Who First Invented Books?ĭifferent civilizations had their own ways of keeping written documents, starting with the Mesopotamians around 3500 BCE. Those who study the history of books consider trace the origins back to early materials, such as tablets, bamboo, beech bark, and sheets of papyrus. However, throughout history, people have used different materials for writing. Today, the modern book is defined as “a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers.” Did you know that the modern book, as we know it today, had to go through several makeovers to become what it is now? Defining Books But it was not always so easy to get your hands on a book. We probably remember favorite books from our childhood.īooks have indeed been a part of people’s daily lives for many generations. CatPrint already has 30+ different types of paper ready for you to choose from, which you can see and feel in our sample booklets.From the youngest age, most of us have had books around us: our parents may have read us bedtime stories, or brought us to the library where we can borrow books. Think of how instant and readily accessible papermaking seemed to be 2000 years ago, yet is now even more instant. Instead of hanging out the pulps to dry for days, hot rollers quickly dry the pulp into paper in a matter of minutes. Complex machines are used instead of hand-macerating the pulps into sheets. There is equipment to chip the wood in preparation for it to become pulp. Now we have tree farms dedicated to being cut down for the creation of paper. ![]() The best thing about this was that it was easily accessible, and just about anyone could do it if they had the time and material!ĭespite this process dating to almost 2000 years ago, we are still using this method to create sheets of paper now, just at a more rapid and advanced technological level. Now, instead of having to pay heavy prices or waiting for the next shipment of silk and bamboo, you could just make paper. Ts’ai Lun invented the first sheets of paper from pounding the wet pulps of the bark of mulberry trees, rags, hemp, and old fish nets and leaving it out to dry for about a day. You couldn’t readily call CatPrint and say, “This is the type of stock that I want my books to be printed on.”Īt this time, the growth of literature also created the need for cheaper and readily accessible writing material. Not only were they problematic, but they were also expensive and hard to come across (just think about the effort in processing, shipping, and handling these raw materials 2,000 years ago). ![]() The issues with this method were that silk took too long to cultivate and process to create the scrolls, and bamboo was heavy to transport. During this time, China was writing on either silk or bamboo sheets. The invention of paper is credited to a man named Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese official back in 105 A.D. ![]() The fibres are then soaked and mashed into a goopy mold, the mold is then pounded into really thin sheets, and finally hung or laid out to dry. Fibres can be from various tree barks, cotton, and many other natural sources. The Egyptians sliced the stem of the papyrus plant into thin strips and pasted them together until they formed something that looked like scrolls and sheets. ![]() The term “paper” itself comes from the word “papyrus”, which is the plant that the Ancient Egyptians processed to write on.
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