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The deliberate suppression of texts and often their authors by organisations of either a spiritual or a temporal nature further shrouds the subject. Certain primary texts, however, may be isolated which have a qualifying role as literature's first stirrings. Ancient Egyptian literature was not included in early studies of the history of literature because the writings of Ancient Egypt were not translated into European languages until the 19th century when the Rosetta stone was deciphered.

Many texts handed down by oral tradition over several centuries before they were fixed in written form are difficult or impossible to date. The core of the Rigveda may date to the mid 2nd millennium BC. The Pentateuch is traditionally dated to the 15th century, although modern scholarship estimates its oldest part to date to the 10th century BC at the earliest. They also stand in an oral tradition that stretches back to the late Bronze Age. The great Hindu epics were also transmitted orally, likely predating the Maurya period. The Classic of Poetry or Shijing is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, comprising works by anonymous authors dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BC.

The Chu Ci anthology or Songs of Chu is a volume of poems attributed to or considered to be inspired by Qu Yuan 's verse writing. Qu Yuan is the first author of verse in China to have his name associated to his work and is also regarded as one of the most prominent figures of Romanticism in Chinese classical literature. The first great author on military tactics and strategy was Sun Tzu , whose The Art of War remains on the shelves of many modern military officers and its advice has been applied to the corporate world as well.

Philosophy developed far differently in China than in Greece—rather than presenting extended dialogues, the Analects of Confucius and Lao Zi 's Tao Te Ching presented sayings and proverbs more directly and didactically. The Zhuangzi is composed of a large collection of creative anecdotes, allegories, parables, and fables; a masterpiece of both philosophical and literary skill, it has significantly influenced writers and poets for more than years from the Han dynasty to the present.

Among the earliest Chinese works of narrative history, Zuo Zhuan is a gem of classical Chinese prose. This work and the Shiji or Records of the Grand Historian , were regarded as the ultimate models by many generations of prose stylists in ancient China. The books that constitute the Hebrew Bible developed over roughly a millennium. The oldest texts seem to come from the eleventh or tenth centuries BCE, whilst most of the other texts are somewhat later. They are edited works, being collections of various sources intricately and carefully woven together.

The Old Testament was compiled and edited by various men [1] over a period of centuries, with many scholars concluding that the Hebrew canon was solidified by about the 3rd century BC. One stands with awe and reverence before these tremendous remnants of what man once was The taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone of 'greatness' and 'smallness'. Ancient Greek society placed considerable emphasis upon literature. Many authors consider the western literary tradition to have begun with the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey , which remain giants in the literary canon for their skillful and vivid depictions of war and peace, honor and disgrace, love and hatred.

Notable among later Greek poets was Sappho , who defined, in many ways, lyric poetry as a genre. A playwright named Aeschylus changed Western literature forever when he introduced the ideas of dialogue and interacting characters to playwriting. In doing so, he essentially invented "drama": Other refiners of playwriting were Sophocles and Euripides. Sophocles is credited with skillfully developing irony as a literary technique, most famously in his play Oedipus Rex.

Euripedes, conversely, used plays to challenge societal norms and mores—a hallmark of much of Western literature for the next 2, years and beyond—and his works such as Medea , The Bacchae and The Trojan Women are still notable for their ability to challenge our perceptions of propriety, gender, and war. Aristophanes , a comic playwright, defines and shapes the idea of comedy almost as Aeschylus had shaped tragedy as an art form—Aristophanes' most famous plays include the Lysistrata and The Frogs.

Philosophy entered literature in the dialogues of Plato , who converted the give and take of Socratic questioning into written form. Aristotle , Plato's student, wrote dozens of works on many scientific disciplines, but his greatest contribution to literature was likely his Poetics , which lays out his understanding of drama, and thereby establishes the first criteria for literary criticism.

The New Testament is an unusual collection of texts-- John 's Book of Revelation , though not the first of its kind, essentially defines apocalypse as a literary genre. In many respects, the writers of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire chose to avoid innovation in favor of imitating the great Greek authors. Virgil 's Aeneid , in many ways, emulated Homer's Iliad ; Plautus , a comic playwright, followed in the footsteps of Aristophanes; Tacitus ' Annals and Germania follow essentially the same historical approaches that Thucydides devised the Christian historian Eusebius does also, although far more influenced by his religion than either Tacitus or Thucydides had been by Greek and Roman polytheism ; Ovid and his Metamorphoses explore the same Greek myths again in new ways.

