In addition to this great variety of materials and uses that define books over some 5,000 years and in every part of the globe, hugely different technologies were used to enable books to transmit meaning, ranging from inscribing, impressing and imprinting to engraving, painting, photography, and an astonishing variety of ancient and modern printing techniques. In considering the function and purpose of books, is the nature or absence of “publication” determinate? And in early South America and early Africa in particular, our understanding of book forms has to combat an historical condescension that has marginalized the intellectual, political and technological achievements of successive communities. We can reflect anew upon cuneiform tablets and ancient Assyrian libraries of books made of clay tablets, just as we do about books made not simply from paper or parchment but from bone or shell or bamboo or papyrus or leaves or micro-processors and LCD screens.īook marterial has ranged from tortoise shells and deer bones to lengthy scrolls in the ancient world to concertina codices in Central America, bamboo and silk books in east Asia and palm leaf manuscripts in south Asia and elsewhere. The appearance of portable computers, smartphones, and scrollable texts challenges assumptions about the make-up, effect, and purpose of books. Unopened books remain sardined on the shelves of great and historic mansions and institutions and even age neglected in a dusty corner of our own homes. But a reader might never be found for some books-and not just those unsold copies currently sent in their millions to be pulped. We instinctively think that it will be printed, but that might not be so intrinsic to a book when we reflect upon its long and pre-printed history-or of the many different material forms of the book in different parts of the world, and their very different intended uses, whether instructional, devotional, as the vehicles of knowledge or entertainment, or sometimes simply as ritualistic.Īll books can be read and most will be-in some fashion by different people with different skills, interests, and motivations-and under very different conditions. It can be read, but does it need to have a cover and a spine-and does it need to have what we think of as “pages”? A book has characters, letters and words and sometimes images. Although we think we know what we mean by a “book,” new digital texts and reading devices are making us reconsider.
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