History and Future of the Book

Manmeet Sidhu

A group of girls busy reading books while some of them are relaxing after reading.

Reading has a vast history. In the manuscript era, scribes copied manuscripts. So there were limited copies and not everybody knew how to read. Also, the reading materials were prized and difficult to afford for most of the population. In those times, a person used to read aloud the text to other people, and they remembered what they listened. Later, in the era of printing press, reading became popular as people had access to more copies of the text. Moreover, literacy started growing slowly. A time came when people used to read all the time and carried their novels or books everywhere. In other words, people became addicted to reading. This whole situation led to an increase in the number of libraries and bookshops. (Bon) Continue reading →

Cori Thorstad

Image by Eli Francis from Pixabay

In the life of an English major the question “what is your favourite book?” comes up often. This question can be quite difficult to answer and inevitably leads to thinking about why, as readers, we become attached to books and our own personal copies of them. The attachment to a specific copy of a book, for me, is determined a variety of different ways. I have those that I loved when I was young and have not read in years, but the attachment remains. I do not see myself returning to these books and yet I also cannot imagine getting rid of them because I maintain an emotional attachment to the stories and the copies of them that I read so many times as a kid. There is a part of those books and the person that I was when I read them, as well as what I took from them, that holds a nostalgic sense of comfort. The attachment goes beyond the feelings I have towards the text itself to how I feel about my own personal copy of a book.

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