It can be argued, and has been, that the Roman authors, far from being mindless copycats , improved on the genres already established by their Greek predecessors. For example, Ovid's Metamorphoses creates a form which is a clear predecessor of the stream of consciousness genre. What is undeniable is that the Romans, in comparison with the Greeks, innovate relatively few literary styles of their own. Satire is one of the few Roman additions to literature— Horace was the first to use satire extensively as a tool for argument, and Juvenal made it into a weapon.

Augustine of Hippo and his The City of God do for religious literature essentially what Plato had done for philosophy, but Augustine's approach was far less conversational and more didactive. His Confessions is perhaps the first true autobiography , and it gave rise to the genre of confessional literature which is now more popular than ever.


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Knowledge traditions in India handed down philosophical gleanings and theological concepts through the two traditions of Shruti and Smriti , meaning that which is learnt and that which is experienced - this included the Vedas. It is generally believed that the Puranas are the earliest philosophical writings in Indian history, although linguistic works on Sanskrit existed earlier than BC. Puranic works such as the Indian epics: Ramayana and Mahabharata , have influenced countless other works, including Balinese Kecak and other performances such as shadow puppetry wayang , and many European works.

Pali literature has an important position in the rise of Buddhism. After the fall of Rome in roughly , many of the literary approaches and styles invented by the Greeks and Romans fell out of favor in Europe. In the millennium or so that intervened between Rome's fall and the Florentine Renaissance , medieval literature focused more and more on faith and faith-related matters, in part because the works written by the Greeks had not been preserved in Europe, and therefore there were few models of classical literature to learn from and move beyond.

What little there was became changed and distorted, with new forms beginning to develop from the distortions. Some of these distorted beginnings of new styles can be seen in the literature generally described as Matter of Rome , Matter of France and Matter of Britain. Following Rome's fall, Islam 's spread across Asia and Africa brought with it a desire to preserve and build upon the work of the Greeks, especially in literature. Although much had been lost to the ravages of time and to catastrophe, as in the burning of the Library of Alexandria , many Greek works remained extant: In Europe Hagiographies , or "lives of the saints ", are frequent among early medieval texts.

The writings of Bede — Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum —and others continue the faith-based historical tradition begun by Eusebius in the early 4th century. Playwriting essentially ceased, except for the mystery plays and the passion plays that focused heavily on conveying Christian belief to the common people. Around AD the Prudenti Psychomachia began the tradition of allegorical tales.


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  8. Poetry flourished, however, in the hands of the troubadours , whose courtly romances and chanson de geste amused and entertained the upper classes who were their patrons. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote works which he claimed were histories of Britain. These were highly fanciful and included stories of Merlin the magician and King Arthur.

    Epic poetry continued to develop with the addition of the mythologies of Northern Europe: Beowulf and the Norse sagas have much in common with Homer and Virgil's approaches to war and honor, while poems such as Dante 's Divine Comedy and Geoffrey Chaucer 's The Canterbury Tales take much different stylistic directions.

    The crusades would affect everything in Europe and the Middle East for many years to come and literature would, along with everything else, be transformed by the wars between these two cultures. For instance the image of the knight would take on a different significance. Also the Islamic emphasis on scientific investigation and the preservation of the Greek philosophical writings would eventually affect European literature.

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    Between Augustine and The Bible , religious authors had numerous aspects of Christianity that needed further explication and interpretation. Thomas Aquinas , more than any other single person, was able to turn theology into a kind of science, in part because he was heavily influenced by Aristotle, whose works were returning to Europe in the 13th century. The epic took form in the 10th century and reached its final form by the 14th century; the number and type of tales have varied from one manuscript to another. This epic has been influential in the West since it was translated in the 18th century, first by Antoine Galland.

    The popularity of the work may in part be due to greater popular knowledge of history and geography since it was written. This meant that the plausibility of great marvels had to be set at a greater distance of time "long ago" and place "far away". This is a process that continues, and finally culminates in fantasy fiction having little connection, if any, to actual times and places. A number of elements from Arabian mythology and Persian mythology are now common in modern fantasy , such as genies , bahamuts , magic carpets , magic lamps, etc.

    Frank Baum proposed writing a modern fairy tale that banished stereotypical elements he felt the genie, dwarf and fairy were stereotypes to avoid. One example is "The Adventures of Bulukiya", where the protagonist Bulukiya's quest for the herb of immortality leads him to explore the seas, journey to the Garden of Eden and to Jahannam , and travel across the cosmos to different worlds much larger than his own world, anticipating elements of galactic science fiction; [9] along the way, he encounters societies of jinns , [10] mermaids , talking serpents , talking trees , and other forms of life.

