Ideas - How the invention of the book shaped humanity

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

If we weren't so used to having books, we would think of them as a "miracle." That's how historian Irene Vallegoviews what she says is humankind's greatest and most influential invention: the book. "With their help, humanity has undergone an extraordinary acceleration of history, development, and progress," she tells host Nahlah Ayed. Vallego has traced written texts back to their earliest origins and has written a book of her own, Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World.  

With the Morial app, you can sharpen your French skills in no time. You'll have a blast learning with content from Radio Canada. It's easy as Arndor Trois. Learn French, have fun, repeat. Download the free Morial app now. This is a CBC podcast. Mysterious bands of men on horseback travel the roads of Greece. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed.

The country folk watched them with suspicion from their plots of land. They know from experience that only those who represent danger travel, soldiers, mercenaries, and slave traders. These mysterious men could easily reside within the pages of a novel. But this particular tale is no fiction. The horsemen ride on. For months, they have gone. climbed mountains, traversed ravines, crossed valleys, forded rivers, and sailed from island to island. More than 2,000 years ago in the 3rd century BCE, these men were enlisted by their king, tolomi the first to undertake a ruthless, violent mission.

These are hunters in search of a special kind of prey, prey that is silent, cunning, and vanishes without a trace. For all its silent cunning, this prey can neither run nor fight. Because King Ptolemy of Egypt hasn't sent his agents to defeat an army or an insurgency, he enlisted them to build a library. The Lord of the Two Lands, one of the most powerful men of his time, would sacrifice lives to obtain all the books in the world for his great library in Alexandria. He was chasing the dream of an absolute, perfect library, a collection that were gathered together every single work

by every single author since the beginning of time. Today, the Library of Alexandria is remembered as one of the great wonders of the ancient world, but it arguably housed an even greater wonder. The book. The book has withstood the test of history. In the words of Umberto Echo, the book belongs to the same category as the spoon, the hammer, the wheel, or a pair of scissors. Once invented, these things cannot be surpassed.

The invention of the modern book unfolded over thousands of years, from the papyrus scrolls coveted by King Ptolemy, to the cover-bound tomes that fill our libraries today. We take it for granted that if we, We weren't so used to it, I think we would think about it as a miracle, that's something magical. Now, Spanish author I René Vallejo has documented that remarkable history with a remarkable book of her own. Papyrus, the invention of books in the ancient world. Your latest work is a work of history, but at its heart, papyrus is a love letter to.

to books. There's a reverence in the way you write about books. In a way, it's almost spiritual. Where does that come from? It comes from my childhood. My parents were both great readers. And ever since childhood, I remember our house as simply being invaded by books in every corner, in every room, and even before I could read, I felt a precocious curiosity for those pages that seemed to me like sheets of paper with rows of tiny black insects running across. The pages of books look like hives that only the grown-ups knew how to decipher. And I remember as a little girl, I used to think that some kind of magic was involved when it comes to books. My favorite definition of what books really mean is our victory against silence, destruction, and oblivion.

Because, you know, before books were invented in the era of Orality. You know, everyone lived under the threat of oblivion, everything got forgotten because they didn't have any vehicle for their ideas, their stories, to make sure that their best discoveries could last on and on. And that's what books have given us, really. This sense of continuity among generations, among centuries. And the guarantee that our best ideas, our best discoveries, our best poems and stories could be safeguard. Let's not forget that the... book has been our ally for centuries in a war that is absent from history textbooks. The struggle to preserve our most valuable creations, words which are scarcely a puff of air,

the stories we tell to give meaning to chaos and to survive it. The true, false, always provisional knowledge we scratch across the hard rock of our ignorance. Of course, these earliest books that you're describing are not books the way we know them. They're papyrus scrolls, which, of course, came after a long history of using clay and stone tablets to preserve text. Can you describe what these scrolls were like as they would have been used and read and appeared more than 3,000 years ago? Papyrus scrolls were completely different to our books nowadays. Papyrus scrolls were like long strings of vegetable material from reeds that grew on the banks of the Nile. And they made these long sheets of papyrus and long strings.

and they roll them up and you needed both hands to handle the scrolls, one hand to unroll it and the other to roll it up after you've read it. So you couldn't take notes or use bookmark.

