“Imagine a pile of books as high as the tallest building in the world, and let the pile represent the many centuries that man as a thinking and speaking creature has lived upon this earth. Only the top volume, an inch or two thick, will represent the printed book as we know it since the invention of the printing press. The three or four volumes below the top will represent all the handwritten books on parchment and leather. Below them the next half dozen volumes will be of stone and clay and wood. Downwards a few feet will be books with crude signs and marks and pictures which no living man could read. And all the rest of the column, clear to the ground is blank! Either because those "books” were never written on, or because the writings have long since been obliterated.“
“The Story of the Worlds Literature,” John Macy 1925