    Other Arabian Nights tales deal with lost ancient technologies, advanced ancient civilizations that went astray, and catastrophes which overwhelmed them. Dante Alighieri 's Divine Comedy , considered the greatest epic of Italian literature , derived many features of and episodes about the hereafter directly or indirectly from Arabic works on Islamic eschatology: These works are said to have been inspired by several Moorish delegations from Morocco to Elizabethan England at the beginning of the 17th century. Ibn Tufail Abubacer and Ibn al-Nafis — were pioneers of the philosophical novel.

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    Both of these narratives had protagonists Hayy in Philosophus Autodidactus and Kamil in Theologus Autodidactus who were autodidactic feral children living in seclusion on a desert island , both being the earliest examples of a desert island story. However, while Hayy lives alone with animals on the desert island for the rest of the story in Philosophus Autodidactus , the story of Kamil extends beyond the desert island setting in Theologus Autodidactus , developing into the earliest known coming of age plot and eventually becoming the first example of a science fiction novel.

    Theologus Autodidactus deals with various science fiction elements such as spontaneous generation , futurology , the end of the world and doomsday , resurrection , and the afterlife. Rather than giving supernatural or mythological explanations for these events, Ibn al-Nafis attempted to explain these plot elements using the scientific knowledge of biology , astronomy , cosmology and geology known in his time.

    His main purpose behind this science fiction work was to explain Islamic religious teachings in terms of science and philosophy through the use of fiction. These translations later inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe , a candidate for the title of " first novel in English ". Among other innovations in Arabic literature was Ibn Khaldun 's perspective on chronicling past events—by fully rejecting supernatural explanations, Khaldun essentially invented the scientific or sociological approach to history.

    Ferdowsi 's Shahnameh , the national epic of Iran , is a mythical and heroic retelling of Persian history. It is the longest epic poem ever written. From Persian culture the book which would, eventually, become the most famous in the west is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Amir Arsalan was also a popular mythical Persian story, which has influenced some modern works of fantasy fiction, such as The Heroic Legend of Arslan.

    Examples of early Persian proto- science fiction include Al-Farabi 's Opinions of the residents of a splendid city about a utopian society, Al-Qazwini 's futuristic tale of Awaj bin Anfaq about a man who travelled to Earth from a distant planet, and elements such as the flying carpet. The two primary streams of Ottoman written literature are poetry and prose. Of the two, divan poetry was by far the dominant stream. Moreover, it should be noted that, until the 19th century, Ottoman prose did not contain any examples of fiction ; that is, there were no counterparts to, for instance, the European romance , short story , or novel though analogous genres did, to some extent, exist in both the Turkish folk tradition and in divan poetry.

    Until the 19th century, Ottoman prose never managed to develop to the extent that contemporary divan poetry did. Medieval Jewish fiction often drew on ancient Jewish legends , and was written in a variety of languages including Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. Liturgical Jewish poetry in Hebrew flourished in Palestine in the seventh and eighth centuries with the writings of Yose ben Yose , Yanai , and Eleazar Kalir [31] Later Jewish poets in Spain, Provencal, and Italy wrote both religious and secular poems in Hebrew; particularly prominent poets were the Spanish Jewish poets Solomon ibn Gabirol and Yehuda Halevi.

    In addition to poetry and fiction, medieval Jewish literature also includes philosophical literature , mystical Kabbalistic literature , ethical musar literature , legal halakhic literature, and commentaries on the Bible. Early Medieval Gupta period literature in India sees the flowering of Sanskrit drama , classical Sanskrit poetry and the compilation of the Puranas.

    Sanskrit declines in the early 2nd millennium, late works such as the Kathasaritsagara dating to the 11th century, to the benefit of literature composed in Middle Indic vernaculars such as Old Bengali , Old Hindi. Lyric poetry advanced far more in China than in Europe prior to , as multiple new forms developed in the Han , Tang , and Song dynasties: Printing began in Tang Dynasty China.

    A copy of the Diamond Sutra , a key Buddhist text, found sealed in a cave in China in the early 20th century, is the oldest known dated printed book, with a printed date of The method used was block printing. The scientist, statesman, and general Shen Kuo — AD was the author of the Dream Pool Essays , a large book of scientific literature that included the oldest description of the magnetized compass.

