It's rather repetitive in the middle. Meanwhile. . . Books themselves are becoming more practical. Smaller formats appear, Cheaper editions become possible. You no longer need to be enormously wealthy to contemplate owning one. And once ordinary people begin owning books, Ordinary behaviour follows immediately. Books acquire stains. Corners get bent. People write their names inside them. Children draw things where children have been specially asked not to draw things. Someone leaves a book somewhere damp. Someone puts a drink on one. A beautiful invention capable of carrying human thought across centuries. Has finally achieved its mature form. There is a cup ring on it. And booksellers become increasingly important. Now you can enter a shop. Specifically to buy a book. This introduces an entirely new danger. You may enter intending to buy one. There is no historical evidence that this has ever worked reliably. You find the book you wanted. Then you see another. You pick it up. This is merely research. You read the back. Do research. Twenty minutes later you leave with four books and a vague feeling that the problem was somehow the shop's fault. Printing has changed everything. For centuries. The great challenge was getting hold of a book. Human ingenuity has now begun solving that problem. Soon we will face its natural successor. Getting hold of far too many books. And in the centuries ahead. A particularly suspicious new form of reading. Is going to become wildly popular. People will sit alone for hours. Reading completely invented stories. About people. Who never existed. Naturally. Society will become very worried about them. Part five. In which everybody starts reading novels. And some people become concerned. By the 18th century. Books are becoming easier to obtain. Literacy is expanding. And increasing numbers of people have discovered a new way of spending several hours a day. While achieving almost nothing measurable. Reading for pleasure. This is a significant development. For thousands of years, Writing has been used to record laws. Prayers. That counts. Philosophy. History. And the occasional furious complaint about copper. Now large numbers of readers are becoming interested in sitting quietly and finding out whether two imaginary people will eventually get married. Naturally some people are worried The growing popularity of novels attracts criticism during the 18th and 19th centuries. There are concerns that excessive novel reading might encourage idleness. Excite the emotions. Or fill young people's heads with unrealistic ideas. Young women receive a particularly generous share of this concern. A woman might read too many romantic stories and develop expectations. Nobody wants that. She might begin thinking the mysterious gentleman with the large house should be interesting as well as rich. Things could get completely out of hand. The novel, Meanwhile. Carries on regardless. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe appears in 1719 Samuel Richardson produces enormous novels such as Pamela and Clarissa. And refielding, " writes Tom Jones. Readers become increasingly accustomed to following characters through hundreds of pages of invented trouble. And then. In the early 19th century. Jane Austen arrives. Austin publishes Pride and Prejudice in 1813. Although she had begun working on an earlier version years before. Its opening sentence about a wealthy single man. Being in want of a wife. Becomes one of the most famous openings in English literature. Then spend a great deal of time. Demonstrating that finding the wife is going to be unnecessarily complicated. Mr Darcy has money. Elizabeth Bennet does not have enough of it. He likes her. She dislikes him. He proposes. He does it badly. She refuses. He goes away and, Among other things, Writes a letter. The letter helps. This is encouraging for anyone who has ever left a conversation and thought of what they should have said approximately 40 minutes later. Darcy gets several hundred pages. And Pride and Prejudice. Gives us a wonderful glimpse. Into a world where social life can turn on extremely small events. Someone visits. Someone doesn't visit. Someone dances with somebody. Someone declines to dance with somebody. A letter arrives. A person enters the room unexpectedly. This can sustain three chapters. There are no phones. Nobody can quietly message Elizabeth. Darcy is here, BTW. She has to discover this in real time. And courtship itself. Requires patience. If you meet somebody interesting. You cannot go home and investigate them for 45 minutes. No photographs No employment history. No old holiday pictures. No discovering that in 2017 Mr. Darcy posted fourteen photographs of himself holding fish. You have to form an opinion based on what he actually says to you. This places an unreasonable amount of pressure on conversation. Austen herself never marries. And during her lifetime. Her novels are initially published anonymously. The title page of Sense and Sensibility. Identifies the author simply as a lady. Which is beautifully understated, Considering what happens later. Two centuries pass. Her books remain in print. There are films, Television series, Academic departments, Festivals, And Jane Austen merchandise. People travel to places associated with her. Mr. Darcy is still being discussed. A lady. Did rather well. Then the Victorians arrived. And the novel becomes enormous. Literally, In some cases. Victorian novels can be very long. This partly reflects the way many are published. Novels may appear in separate monthly or weekly installments. Before being collected into volumes. Charles Dickens becomes a master of this. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Appears in monthly parts beginning in 1836. Later works including Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak house, And great expectations, Also reach readers serially. So, Dickens' Readers don't necessarily receive the entire story at once. They wait. This is basically television before television. A new installment arrives. You read it. Something terrible happens to someone you like. Dickens ends the installment. See you next month. There is no option to click. Next episode. Dickens has gone home. And readers become deeply invested. Dickens is hugely famous during his lifetime. His characters and stories reach an enormous audience. And he later performs public readings from his work to packed crowds. He is recognizably a celebrity author. People want to see him, They want to hear him, They follow his latest works. If Dickens were alive today. There is every possibility. He would eventually be forced to do a podcast. As novels are filled with memorable characters. And Dickens as a particular gift for names. Ebeneezer screwed. Uriah Heap. Mr. Bumble. WACKFORD SQUARES Dickens can introduce somebody called Mr. Pumplejuke. And somehow everybody accepts this immediately. Nobody in Great Expectations says Sorry, What was your name again? Humboldt tube. Of course. Continue. And Dickens likes characters. Lots of them. Open a Dickens novel after putting it down for three weeks. And there is a genuine possibility that a man called Mr. Jaggers has appeared. And you no longer remember whether you're supposed to know him. You check earlier. There he is. Page 117. Apparently he is extremely important. You knew this in February. By the 1840s another extraordinary literary family is preparing to enter the story. The Brontes. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte grow up in Hayworth in Yorkshire, The daughters of a clergyman. As children, They create elaborate imaginary worlds and write tiny books. Eventually they move on to larger books. This turns out to be significant. In 1847. Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights are published. And Agnes Grey appears the same year. Initially, The sisters publish under the male pseudonyms. Currer, Alice, And Acton Bell. The names allow them some protection from assumptions about female writers. And Jane Eyre gives literature Mr. Rochester. Wuthering Heights gives it Heathcliff. Neither man would be my first recommendation, If a friend said she had started seeing somebody new. He's very intense. Right. Anything else? He spends a lot of time brooding. Of course he does. There's something strange happening in the house. Maybe keep your own flat for a while. The nineteenth-century novel has a remarkable number of large houses in which something is wrong. A room is locked. Someone has a secret. A relative hasn't been entirely truthful. The weather has deteriorated. Nobody simply buys a large country house and has a nice time in it. This would be a terrible novel. Chapter 27 THE ROOF WAS FINE Emily Bronte dies in 1848. At only thirty years old. Just a year after Wuthering Heights is published. She never sees the extraordinary reputation the novel eventually acquires. And that happens repeatedly in the history of books. Authors cannot know which works will survive them. A book may sell modestly, A review may be poor, The writer dies, Then future generations arrive. And make completely different decisions. Herman Melville's Moby Dick, For example. Receives mixed reviews, And does not make Melville rich. Later generations, Turn it into an American classic. This must be one of the more irritating features of literary immortality. Everybody finally agrees you are brilliant. You. Are unavailable for comment. By the later 19th century. Readers have an extraordinary range of fiction available to them. George Elias publishes Middlemarch. Thomas Hardy writes novels including Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Arthur Conan Doyle introduces Sherlock Holmes. Robert Louis Stevenson gives readers Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Books can frighten you, Make you cry, Take you on adventures. Allow you to investigate murders from the comfort of a chair. And the chair is becoming important. Because reading is increasingly entering ordinary domestic life. People borrow books from circulating libraries. They buy cheaper editions. They read newspapers and magazines. Carrying serial fiction. Families read aloud together. And reduce develop habits we would recognize instantly. They have favourite authors. They recommend books. They disagree about endings. They lend books and begin quietly monitoring whether the borrower has made any attempt to return them. There is a delicate stage in every borrowed book's life. When it stops being clear who owns it. Three months, Borrowed. Six months, Still borrowed. Two years. Apparently part of Susan's collection. You visit Susan. There it is. On her shelf. You both see it. Nobody says anything. The friendship continues under slightly altered conditions. And by the end of the 19th century. The book has travelled an extraordinary distance from the clay tablet. It has become entertainment on a massive scale. People can buy stories about romance, Murder, Adventure, Ghosts and difficult families. They can read on trains, At home, In bed, On holiday. And increasingly. Books don't have to be precious objects at all. They can be cheap. Perishable. Disposable even. The next great change in our story isn't going to be about what people write. It's going to be about how many books ordinary people can suddenly afford to buy. Which will finally allow humanity. To achieve something it has been working towards. For thousands of years. Owning far more books than there is any realistic possibility. Of reading. And it is worth remembering what entertainment means in this world. There is no Netflix waiting upstairs. No YouTube. No television. Nobody finishes Jane Eyre and discovers that the next episode will begin automatically in 8 seconds. A good book can occupy an entire evening. Someone might sit beside a fire, Or read by candle or lamplight for hours, Completely absorbed in the private disasters of people who don't exist. And if the chapter ends at an exciting moment. There is nowhere else to go. Recap video. No fan forum. No searching. Does Mr. Rochester. And accidentally ruining the entire book. You simply close it. Stare into the fire for a while and somehow cope with having your own thoughts. Part 6, In which books become cheap, Portable, And very difficult to stop buying. By the beginning of the 20th century. Books have completed a remarkable transformation. Once. Owning a substantial collection of books, Suggested wealth, Scholarship. Or access to a monastery. Now, It increasingly suggests that you have shelves. Industrial printing has made books cheaper and faster to produce. Literacy has expanded enormously across Europe and North America. During the 19th century. Public libraries are growing. Railway bookstores have already helped turn books into travelling companions. And publishers are discovering enormous audiences hungry for fiction. The book is becoming an ordinary object, Which is perhaps the greatest compliment humanity ever pays it. You can leave one on a train. You can spill tea on it. You can lend it to Susan and never see it again. We have progressed. And the 20th century produces writers who become celebrities on a scale earlier authors could scarcely have imagined. One of the most recognizable is Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is born in Illinois in 1899. Works as a journalist. Serves as an ambulance driver during the First World War. And eventually becomes associated with that extraordinary collection of writers and artists. Living in Paris during the 1920s. Paris is cheap enough for many expatriate writers to live there, And it attracts people who would later become enormously famous. Hemingway. F. Scott Fitzgerald Gertrude Stein Ezra Pound. James Joyce is there. Everyone seems to be writing something. You could hardly order a coffee without sitting beside someone else. Who would eventually require a university course. Hemingway later writes about these Paris years. In A Moveable Feast, Published after his death. The book gives us cafes, Writing, Friendships, Arguments, Meals, Cold rooms, And the peculiar romance that later grows around being a young writer without much money in Paris. This has become so attractive in retrospect. That we occasionally forget one detail. Having very little money is considerably more romantic afterwards. In the photograph. Hemingway is young. Paris is beautiful. There is a notebook on the cafe table. Lovely. What the photograph cannot show is that eventually somebody has to pay for lunch. Still. Cafes become part of the mythology of 20th century literature. A writer sits at a small table. Coffee. Notebook. Perhaps a cigarette? Hours pass. A masterpiece slowly appears. Today, The same writer would open the laptop door. Write 11 words. Check an email. Look up something necessary for the book, Somehow end up watching a video about a man restoring an old lawnmower. And discover that it is lunchtime. Modern technology has given writers many things. Concentration was not necessarily one of them. F. Scott Fitzgerald also becomes closely associated with the 1920s. Jazz age and the glamour and excess surrounding it. The Great Gatsby appears in 1925. It gives us Jay Gatsby. An enormously wealthy man throwing lavish parties partly because he remains obsessed with Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby has acquired the mansion, The clothes, The car, The parties, The money, He has overlooked the possibility that perhaps he should move on. It would be a much shorter novel. Fitzgerald himself becomes famous alongside his wife Zelda. And their lives become almost as disgust as his fiction. This is another development in our relationship with books. Increasingly. We don't merely want the book. Wants the author? What did they eat? Where did they live? Who did they love? Where did they write? Were they happy? What did they mean by chapter 7? A writer can spend three years carefully inventing fictional characters. And the reader finishes the book. And immediately wants information about the writer's marriage. We are difficult customers. Across the Atlantic. Virginia Woolf is experimenting with what the novel itself can do. In Ireland. James Joyce pushes language and form in increasingly ambitious directions. In America. William Faulkner writes about the American South. Later come writers including John Steinbeck. Whose novels bring the lives of ordinary and struggling Americans. Into some of the century's most enduring fiction. And then there is Hemingway's famous prose style. Shorter sentences, Direct language, Things left unsaid. The idea that much of the meaning can remain beneath the surface. Other writers read Hemingway and are influenced by him. Some become so influenced. That you can almost hear Hemingway. Wondering where his sentences have gone. He had them a moment ago. Now everybody has one. But the 20th century love affair with books isn't only among literary writers in Paris. This is the period when books become truly mass entertainment. Mystery fiction flourishes. Agatha Christie produces Hercule Poirot. And Miss Marple. And becomes one of the best-selling novelists in history. And