About Books

published 1952

I like books.  I always have. There is something magical about them. They can take you places you can only dream about. From them you can gain knowledge you wouldn't have known otherwise. And, of course, there is the pure entertainment value. I'm not sure which I prefer. When I was very small, I remember my mother reading to me at bedtime. My first book that was my very own was The Boy Mechanic. It was a Christmas gift from an aunt and uncle. It seemed to be thick and heavy for a six-year-old. At six I was not a very good reader, but it had a lot of pictures. After all, I had built my first model airplane at five from the book, and it flew. I remember it well, a red and white Piper Cub. The balsa wood was printed in color. I enjoyed this book for many years. I still have it. It taught me how to do things from building small electric motors to taxidermy.

Somewhere in my youth I discovered the Hardy Boys Mysteries. Great entertainment  and I continue to read detective novels today. While in elementary school my parents bought a set of encyclopedias from a traveling salesman. I read each volume.  It took some time but by then I had become a fast reader. Yes, I was one of those kids who took a flashlight under the covers at night to read. I continue to love books.

There is a lot of stuff to learn from books.  A friend of mine was once repairing his MGBGT and told me that "If someone's done something they've probably written a book about it.  You just need to find that book!"  While I was in the Navy I read a lot while at sea.  In the ET gang we had a book locker filled with dog-eared paperbacks. (I don't consider paperbacks real books.) To check out a book you had to deposit two new books. And yes I do have a collection of Library Cards. Do book-of-the-month clubs still exist? My sister once was a member.

Where did books come from?  I'm sure the cavemen did not have them. But first: what is a book?

A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf, and each side of a leaf is called a page. A set of text-filled or illustrated pages produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book, or e-book. 

That is the Wikipedia definition. It did not happen overnight.  The book evolved.  First there were cave drawings.  Probably the need to make these drawings portable led to reproducing them on something smaller than a cave wall. As written languages developed so did the method for preserving what was written. Some of these first methods could have been as simple as notches cut on a stick in a certain order to represent words. Clay tablets were preceded by wooden tablets, palm leaves, and silk cloth as a substrate for writing. After clay tablets came the papyrus scrolls and vellum scrolls. Papyrus was made famous by the Egyptians for their hieroglyphics or pictograph writing. The book could have evolved several ways.  According to some it may have been the offspring of the Roman tablet.  The Romans used a tablet roughly 8 x 10 inches with a

Wikipedia image

wax coating. With a pointed stylus  it could be written on. The writing could be removed  by smoothing the wax. Some speculate that several of these tablets bound on one edge became the first book.   The concertina or accordion theory also exists. A scroll could be folded concertina style forming a book.  If the pages were cut apart and one edge bound  a reasonable facsimile of the modern book would be produced. As the change from scroll to codex was made the material changed for papyrus to vellum. By the 4th century scrolls were no longer produced. A codex is bound pages of a handwritten manuscript.  Vellum is calf or sheep skin. There are a number of advantages of the book versus the scroll. A book fits on a  bookshelf better. A book offers random access to its content and is more durable. It lies flat for easier reading. Books have followed roughly the same form for over 1500 years. They have:

• separated words  
• punctuation
• numbered pages
• tables of contents
• indexes
• capitalization

Paper replaced vellum.  When papermaking was mechanised in Spain in the 11th century, book production expanded rapidly. We saw some of the water-powered papermaking machinery in a museum in Italy. Another rapid expansion in book production occurred with the invention of movable type by Gutenberg. The Protestant Reformation fueled the demand for printed Bibles and other printed books. I have been fortunate enough to have seen one of the eleven surviving Gutenberg Bibles at the Huntington Museum in California.

The Boy Mechanic, a repurposed book of collages, a sketchbook, and light reading

Yes, I've had a lifelong love affair with books and see no reason to change.  However, I wish someone would develop an e-book reader with the smell of ink and paper.