    During the Song Dynasty, there was also the enormous historical work of the Zizhi Tongjian , compiled into volumes of 3 million written Chinese characters by the year AD. Classical Japanese literature generally refers to literature produced during the Heian Period , what some would consider a golden era of art and literature. The Tale of Genji early 11th century by Murasaki Shikibu is considered the pre-eminent masterpiece of Heian fiction and an early example of a work of fiction in the form of a novel.

    It is sometimes called the world's first novel, the first modern novel, the first romance novel , or the first novel to still be considered a classic. In the middle of last century there were still many trade binders — stand-alone binding companies which did no printing, specializing in binding alone. At that time, because of the dominance of letterpress printing, typesetting and printing took place in one location, and binding in a different factory. When type was all metal, a typical book's worth of type would be bulky, fragile and heavy.

    The less it was moved in this condition the better: Printed sheets on the other hand could easily be moved. Now, because of increasing computerization of preparing a book for the printer, the typesetting part of the job has flowed upstream, where it is done either by separately contracting companies working for the publisher, by the publishers themselves, or even by the authors. Mergers in the book manufacturing industry mean that it is now unusual to find a bindery which is not also involved in book printing and vice versa. If the book is a hardback its path through the bindery will involve more points of activity than if it is a paperback.

    Unsewn binding, is now increasingly common. The signatures of a book can also be held together by "Smyth sewing" using needles, "McCain sewing", using drilled holes often used in schoolbook binding, or "notch binding", where gashes about an inch long are made at intervals through the fold in the spine of each signature. The rest of the binding process is similar in all instances.

    Sewn and notch bound books can be bound as either hardbacks or paperbacks. In the most basic case-making, two pieces of cardboard are placed onto a glued piece of cloth with a space between them into which is glued a thinner board cut to the width of the spine of the book.

    After case-making the stack of cases will go to the foil stamping area for adding decorations and type. Recent developments in book manufacturing include the development of digital printing. Book pages are printed, in much the same way as an office copier works, using toner rather than ink. Each book is printed in one pass, not as separate signatures. Digital printing has permitted the manufacture of much smaller quantities than offset, in part because of the absence of make readies and of spoilage. One might think of a web press as printing quantities over , quantities from to being printed on sheet-fed presses, and digital presses doing quantities below These numbers are of course only approximate and will vary from supplier to supplier, and from book to book depending on its characteristics.

    Digital printing has opened up the possibility of print-on-demand, where no books are printed until after an order is received from a customer. In the s, due to the rise in availability of affordable handheld computing devices, the opportunity to share texts through electronic means became an appealing option for media publishers. The term e-book is a contraction of "electronic book"; it refers to a book-length publication in digital form. E-book readers attempt to mimic the experience of reading a print book by using this technology, since the displays on e-book readers are much less reflective.

    Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole. In the words of Jan Tschichold, book design "though largely forgotten today, methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books these rules have to be brought back to life and applied. Many different creators can contribute to book design, including graphic designers , artists and editors.

    The size of a modern book is based on the printing area of a common flatbed press. The pages of type were arranged and clamped in a frame, so that when printed on a sheet of paper the full size of the press, the pages would be right side up and in order when the sheet was folded, and the folded edges trimmed. The world's largest book is made of stone and is in Kuthodaw Pagoda Burma. A common separation by content are fiction and non-fiction books.

    This simple separation can be found in most collections , libraries , and bookstores. Many of the books published today are fiction, meaning that they are in-part or completely untrue. Historically, paper production was considered too expensive to be used for entertainment. An increase in global literacy and print technology led to the increased publication of books for the purpose of entertainment, and allegorical social commentary. Most fiction is additionally categorized by genre. The novel is the most common form of fiction book.

    Novels are stories that typically feature a plot , setting , themes and characters. Stories and narrative are not restricted to any topic; a novel can be whimsical, serious or controversial. The novel has had a tremendous impact on entertainment and publishing markets. A short story may be any length up to 10, words, but these word lengths vary. Comic books or graphic novels are books in which the story is illustrated. The characters and narrators use speech or thought bubbles to express verbal language.

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    In a library, a reference book is a general type of non-fiction book which provides information as opposed to telling a story, essay, commentary, or otherwise supporting a point of view. An almanac is a very general reference book, usually one-volume, with lists of data and information on many topics. An encyclopedia is a book or set of books designed to have more in-depth articles on many topics. A book listing words , their etymology , meanings, and other information is called a dictionary. A book which is a collection of maps is an atlas. A more specific reference book with tables or lists of data and information about a certain topic, often intended for professional use, is often called a handbook.

