Dear Readers,
From humanity’s earliest days, life has been primarily spent in the pursuit of increased knowledge. For thousands of years, that pursuit was largely driven by the needs of survival: the development of tools for transportation, food production, medicine, war, and so much more has helped ensure the longevity and advancement of civilizations past and present. But given the massive technological advancements of the past several centuries, there are large groups of the earth’s population who these days are able to dedicate a portion of their lives to the pursuit of knowledge for purposes other than pure survival.
It’s relatively safe to assume that humanity wouldn’t have progressed much, if at all, if we hadn’t developed instruments to record knowledge and transfer it across space and time. After all, only so much knowledge can be passed down from generation to generation through word of mouth.
The evolution of technology to record and share knowledge itself has been rather remarkable. For millennia, information was recorded on paper and shared from person to person. The idea of tangible books made of paper and ink may seem completely foreign to some future generation, and even today is being replaced by a wide variety of digital mediums. But for the people of those foregone generations, books were a godsend helping them to acquire the knowledge they needed to mold their futures.
