It’s no surprise about the uses books have managed to achieve through the centuries of time. Some have said books are just what enlightened people have, as only they are be able to understand the Latin or Hebrew from within the pages.
Origin
The very first methods involved splattering stuff against cave walls, depicting amatuerly made objects and animals running or charging at a bunch of nak ed people with pointy sticks. Of course the method of using your own feces wasn’t very worthwhile, so more sophisticated methods had to be developed, like chiseling into the rock or using strange paints of unknown origins.
Apparently the rock method proved to be picked up by most our homo-sapien grandfathers who transitioned into making fancy symbols which would describe and unravel the secrets of the universe as it is.
There were attempts of making it easier and less time-consuming by exterminating animals for their hides, or using wax tablets to take notes for what groceries were needed to be bought after a barbarian invasion. It wasn’t widely used by the population back then, since it lacked much use to the farmers who only cared if God were to stop sending them sacks of locusts.
Development
Those who capitalized on books and their development were bankers and the Holy Church. They saw the written word as a ledger of those who owed money, or a way to put the word of God upon the page, which then would be utilized for the mass literacy to why the farmers were being punished by the annoying locusts.
The problem the medieval industry of books had was the laborious and inefficient rate it took to put the bulky beasts full of letters, meaning and proper quality. Some scribes would devote their entire lives just copying text from another manuscript, and it was impossible to fix mistakes like now in your Word documents. You can already see the terror in Bill who had miswrote ‘Thou shall to murder.’
The Church noted this as the worst PR move the world had ever seen, but at the same time it had increased the interest in their competitors. The market found equalization, pushing the need for improvement upon manufacturing, as well as fact-checking, every book before it’d be sent to the hungry market.
Then, out of the dirtiest gutter, came Gutenberg, the inventor of the first European printing press. He had the idea that taking loans to get his books printed would be a great move, especially at times when patents were a word only drunks would accidently babble.
Obviously the best choice was to work on Bibles, as they were huge and the profit therefor would be enormous. It wasn’t easy for Gutenberg to prove how his system of mechanical levers, strange surfaces and mechanisms could easily produce the word of God in quantities some lifetimes could only create.
So Gutenberg told the Church bossman, “Thou swear make 150 Bibles by the end of the year.” But how could one believe such an insane promise? Gutenberg noticed the mistrust in the letter’s eyes, and decided to use the loophole of all loopholes. “Thou swear to God I’ll make 200 Bibles by the end of the year.”
He was instantly given confirmation, because he was obviously a very determined guy. No one could challenge such a promise, as a promise to God would mean that the person is 100% trustworthy and undeniable sane. Some more money was borrowed and the Bibles rolled fresh like crusty bread under midnight’s frost.
But even with the success he brought upon his small entrepreneurship, Mr Fust, the guy from whom money was borrowed, saw a way to put his claim and sued the father of primitive printers, winning and taking for himself half the Bibles, to which apparently God punished Gutenberg for his inability to stick to his abysmal promise.
Today
Fast forward to today, where paper stacks in towers are fed into a printer, which loves to change cartridges before they are even half empty. We can also observe forests disappearing from around us from the insane amount of supply books have turned to.
It no longer is a profitable business, due to the ease of which millions of copies can be made around the world for pennies, especially with the rise of the evil e-book and its lack of physical existence.
Characteristics
Nevertheless, the characteristics of a book? Picturing in your head a big, fat and juicy book, the core part are its content pages which is just a brick of paper, leather or cloth which is aligned perfectly on top of one another.
An appropriate spine is chosen for the amount of pages present, as the spine goes in the middle to support all the bulk of the core material. A bookbinding gauze wraps around the back of the pages with hard glue as to keep them together from running freely to the floor in hundreds of escapees.
Then the spine, with the rest of the front and back cover, are glued to this gauze, and after trimming any poking bits, you have a book ready to be devoured by illiterate Christians who’d love to get their hands on the white-fresh pages of tiny letters and creative stories.
Conclusion
But Bill still feels uncomfortable at the rain of locusts he has to persevere through every now and then. His suspicions reside that his neighbor, John, is the root of all of this, and it looks like the only way to fix this is to get matters into his own hands.
