If you think about it, the written history of humanity has captured the overwhelming majority of our past.
I mean, how many ways are there to communicate?
You can read something.
Listen to something.
Or, see something.
Photographs and audio recordings have only been around since the early to mid-1800’s.
And the first video recording was not made until the very end of the 1800’s.
But books? Books saved us.
Humans communicating with the written word has been around since 3200 B.C.
Books have been the record the history of humanity.
Thank goodness a few people started writing it all down.
About seven hundred years ago Richard de Bury—an English monk, librarian, book collector, and eventually Bishop of Durham—wrote that “in books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in
oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.”
-Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction