Where would we be without our books to help fire our imagination? One of mankind’s single greatest inventions could be said to be the invention of books for it is thanks to the various books that we have been able to share knowledge, information, and much more. The fact that the first book was first published in the 16th century was the Gutenberg bible should not imply that books did not exist before the printed version came out. It did but in the forms of woodcuts, palm leaves, papyrus rolls, and much more.
In fact, religion had a big role to play when it came to both publishings and marketing these early books and in fact, the first council of Nicaea held during the reign of Emperor Constantine was the first conference of its kind to determine the layout, structure, and content of one of the most famous books in the world, the Bible.
Books have always been a source of hidden, prohibited knowledge and as a result of the Nicaea conference in 325 AD, many other versions of the bible including the Jesus manuscript was outlawed. This conference stood out on two grounds, as the first-ever conference to codify a book and as the first instance of when a particular set of books were outlawed. Naturally, the outlawed books became more popular but that just goes to show you that books in all formats are indeed founts of knowledge, especially hidden knowledge. Today, books are mainly a source of entertainment to all and whether you are into fiction or non-fiction, reading these books pushes the bounds of our imagination and teases it at the same time.
Plays have been written on books and you may have had a whole series remade into films as with harry potter. While it is easy to assume that most of the public read books at those times, the fact remains that only a select few could read. But thanks to various books, illiteracy was finally on the vane. Today, most young children are knowledgeable enough to read books, and often read a variety of authors from Hardy boys to Ann Ryan for those into advanced reading. These books, from fiction to nonfiction manages to take its readers to the other side where you would have to exercise your imagination in order to understand the basic premise. Owning a book meant a great deal and it was often seen as a prestige symbol; there have been times when owning certain books could get you tortured or hung for daring to own a book. Thankfully those incidents are but blurbs in our history. Had the Alexandrian library not burnt down during the time of the Roman civil war, we would have inherited the largest batch of specialized knowledge and information, handed down to us from over two thousand years ago. Sadly that treasure went up in flames and is now irretrievably lost to us. But nevertheless, we have managed to inherit advanced knowledge and information through select books that had managed to escape unscathed till now.
