The Story of Mankind

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Books are one of the defining aspects of the transition between prehistory, when our stories were only passed on by word of mouth and modern history where our stories and thinking were captured in a written form. One of the world’s oldest books is the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh which was written on clay tablets almost 4000 years ago. Until the 15th century most books were in some form of a scroll. These scrollstooltip TIP blue ICON.png were used by all the world’s major religions to record and define their belief systems. The ancient Egyptians had The Book of the Dead, the Jews the Torah, the Muslims the Qur’an, the Hindus the Mahābhārata, the Taoists the I Ching and the Christians The Bible. But it was not just religious works that were captured but almost all works of thinking. In the 15th century came the adventtooltip TIP blue ICON.png of printing; initially carved wood blocks and then with Johan Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1455 (printing as we almost know it today). With printing came the accessibility of the book to the masses. (Within 50 years there were 10 million books in print!) All the books we know today can trace their roots to some evolution or influence of an earlier book.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/16/100-best-novels-bunyan-to-carey-robert-mccrum?CMP=share_btn_tw

 

Robert McCrumtooltip TIP blue ICON.png, whilst working for The Guardian, spent two years putting together a list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. In a discussion on how he put this list together he describes the almost impossibility of it. First of all he asks the question, as we all do at some point, “What is a classic?

 

There are many definitions and all of them seemingly in contradiction to each other. But there are certain threads they share. Italo Calvino defines a classic “as a book that has never finished what it wants to say”. Ezra Pound defines it as “a certain eternal and irresponsible freshness”.

 

According to Robert McCrum one necessary, characteristic of a classic is that it should remain in print. This aspect obviously talks very much to us as book sellers.

 

To quote Robert McCrum, “Thereafter, the issue becomes subjective. Classics, for some, are books we know we should have read, but have not. For others, classics are simply the book we have read obsessively, many times over, and can quote from

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The Gutenberg Bible

 

The ordinary reader instinctively knows what he or she believes to be a classic. While our preferences tooltip FACT purple ICON.pnginevitably reflect gender, nationality, class, and education, there is no accounting for taste.”

Therefore forgive me dear reader but this discussion on book knowledge is very much couched within my own realm of book knowledge.

 

So the route I am suggesting that we take on our journey to acquiring some book knowledge is as follows.

 

Fiction starting with the classics by looking at a chronological development of influential books from antiquitytooltip TIP blue ICON.png to today, followed by popular fiction in English and Afrikaans as well as fantasy and science fiction.

 

We will then examine those non-fiction titles that booksellers really should at least know about.

  

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