But at the moment when papyrus scrolls were first invented, they played an essential role, and they were crucial discovery at a time when the preservation and transmission of culture was an extraordinarily difficult endeavor to carry out. Compared to clay tablets, these sheets of papyrus were fine, light, and flexible. They could store a huge amount of text in very little space. So, for instance, an average-sized role could contain a Greek tragedy or one of Plato's dialogue or a book of the gospel. And that represented a huge leap forward in the effort of preserving together works of thought or imagination or philosophy. The papyrus scroll represented an extraordinary amount of progress.

After centuries of searching for the right format, of humans writing on stone, mud, wood or metal, language had finally found its home in organic matter. Compared to its inert and rigid ancestors, the book was a light, flexible object from the beginning, ready for journeys and adventure. You talked about the way in which people would be reading a book that is a scroll. I wonder how it sounded differently than the way we read today.

Yeah, well, we tend to think that human beings have read the same way since the very beginning of books, but that's not the case. And at the very beginning, books were just like memory aids. The norm was reading aloud to yourself or to others. And when a book was read, there were usually witnesses. And public readings were common because not everyone was able to read. I love the idea of listeners as witnesses to the book reading, as if it's a unique event. Yeah, it was for them, really. It was a unique event, and sometimes the only window they could open to knowledge, to the stories of the past, to their identities.

All societies wish to endure and to be remembered. The act of writing lengthened the life of memory. prevented the past from fading away forever. You describe the readings of those early written texts as almost kind of like a musical score. Yeah, at the beginning, text were just scores in order not to forget the text or, you know, to rehearse the performance. But they were not conceived for a private use

or to substitute orality. Like a jazz musician who takes a popular tune and embarks on a passionate improvisation without a score, the bards played with spontaneous variations on the songs they'd learned. Writers had to choose the most beautiful possible version of the songs to survive all others. Until that moment, the oral poem was a living organism that grew and changed.

But writing would calcify it. Elevating only one version of the story meant sacrificing all others, but at the same time, it meant saving it from being destroyed and forgotten. It took a long while to develop this technique of silent reading. The first time we have a testimony of someone witnessing the spectacle of someone reading in silence is in the fourth century when St. Augustine felt very intrigued to see Bishop Ambrose of Milan reads in this new way. And he was so shocked and amazed that he wrote about it in his confessions.

He was disturbed by it. Yeah, clearly it was something out of the ordinary for him. and he realizes that Ambrose is understanding what the letters say, but his tongue stays silent and quiet. And Augustine realizes that his professor, his friend, despite his physical proximity, is not beside him. He has escaped into another freer, more fluid world of his choosing, and he's traveling without moving and without revealing where he can be found. And some historians think that's the first testimony of intimacy, of a conversation with yourself. And I think the way he described the scene, his wonder, his amazement is what we should feel about it. Augustine is right.

We can go into another time and space that we are creating and we are master of the experience and we can come back whenever we want. It's extraordinary, but there was something else you also noted that there was was sometimes superstition around the act of reading, both in ancient Greece and Rome, kind of it was seen as a form of possession. Can you tell me about that? Yeah, because they thought the voice of the author possessed the reader, you know. It's like your throat is invaded by another people's voices and words. And they thought this speech, experience was somehow promiscuous.

They sometimes use sexual words and vocabulary and terminology, like, yeah, making love with the author of the book. So, yeah, sometimes they prefer to trust this task to slaves, not to do it themselves, because it was like, yeah, a little bit promiscuous. You know, aristocrats and, you know, decent people shouldn't do this very often. I like to imagine our ancestors savoring the excitement of capturing their thoughts for the first time when they discovered that love, hate, terror, discouragement and hope could be put in writing. I want to change the channel slightly and go to Alexandria with you. Maybe the most captivating proof of the reverence our ancestors had for the written word is the Library of Alexandria, which was built in the 3rd century BC, as part of this broader effort by King told me, one, to build up the city's influence.

How did this vision for our library fit into the political? political vision that the kings in Egypt had for Alexandria and for their broader empire? Well, I think the first idea or the first glimpse of the Library of Alexandria was born in Alexander the Great's mind, but he had time to implement this idea, this project. So it would B. Ptolemy, one of his generals, who actually built the Alexandrian Library. And this was probably the most ambitious cultural project in antiquity. Alexander was one of the first people who dared to conceive the world with a global perspective.

