One Thin Tumbl

Very often people oddly put books against the internet. Man’s first communication with man, as far as we know, is obviously through the spoken voice and literature was first an oral thing - poetry sprang from groups of men and women around the fire telling each other stories, telling each other fables and myths and explaining the world in different ways and reporting their hunting incidents. It took a very long time for a technology to arise, making impressions on wax tablets and staining papyrus and so on, and then illuminating manuscripts; and eventually, thanks to Gutenberg of course, movable type and print was disseminated at great speed. But it was a technology. And it seems to me that books are a marvellous and absolutely new way in the human race - I mean they’re only five hundred years old, if that - of telling stories. And we love them. I love them. You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.