    Books which try to list references and abstracts in a certain broad area may be called an index , such as Engineering Index , or abstracts such as chemical abstracts and biological abstracts. Books with technical information on how to do something or how to use some equipment are called instruction manuals. Other popular how-to books include cookbooks and home improvement books. Students typically store and carry textbooks and schoolbooks for study purposes.

    Elementary school pupils often use workbooks , which are published with spaces or blanks to be filled by them for study or homework. In US higher education , it is common for a student to take an exam using a blue book. There is a large set of books that are made only to write private ideas, notes, and accounts. These books are rarely published and are typically destroyed or remain private. Notebooks are blank papers to be written in by the user.

    Students and writers commonly use them for taking notes. Scientists and other researchers use lab notebooks to record their notes. They often feature spiral coil bindings at the edge so that pages may easily be torn out. Books for recording periodic entries by the user, such as daily information about a journey, are called logbooks or simply logs.

    A similar book for writing the owner's daily private personal events, information, and ideas is called a diary or personal journal. Businesses use accounting books such as journals and ledgers to record financial data in a practice called bookkeeping. There are several other types of books which are not commonly found under this system. Albums are books for holding a group of items belonging to a particular theme, such as a set of photographs , card collections, and memorabilia. One common example is stamp albums , which are used by many hobbyists to protect and organize their collections of postage stamps.

    Such albums are often made using removable plastic pages held inside in a ringed binder or other similar holder. Picture books are books for children with pictures on every page and less text or even no text. Hymnals are books with collections of musical hymns that can typically be found in churches. Prayerbooks or missals are books that contain written prayers and are commonly carried by monks , nuns , and other devoted followers or clergy. A leveled book collection is a set of books organized in levels of difficulty from the easy books appropriate for an emergent reader to longer more complex books adequate for advanced readers.

    Decodable readers or books are a specialized type of leveled books that use decodable text only including controlled lists of words, sentences and stories consistent with the letters and phonics that have been taught to the emergent reader. New sounds and letters are added to higher level decodable books, as the level of instruction progresses, allowing for higher levels of accuracy, comprehension and fluency.

    Hardcover books have a stiff binding. Paperback books have cheaper, flexible covers which tend to be less durable. An alternative to paperback is the glossy cover, otherwise known as a dust cover, found on magazines, and comic books.

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    Spiral-bound books are bound by spirals made of metal or plastic. Examples of spiral-bound books include teachers' manuals and puzzle books crosswords , sudoku. Publishers may produce low-cost, pre-publication copies known as galleys or 'bound proofs' for promotional purposes, such as generating reviews in advance of publication. Galleys are usually made as cheaply as possible, since they are not intended for sale. Private or personal libraries made up of non-fiction and fiction books, as opposed to the state or institutional records kept in archives first appeared in classical Greece.

    In the ancient world, the maintaining of a library was usually but not exclusively the privilege of a wealthy individual. These libraries could have been either private or public, i. The difference from a modern public library lies in the fact that they were usually not funded from public sources. It is estimated that in the city of Rome at the end of the 3rd century there were around 30 public libraries. Public libraries also existed in other cities of the ancient Mediterranean region for example, Library of Alexandria.

    Typically not the whole collection was available to public, the books could not be borrowed and often were chained to reading stands to prevent theft. The beginning of modern public library begins around 15th century when individuals started to donate books to towns.

    This reflected classes in a society: The poor or the middle class had to access most books through a public library or by other means while the rich could afford to have a private library built in their homes. In the United States the Boston Public Library Report of the Trustees established the justification for the public library as a tax-supported institution intended to extend educational opportunity and provide for general culture. The advent of paperback books in the 20th century led to an explosion of popular publishing. Paperback books made owning books affordable for many people.

    Paperback books often included works from genres that had previously been published mostly in pulp magazines. As a result of the low cost of such books and the spread of bookstores filled with them in addition to the creation of a smaller market of extremely cheap used paperbacks owning a private library ceased to be a status symbol for the rich.

    In library and booksellers' catalogues, it is common to include an abbreviation such as "Crown 8vo" to indicate the paper size from which the book is made. When rows of books are lined on a book holder, bookends are sometimes needed to keep them from slanting. During the 20th century, librarians were concerned about keeping track of the many books being added yearly to the Gutenberg Galaxy.

    Each book is specified by an International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, which is unique to every edition of every book produced by participating publishers, worldwide. An ISBN has four parts: The last part is a check digit , and can take values from 0—9 and X Commercial publishers in industrialized countries generally assign ISBNs to their books, so buyers may presume that the ISBN is part of a total international system, with no exceptions.