And as opposed to his military campaigns, I think the best incarnation. of his dream was precisely the Library of Alexandria, where books and wisdom and stories and thoughts brought from every corner of the world at a place. And I think some of our most valuable ideas were born there, the dialogue between different traditions, the very same concept of translation, the desire to preserve knowledge. and the first time we tried to build a place with bricks such as pluralism, openness, and diversity. But with a more critical approach, it was also part of his imperial design. Yes.

He thought he could take possession of his subjects if he could possess their ideas, their legends, their traditions, their knowledge. So it was like a way of possessing everything, the souls of their subjects. It might have been the last and only time, there in the 3rd century BC that the dream of gathering all the books in the world without exception, in a universal library, could become a reality. You described bringing together all existing books as another peaceful way of possessing the world. I wonder if this library in some ways represents a kind of utopian ideal for you.

Yeah, it's utopian, also a little bit melanchiac as well. But it was the first time when someone tried to do such a thing. Alexander and Ptolemy were not just interested in the text of their own culture, but they tried to gather everything, everything was written or published or thought since the beginning of history. So, yeah, it was so ambitious. But at the same time, it is a cosmopolitan scheme, and that changed the world in a consistent way, I think. The library made the best part of Alexander's dream come true.

His universalism, his passion for knowledge, his unprecedented desire for fusion, On the shelves of Alexandria, borders were dissolved, and the words of the Greeks, the Jews, the Egyptians, the Iranians, and the Indians finally coexisted in peace. This mental territory was perhaps the only space that proved welcoming to all of them. You also, as you say, in contrast to a utopian ideal, there was a good degree of violence in setting it up.

Yeah. Can you talk about what the lengths that were gone to, you know, by Tomi and his successors in their efforts to build the library's collections? Yeah. Yeah, if you have to cut a throat in order to get a valuable book, there were no doubt about it. That was okay. Yeah, that was okay. They were kings trying to show off their power, and it was a display of their ability to conquer other territories and possess their books,

their art, their imaginaries, their identities. In the era of the Great Alexandrian Project, there was no such thing as an international book trade. Books could be bought in cities with a long-standing cultural life, but not in the young Alexandria. Sources tell us that the kings used the immense advantages of absolute power to enrich their collection. What they could not purchase, they seized. If throats had to be slit or harvests laid waste to get hold of a coveted book,

they ordered that it be done, telling themselves that their country's splendor was more important than minor scruples. This collection was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But most of its contents, as many listeners would know, are lost to history after a long cycle of fire and destruction, including the legendary blaze of the first century BC that has been attributed to Julius Caesar, although not everyone believes that. How much do you mourn that loss? We've lost the majority of ancient texts. and that's sad, but I would put it all the way around and say that those texts were doomed to extinction and to disappearance because every text before the invention of printing press

was destined to disappearance unless a lot of effort and funds and passion was acting in the other direction. So, yeah, I think it's miraculous that we have this 1% of text from 2,000 years ago. The library was destroyed many, many times, but, you know, people could ask for copies of the books, so they were providing for centuries books

that were preserved in other areas of Europe and Africa. So, yeah, maybe the books that ended up in Roman libraries and then in abays and monasteries in Middle Ages came from the Library of Alexandria. And, yeah, there is this kind of chain that could have been broken any time. but somehow this essential text survived. Though the Library of Alexandria was repeatedly burned and destroyed, not all was lost. Centuries of efforts to save its imaginative legacy weren't in vain.

Alexandria was the place where we learned to preserve books from the ravages of moths, rust, mold, and from barbarians armed with matches. You're listening to Ideas and to my conversation with Irenae Vallejo, author of Papyrus, the invention of books in the ancient world. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. public radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. If you want to hear daily news, that doesn't hurt your soul and might even be good for you. for your soul. Check out As It Happens. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Neil Kokesal. Every day we reach people at the center of the most extraordinary stories,

like the doctor, who restored a patient's eyesight with a tooth. Or a musician in an orchestra that plays instruments made out of vegetables. Take the scenic route through the day's news with As It Happens, and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. The great innovation of the scholars at the Library of Alexandria has little to do with their love of the past. What made them visionaries was their understanding that Antigone, Edipus, and Medea, those beings made of ink and papyrus in danger of being forgotten, should travel through the centuries, that millions of people still unborn should not be deprived of them, that they would

inspire our rebellions, that they would remind us how painful certain truths can be. For the first time, they considered the rights of future genera, like us. The ancient library of Alexandria was a grand testament to the power of knowledge. But knowledge, like books, can be fragile. The invention of books was perhaps the greatest triumph in our tenacious struggle against destruction. With their help, humanity has undergone an extraordinary acceleration of history, development, and progress. Books have a voice, and when they speak,

