passing it along to a friend.

encouraging news. Our little group here is certainly doing our part in keeping the printed book in vogue. Between the library and used-book stores I always have a printed book on the go. Plus I listen to an audio book most every day as I cook and clean. I have not, as yet, read a book on an electronic device. Someday, maybe.

While I have no problem with those who like ebooks, I get mightily irritated with those who claim traditional books are dead. Several points here. One is that electronic formats have a limited life span. Far more limited than that of printed books. And If I buy a traditional book, I can pass it on to someone else. I can't do that with an ebook. Not to mention the possibility of an EMP. Look it up, those of you who don't know what it is.

I recently (at the WorldCon in Kansas City) sat in on a session about old books. The amazing and wonderful Ada Palmer passed around actual samples of papyrus and real copies of very old books for us to look at and touch. She assured us that what she was passing around weren't valuable, and could readily survive our handling. Nonetheless, it was completely fascinating.

Here's a factoid or two: papyrus lasts a few hundred years. Vellum (sheepskin) lasts a whole lot longer, as in we still are not at the end of the lifespan of vellum. There is not a single original manuscript of anything at all from Greek and Roman times. Every single thing we have is a copy.

Please, please read The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. It's nominally about the discovery of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius in 1417, but is about a lot of other things as well. The lost knowledge of the ancients. How knowledge is preserved or lost. The importance of monasteries in the preservation of ancient knowledge. How very little of ancient writings have come down to us.

I listened to this on a CD on a recent long drive, and I know I need to buy this book, and that I also need to find a copy of De Rerum Natura that I want to keep on my bookshelf.

Here's another delightful result of this: I was helping my son relocate as he'd been accepted into grad school in physics (trust me, he's incredibly smart) and I was telling him about The Swerve, because I'd just listened to it. As it happens, he had a copy of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) apparently from some long ago class. Because of what I'd learned from the book, I could open his copy at random, and read to him the most amazing passages. It's as if someone from the late 20th or early 21st century had been tossed back some 2,000 years, and had now decided to write up modern (as in 20th or 21st century) understanding of things like physics, only putting that knowledge into a form that those of that earlier era could understand. Trust me, it's a lot like this.

My library has The Nature of Things available, but only as an ebook. They do, though, have The Swerve which sounds marvelous. I love reading about The Renaissance.