    However, many government publishers, in industrial as well as developing countries, do not participate fully in the ISBN system, and publish books which do not have ISBNs. A large or public collection requires a catalogue. Codes called "call numbers" relate the books to the catalogue, and determine their locations on the shelves.

    Call numbers are based on a Library classification system. The call number is placed on the spine of the book, normally a short distance before the bottom, and inside. One of the earliest and most widely known systems of cataloguing books is the Dewey Decimal System. Another widely known system is the Library of Congress Classification system. Both systems are biased towards subjects which were well represented in US libraries when they were developed, and hence have problems handling new subjects, such as computing, or subjects relating to other cultures.

    Metadata , which means "data about data" is information about a book. Metadata about a book may include its title, ISBN or other classification number see above , the names of contributors author, editor, illustrator and publisher, its date and size, the language of the text, its subject matter, etc. Once the book is published, it is put on the market by the distributors and the bookstores.

    Meanwhile, his promotion comes from various media reports. Book marketing is governed by the law in many states. In recent years, the book had a second life in the form of reading aloud. This is called public readings of published works, with the assistance of professional readers often known actors and in close collaboration with writers, publishers, booksellers, librarians, leaders of the literary world and artists. Many individual or collective practices exist to increase the number of readers of a book. This form of the book chain has hardly changed since the eighteenth century, and has not always been this way.

    Thus, the author has asserted gradually with time, and the copyright dates only from the nineteenth century. For many centuries, especially before the invention of printing, each freely copied out books that passed through his hands, adding if necessary his own comments. Similarly, bookseller and publisher jobs have emerged with the invention of printing, which made the book an industrial product, requiring structures of production and marketing. The invention of the Internet, e-readers, tablets, and projects like Wikipedia and Gutenberg, are likely to strongly change the book industry in the years to come.

    At first made of rags, the industrial revolution changed paper-making practices, allowing for paper to be made out of wood pulp. Papermaking in Europe began in the 11th century, although vellum was also common there as page material up until the beginning of the 16th century, vellum being the more expensive and durable option. Printers or publishers would often issue the same publication on both materials, to cater to more than one market.

    Paper made from wood pulp became popular in the early 20th century, because it was cheaper than linen or abaca cloth-based papers. Pulp-based paper made books less expensive to the general public. This paved the way for huge leaps in the rate of literacy in industrialised nations, and enabled the spread of information during the Second Industrial Revolution. Pulp paper, however, contains acid which eventually destroys the paper from within.

    Earlier techniques for making paper used limestone rollers, which neutralized the acid in the pulp. Books printed between and are primarily at risk; more recent books are often printed on acid-free or alkaline paper. Libraries today have to consider mass deacidification of their older collections in order to prevent decay. Stability of the climate is critical to the long-term preservation of paper and book material. The HVAC system should be up to date and functioning efficiently.

    Light is detrimental to collections. Therefore, care should be given to the collections by implementing light control. General housekeeping issues can be addressed, including pest control. In addition to these helpful solutions, a library must also make an effort to be prepared if a disaster occurs, one that they cannot control.

    Time and effort should be given to create a concise and effective disaster plan to counteract any damage incurred through "acts of God" therefore an emergency management plan should be in place. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Book disambiguation. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. May Learn how and when to remove this template message. Clay tablet and Wax tablet. This section possibly contains inappropriate or misinterpreted citations that do not verify the text.

    Please help improve this article by checking for citation inaccuracies. September Learn how and when to remove this template message. Movable type and Incunable.

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    Conservation and restoration of books, manuscripts, documents and ephemera. All ,, of you". Retrieved August 15, After we exclude serials, we can finally count all the books in the world. There are ,, of them. At least until Sunday. The Law of Cybercrimes and Their Investigations. The New York Times. Retrieved October 8, Retrieved November 6, Archived from the original on November 3, Retrieved December 30, Rhetoric before and beyond the Greeks.

    Scribes, Script and Books , p. Latin palaeography antiquity and the Middle Ages. Scribes, script, and books: New York, New York: History and Technique of an Ancient Craft New ed. Dover Publications , p.

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    Scribes, Script and Books , pp. Cambridge University Press , pp. Saint Benedict and His Monks. Staples Press Ltd , pp. Historical Aspects of Cataloguing and Classification. Haworth Press , p. Its Background and Technique. Dover Publications , pp.