They save eras and lives. That voice continued long after the Library of Alexandria had fallen silent. Books, like the ideas they fomented, continued to evolve over the centuries, unlocking new realms of intellectual thought and artistry at every step. But as author I René Vallejo reminds us, none of that progress was inevitable. The destruction of that library, the ultimate destruction of it, speaks to just how fragile those books were and continued to be. And you describe, of course, that the journey of the written word through the millennia has been a perilous one. Papyrus was incredibly fragile and susceptible to the elements that it took until the second century BC for a more durable bookmaking material to emerge, which was parchment. And its invention was also far from inevitable.

Can you tell the story briefly of how parchment came to be to come into use? Yeah. As far as we know, the pharaohs of Egypt set the price for papyrus, the eight types of papyrus that were available on the market. And just as with our modern oil exporting countries, they would sometimes raise prices to abusive levels. And there is a story that one day, King Ptolemy, the Fifth, cut off the supply of papyrus to the kingdom of Pergamon in what is today Turkey. and this embargo triggered a huge breakthrough because in Pergamon they responded by perfecting an old Eastern technique

of writing on leather, a practice that had been not usual till then, and parchment was made with calf or sheep or goat hides And it required a long production process, but the crucial advantage was it could be made everywhere to just needed animals. Parchment was more resistant, light. And, you know, papyrus was very fragile when it comes to humidity in atmosphere, and parchment is much more resistant. So the life expectancy of books increase with parchment. Yeah.

It did. On the other hand, as you were noting, parchment is actually made of livestock skin. Yeah. And that, while, you know, available, required cruelty. Yeah. And sometimes the procedures were particularly cruel. For instance, they forced abortions in order to use the high-quality heights of unborn creatures.

Oh, my gosh. So, yeah, it was really appalling. The parchment for aristocrats or for kings and perors and popes were made with this high-quality heights that require this kind of cruelty. So, yeah, it's an example of culture and cruelty linked together. Behind the exquisite work of parchment and ink, wounded skin and blood, the barbarity lurking in civilisation's blind spots,

are hidden like a pair of rejected twins. We prefer to be unaware that progress and beauty involve pain and violence. In accordance with this peculiar human contradiction, many books have served to spread outpourings of wise words about love, goodness and compassion across the world. Another breakthrough was the Codex format, which is the book, as we know it today, the book of pages. It was invented in Rome around the first century after Christ.

And, yeah, the codex gained territory at the spans of the scrolls, thanks to the strong preference of Christians, because they were victims of religious persecution over centuries. And they were forced to find hidden places and where they were organized in tiny clandestine grouplets. And the codex was easier to hide quickly in the folds of one's tunic and could be carried on apostolic journeys. And these were enormous advantages to communities of furtive readers. But what did it look like? I mean, you say it looks like our books, but what did it look like exactly? Yeah, there were pages made of parchment, like small notebooks. But Romans developed the technique of books binding, and they protected the books with tablets of wood, with leather, and that was the origin of the cover of the books, and that protected the pages from the humidity.

or animals or aggressions. So, yeah, it was a huge leap forward. And I love this idea of, you know, the kind of books that we have nowadays being triumphant because they favored prohibited readings when Christians were persecuted. And I remember as a child when I used to read books at night under the camouflage of a blanket with a flashlight on.

And yeah, we are descendants of those first fortive readers. Wow. Our books won out largely because it favoured this kind of reading, clandestine, disapprove of. In every era, censors risk producing the opposite of their desired effect. Their great paradox is that they draw attention to the very thing they intend to suppress. Tacitus wrote, They are foolish, those who believe that they can, with their temporary power, extinguish the memory of events in those who come after them.

