I’ve always loved books and reading, ever since I can remember. If our parents wanted some hours of peace, they would drop my brother and myself off at the local library for a few hours. Other animals clearly have elements of language, social organization and perhaps even what we might call culture. But as far as we know, we’re the only animal that writes, and so has found a way of passing on accumulated learning and experience through time and space in the form of books.
The Martin Bodmer Foundation in Geneva, where I lived for many years, is a shrine to the book. An absolute must for book-lovers, if you’re ever near Geneva. You can see there some of the oldest writing, on clay tablets, from Mesopotamia – you’d need a truck to shift a single copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace! So after writing, the next great breakthrough is the invention of paper, as a medium for writing. Well-made paper can last a thousand years. We know it can, because it has. And then the invention of printing, this simple yet amazing way of mass-producing and multiplying so far beyond the labours of the medieval monk-copyists.
For many years, I worked as a book publisher, a mid-wife for books. Now, in retirement, as a lover of books, I cut them up (with a little word of apology!) to give them a new digital life on the Web, on For A New World. I cut them into single pages and run them through my simple scanned, check that all the pages are scanned right, in the right order, to an acceptable quality, and up they go in .pdf files that can then be word-searched.
I've just put up a little booklet by Michael Henderson, who was a mentor and friend: The Power of the Printed Word. He writes about his motivations for writing: “I would like to reduce polarization at home. I would like to work for a greater tolerance and understanding of those who differ from us. I would like in my writing to reduce the us and them syndrome and the element of blame. Arab and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, black and white, rich and poor, so many divisions have to be bridged, so many wrongs have to be righted. And there are not enough who recognize that when I point my finger at my neighbour there are three more pointing back at me.” A credo more urgently needed today than when it was written!
It was another old friend, John Munro, who published that booklet. I've just put up his own moving autobiographical story, Calm before Coffee: a child's voyage from rejection to resolution. But in this case the author kindly pointed me to his website where I was able to download a digital copy and avoid any trauma to a bound volume.
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