Christie discovers something readers absolutely love. Put several people in a confined location and murder one of them. A country house is ideal. A train will do. An island is excellent. Anywhere, Really, Provided leaving becomes inconvenient. The reader then spends the next few hours distrusting everyone. This can affect you. You close an Agatha Christie novel. And briefly regard the person making tea. With unnecessary suspicion. Why are they making tea now? Interesting. Children's publishing also expands enormously during the century. Characters and stories. Pass from one generation to another. Books become attached to childhood itself. A parent reads a book. Years later, They give it to their child. The child loves it. This is one of the gentler ways books travel through time. Although occasionally the parent says, You'll love this. I loved this when I was your age. Which is almost the worst possible marketing strategy for a 12-year-old. Meanwhile. . . Publishers are finding ways to make books even more accessible. And in Britain. One particular moment becomes famous. In 1935, Publisher Alan Lane launches Penguin Books, Producing good quality books in inexpensive paperback editions. That can be sold widely. Including through places such as railway stations. The idea is beautifully simple. Books should be affordable and easy to carry. The paperback becomes enormously important during the 20th century. And suddenly. A book can go almost anywhere. Into a handbag. Into a coat pocket, Onto a train, Onto a peach. Into a bath. Although this remains an environment in which the book has serious concerns. The paperback changes our physical relationship with reading. A valuable old book demands care. A paperback. Understands that things happen. Its spine get cracked. A corner folds over. Sand enters it during a holiday in 1987 and remains there permanently. Someone writes a telephone number on the inside cover. The book ages with you. And perhaps this is part of why people become so attached to particular copies. There are books which are objectively in terrible condition, And which their owners would absolutely refuse to replace. The cover is falling off. Page 183 is loose. There is an unexplained stain near the end. You could buy a new copy for £8. Absolutely not. This one is mine. Libraries too become central to everyday reading. The modern public library movement expands dramatically from the 19th century onward. Giving millions of people access to books they do not have to buy. And libraries establish. One of civilization's most optimistic systems. Take this home. Bring it back. We trust you. Mostly. There is a date stamped inside. Books pass through hundreds of hands. Someone checks out a detective novel in 1954. Someone else takes it home in 1967. Another reader finds it in 1982. None of these people ever meet. They share a book. Occasionally. One of them also leaves a biscuit crumb around page 94. This is less poetic. But considerably more likely. Bookshops become destinations in their own right. You can browse. That's important. Browsing is shopping without admitting you intend to shop. You pick up a book. Read the first page. Push it back. Pick up another. Read to the back. Carry it around for a while. At some point the book has crossed an invisible boundary. Pushing it back would now feel cruel. You buy it. Publishers understand this relationship very well. Covers become increasingly important. Tyto's measure. Reviews appear on jackets. A famous writer tells you another writer's book is unmissable. You have never previously heard of either person. Still. Unmissable. Into the basket. And books are now being produced in every imaginable category. Romance. Crime. Science Fiction. Fantasy. Westerns, Thrillers. Biography, History, Cookery, Gardening, Travel. Self help. The self-help shelf is particularly interesting. Because it allows you to purchase the person you intend to become. You buy a book about simplifying your life. You place it beside the other seven books about simplifying your life. The shelf is becoming crowded. Something will have to be done. Perhaps there is a book. And throughout the 20th century. New technologies repeatedly arrive. Which appear capable of stealing the book's audience. Radio. Cinema. Television. Later video games. Survives all of them. This is partly because. . . Reading offers something slightly different. A film shows you Gatsby's mansion. A novel makes you build it yourself. The author provides some instructions. Your mind handles construction. No two readers necessarily imagine exactly the same room, Face, Or street. And when a beloved novel is eventually made into a film. Millions of readers can participate. In one of literature's great traditions. That's not how I pictured him. The actor has had no chance. He may be an Academy Award winner. Is still the wrong height. By the end of the 20th century, Books are everywhere. Homes have shelves full of them. Airports sell them. Supermarkets sell them. Libraries lend them. Schools assign them. People form book clubs around them. Providing a regular opportunity to gather together. Discuss the book for approximately 11 minutes. And then move on to everybody's lives. And readers have developed deep relationships with particular authors and stories. A book can remind somebody of childhood. A journey. A relationship. A particular house. A difficult year. People remember where they were when they first read something. They return to books decades later and discover that the book appears to have changed. It hasn't. Annoyingly, That's you. The words have been sitting there behaving themselves. And by the end of the century. Humanity's relationship with books