On the contrary, talents that are punished only grow more revered. And those who act severely achieve nothing but their own dishonor and the glory of those they punished. I wonder how else you would describe the change in the content of books, overall in a big picture, going from papyrus scrolls to parchment and then to the hardy codex. How else would the content have changed? The structure of books changed because, you know, The string of scrolls was like the continuous reading, and pages are like units of reading. So it's a different way of conceive the speech and the arguments and the way we express ourselves.

What about the topics? The topics also, you know, because scrolls deteriorated if the strip was too long. the works of art tend to be shorter. With codices, you could write longer text and be sure that they would be preserved together and there wouldn't be dispersion of the part of the text. And also the architecture of books change. At the very beginning, there was no space between words. Oh, wow.

And they didn't have paragraph. It was like continuity of letters, and it was difficult to decipher the text. The idea was you was going to read it aloud to yourself, and then by reading it aloud, you will hear the text and then understand it. Right. But the structure, the architecture of the book inside was changing. making it easier to travel through the pages with paragraph and punctuation, chapters and index, so it was easier to find a particular passage you are interested in or read parts of the books and not the whole of the work. So many, many things change.

As the centuries passed, the closed jungles of letters through which readers had forged a laborious path, machete in hand, were gradually transformed into tidy gardens of words, through which they could take a peaceful stroll. You suggest that books particularly codices, which were more easily and reliably copied and transported across large distances, that they opened up new potential for subversive thought in societies of the time. Can you talk about how that happened? That's the process that began with the invention of writing, really, because when people had the opportunity to read their traditions on a text and stop to think about it and go.

to previous pages and compare the ideas or, you know, to have a critical approach towards the ideas you are listening to. So it's not by chance that philosophy is born in written societies. of government and far from the guardians of orthodoxy, writing gave access to traditional stories for the first time. This was how literature and the critical spirit were born. Certain individuals dared to leave a trace of their feelings, their skepticism. Little by little, books became a vehicle for individual expression.

So just to take you back to this era that we're talking about, the most popular books that went on to become literary classics that we know today, like Plato's the Republic and the works of Seneca and Homer, why do you think these classics hold such lasting appeal? I like to emphasize that the books that have survived are not random books. They were the most loved books in antiquity, and they made huge efforts to guarantee their survival, multiplying copies, and having them in public libraries, studying them in school, So they are really the core of their literature and their preference, of course. This selection is biased by their prejudices. The so-called classics were the economic creme de la creme, those with great fortunes, the blue bloods of the republic,

the extravagantly rich who monopolized the foreign. first class. The word reached literature as a metaphor. Translating an obsession with business to art, some critics decided that there were first class authors, in other words, reliable and solvent writers to whom one could lend attention and in whom it was advisable to invest time. At the other end of the hierarchy were the proletarian writers, poor papyrus smudgers with neither property nor patrons. They were books that were able to describe human passions, ideas, the nature of power, of ambition, of love, jealousy, death, life, you know. know, what's essential in our humanity.

And that's important to emphasize this, because maybe sometimes a book can become a classic because it's on the interest of an emperor or a king, but this kind of political, propagandistic classics died soon because the next generations were not interested in this kind of messages or books. So books that have become long-lasting classics are these kind of books that have been loved and them relevant and essential and crucial throughout the generation and throughout the centuries. And when we read Plato or Aristotle or the Trajigs or Seneca or tacitus nowadays, we feel they captured something that is essential in our societies. For instance, we read the tragedy about Trojan women and they weave our lamentations about war

and you read this text and you feel they are talking about the wars that are taking place nowadays. And, you know, the Odyssey talks about adventure and danger and home and family and longing for another life. I think these books manage to capture in an astonishingly beautiful way what does it mean to be a human being on this world. We owe the survival of the greatest ideas dreamed up by humanity to books. Without them, we might have forgotten that handful of reckless Greeks who decided to give power to the people and called that bold experiment democracy. We might have forgotten the Hippocratic doctors who created the first professional oath where they swore to care for slaves and the poor.

