I love books and always have. I would have a hard time imagining a world without books. I know that there are societies that still exist that don’t have books and they seem to get along just fine. I am not an anthropologist and don’t know all of the social ramifications that come about once a society develops the capacity to write things down into book form and to pass that knowledge along to future generations. Certainly oral story telling and passing down knowledge via oral means has served humanity well and still serves many cultures well , but books seem to be a powerful means of insuring that knowledge is preserved . I sit looking at a volume of Gay’s Fables published in 1793. The book is full of stories predate the publication of the book by hundreds of years. We owe a great debt to John Gay for his collecting these stories and preserving them in a format that over 200 years later I can still access. I have sitting in another room floppy disks that I used with computers just a few short years ago. I am certain you can still obtain external floppy disk drives, but the information on the disks might no longer be compatible with my Windows 7 operating system. I don’t have to worry about Gay’s book of fables as long as my eyes can see and even then someone could read the book to me. This is wonderful ! Another volume that jumps out at me is ” Enchanted Tales of the Atlantic”. This book was published in 1898 and contains stories about such places as Atlantis and Antilla and Hy – Brasil. In it you can read tales about Merlin and Sir Lancelot as well as the story of the voyage of St. Brandan. I can sit for hours and occupy my time reading these stories. The only operating system I need is the one that I have always had – an inquisitive mind. I have a great admiration for those people who made books possible – from the ancients who started recording events by drawing on cave walls to the people who hand wrote manuscripts to the people who developed type and to those who developed moveable type. We all have a debt to those people who handed down stories via oral traditions and to those who eventually wrote down those stories.
