Literate Alexandrians, whose city boasted a library with perhaps half a million works, pored over papyrus scrolls. An Egyptian invention, papyrus was one of the city’s key exports.
Affluent Muslims in Córdoba cherished hand-lettered books, whose parchment or paper leaves were bound in painstakingly decorated leather. Besides the Koran and Hadith (sacred texts), a scholar’s library likely included poetry and scientific treatises.
Worldly and wired, a modern New Yorker can access the Information Age by computer, telephone, television, or radio. Yet mass-produced books, magazines, and newspapers—and superstores to sell them—testify to an undying thirst for the intimacy of words on paper.