We might have forgotten Aristotle, who founded one of the earliest universities, and told his students that the difference between a wise man and an ignorant one is the same as the difference between a live man and a dead one. Our knowledge of all these precedents has inspired ideas as outlandish in the animal kingdom as human rights, democracy, faith in science, universal health care, compulsory education, the right to a fair trial, and social concern for the disadvantaged. Who would we be today if we had lost the memory of all these discoveries,

just as we lost the languages and wisdom of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations for centuries? And yet, as you said that after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, this reverence that people had for such books had evaporated. And so I wonder how close you think we got to having these classics completely disappear. They were in serious danger many times, above all, when there is some significant change in civilization. And this border between Roman Empire and the beginning of Middle Ages, This was really a moment when everything could have disappeared. Also, when the Christian culture substitute the pagan society also was a moment of danger.

Between the soldiers' torches and the slow and secret labour of danger. secret labor of moths, the dream of Alexandria was once again imperiled. Until the invention of printing, millennia of knowledge remained in the hands of very few people who embarked on a heroic and almost implausible rescue effort. But people of the new societies felt their roots, their ideas, their origins were in those books. they develop ways to save them, to safeguard them, libraries in monasteries or abbees, preserve those books, even if sometimes were contradictory with Christian religion and some of them were considered immoral or dangerous.

And then when Muslims conquered Egypt and other areas of the Roman Empire, also everything was in danger. But Muslims were so interested in Aristotle and other classics and they translated them into Arabic. So, yeah, it's like a long road of knowledge. And somehow this text so fragile and found a way to survive because many, many people fall under the spell of this text. Yeah. As you say, it has been a journey with many perilous moments. And I just want to ask you this. We've seen examples in modern day, you know, where there are groups, individuals, societies,

where they burn books because of what books contain. I wonder what, given the history that you know and what you just recounted to us, what goes through your mind when you hear stories like that? It's true. Books have been attacked and destroyed and burned since the very beginning of history. And maybe we thought democratic societies

have stopped this kind of behaviors but that's not the case books are attacked or writers are staffed or, you know, it's unbelievable, but it's still going on this persecution against books because the circulation, the free circulation of books implies freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, And that's something that has always had many, many enemies in societies. And that's a struggle that is going on nowadays against people who want to impose their ideas of what books are right and what books are harmful or detestable and shouldn't be available at schools. public libraries and even changing books, publishing them in different versions in order not to offend, that's a huge debate that we are having nowadays and that proves that books

are still essential nowadays and that's the way we need to pay attention to these questions because our freedom, it's at stake. In different eras, we have experimented with books made of smoke, of stone, of earth, of leaves, of reeds, of animal skin, of rags, of trees, and now of light, the computers and e-books of today. The actions of opening and closing a book, or of traveling through the text, have varied. They have taken many shapes, but what's indisputable is the overwhelming success of their discovery. Books make us airs to all stories, the best, the worst, the ambiguous, the problematic, the double-edged.

Having access to all of them is vital for critical thought. It allows us to choose. Since the invention of the computer, people have been speculating about the possibility that books will no longer be with us, that there may be an extinction. And as you say, in the age of tablets and audiobooks and AI, there are more reasons to wonder about the book's future. Do you think we will ever leave the physical paper-bound book behind? No, I don't think so. I think books, traditional books, paper books are great survivors.

They've stood the test of time. And they offer us advantages. We love the tangible side of books, the design of the cover, the smell and the sound when we handle them. We usually think of digital information and screens as rivals of traditional books and that's not my point of view. I think they are going to coexist not to compete and they are lies in the task of preserving our

information or knowledge or wisdom and it enriches our experiences to have the chance to choose and, you know, paper books are almost perfect. They don't need batteries or internet connection are required, and they are shock-resistant, and they are beautiful. And it's also an aesthetic experience. Well, thank you for writing a book about that. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me to this legendary program.

It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. There is something astonishing about having managed to preserve the fiction's first woven millennia ago. What is a story after all? A string of words, a sigh. But humanity defied the absolute sovereignty of destruction by inventing writing and books. Somehow, the love of books forged an invisible chain of people, who, without knowing one another,

have rescued the treasure of the greatest stories, thoughts, and dreams throughout time. Forgotten men, anonymous women, people who fought for us, who fought for the hailed faces of the future. You've been listening to my conversation with Irene Vallejo, author of Papyrus, The Invention of Books in the Ancient World. Special thanks to Penguin Random House Audio for sharing excerpts from the audiobook for papyrus with us. This episode of Ideas was produced by Annie Bender.

Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, acting senior producer Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more seats, you know, see. Podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.