seems secure. We have spent thousands of years improving them. They're cheap. Portable. Beautifully printed. Available almost everywhere. We have libraries containing millions of them. Everything is going extremely well. During the 1990s. Increasing numbers of ordinary people. Acquire something called the internet. End. Almost immediately. Somebody begins wondering. Whether books are finished. Part 7 in which the book is declared dead. And fails to cooperate. By the end of the 20th century. Books of survived clay tablets. Scrolls. Monasteries. Printing presses. Industrialization. Radio. Cinema. And television. Then. The intern has arrived. And fairly quickly. People begin wondering whether anyone will ever read a book again. This becomes something of a tradition. A new technology appears. Someone looks at the book. Well, That's finished. The book remains where it is. The internet does, However, Transform the way books are bought and discovered. In 1995. Amazon begins selling books online. This makes books look particularly suitable for early internet shopping. There are enormous numbers of titles. They're easy to describe. And the customer generally knows what a book is. The bookshop now exists inside the computer. This removes one important restraint on book buying. Closing time. That's two in the morning. You can suddenly decide that what your life has been missing. Is a 600-page history of the Ottoman Empire. Nobody is there to question this. Two days later, It arrives. You have absolutely no memory of the confidence with which you ordered it. Then comes the e-book. Electronic reading has been experimented with for decades. But dedicated e-readers become increasingly popular in the 2000s. Amazon launches the Kindle in 2007. And suddenly one small device. Can hold hundreds or thousands of books. This would have seemed miraculous to the medieval monks. Could hand him a kindle and explain that it contains an entire library. He would be astonished. Then you would explain there's many people who own one. Still spend 20 minutes scrolling through it, Saying, I don't know what I feel like reading. The technology has solved storage. It has done nothing about us. E-books also introduce a peculiar new problem. Nobody can see what you're reading. For centuries. A book in public has quietly announced something about its owner. War and peace. Interesting. A biography of Napoleon. Interesting. How to stop caring what other people think. Interesting. With an e-reader. Or mystery. The person opposite you on the train could be reading Dostoyevsky. They could be reading a celebrity autobiography. You will never know. Audiobooks also expand dramatically in the digital age. Although recorded books have a much longer history. Now a person can experience a book while driving. Cooking, Exercising. Walking. Or lying in bed with their eyes closed. The book has finally escaped the requirement. That you look at it. This is quite an achievement for something that spent several thousand years developing better pages. And then books meet social media. Readers gather on YouTube, Instagram, Goodreads, And later TikTok. Book talk becomes particularly influential. Helping older titles suddenly become bestsellers again. And turning recommendations into enormous publishing events. Books are photographed. Reviewed. Right? Unboxed Displayed people show other people what they have bought. Sometimes the pile is substantial. This is my reading for August. No, It isn't. That is 43 books. August has been consulted and will not be participating. And once again something very old is happening underneath something very new. People are recommending stories to one another. The technology around the conversation. Has changed completely. The conversation itself would be familiar. Almost anywhere in this history. I loved this. You should read it. Can I borrow it? Yes. And there we are again. Be careful. Susan still has the last one. Online reviews have also given every reader the opportunity to become a critic. A book may have taken somebody eight years to write. The author researched it. Rewrote it. Edited it. Worried about us. Finally published it. Three days later. Two stars. Didn't like the main character. There is no appeal. Nani and his complaint about Ea Natsir's copper would understand this world immediately. We've merely made the clay considerably faster. And despite decades of predictions about the death of Prince physical books remain very much alive. People continue buying them alongside e-books and audiobooks. Perhaps that shouldn't surprise us. A physical book. Is remarkably good technology. It needs no battery. No password. No software update. You can drop it, And it generally continues being a book. Leave it untouched for 20 years. Come back? Open it. And it doesn't ask you to accept new terms and conditions. It has been waiting. And so. . . We arrive back at those shelves. The shelves containing books we've read. Books we love. Books we intend to read. Books we bought because Somebody recommended them. Books we bought because the cover was beautiful. And one enormous book we have moved between three different homes, While maintaining that we are definitely going to get to it. Thousands of years ago. Someone pressed marks into wet clay to record a quantity of barley. Today, We can carry entire libraries in our pockets. We can download a novel in seconds. We can listen to one while walking. We can order almost any book without leaving bed. Humanity has spent more than 5, 000 years making books easier to obtain. And finally. . . After all that effort. We have created. The perfect modern problem. There are too many books. And we still haven't read the ones. Beside the bed.