A PERSONAL TIMELINE:
Do you remember when you learned to read? I do. I was being punished for some rough housing in our two bedroom flat apartment. The book was a colorful collection of children's stories about a group of kids who played outside together. It smelled like it was stashed an abandoned library which happened opened its doors since 1988. My father had read it as a child and made sure to have his mother drop it off for the purpose of punishing me. I learned how to sound out words nearly sobbing, seated in the long hallway that ran through the entire apartment. I sat across the bathroom..- I can still see the yellow hue coming from under the bathroom door as my father showered and I 'read.' I struggled with reading for years after that. It wasn't until the diligent after school hours tutoring of a faceless woman that by sixth grade I could actually read. I fell in love with the adventures it filled with my head. I also couldn't ask people to buy me all the books I wanted...- so I began taking them from different libraries in Shaker Heights, Cleveland. By the end of sixth grade, I had around 64 stolen books in three different bookbags hidden in my closet. Did I read them all? It was hard...- the FBI cosplayed as my mother and was headquartered downstairs. I remember reading those stolen books with such joy. It was mostly Ancient China and Drawing Books but I also had 'The Book Thief,' which I never read because I was living the story. From that bedroom onward, I have been a reader. That was 2006. Here's a timeline that spans six thousand years before that!
4000 BC
With the inscription of signs representing ten goats and sheep on a clay tablet the first writer comes into being.
c. 2600 BC
The scribal schools of Sumer train the first professional readers and writers, transforming literacy from sacred mystery into teachable craft.
2300 BC
The first recorded author, the high priestess Princess Enheduanna addresses for the first time a "dear reader" in her songs.
c. 8th century BC
Homer’s epics are fixed into written form, marking the uneasy transition from oral memory to textual permanence.
593 BC
The prophet Ezekiel has a vision in which he is order to open his mouth and read a book by eating it., thereby ingesting its meaning.
420 BC
Socrates argues against reading. For him, books are useless tools, since they cannot explain what they say but only repeat the same words over and over again. He was clearly fried.
387 BC
Plato founds the Academy, the first institution where books become central to structured learning.
330 BC
Standing before his troops, Alexander the Great silently reads a letter from his mother, to the bewilderment of his soldiers, who have only seen reading done aloud.
231 BC
The Chinese Emperor Shih Huang-ti decrees that history is to begin with his reign. All book published before his time must be condemned to the fire. MESSAGE! OPEN A BOOK BEFORE AI STARTS BRAINWASHING YOU!
200 BC
Aristophanes of Byzantium invents punctuation. Before then, written words were strung together in one continuous line.
55 BC
For his dispatches, Julius Caesar invents one of the earliest codices--pages folded into a booklet- -thereby presaging the end of the scroll and the begging of the book as we know it.
c. 230
By royal edict, every ship that passes through Alexandria must surrender any books it might be carrying so that they can be copied and kept in the city's library. When it burns to the ground, half a-million titles--the greatest collection of books in the world– are irredeemably lost.
c. 540
St. Benedict of Nursia sets out the Rules for his monastery. Among them he includes reading out loud during mealtimes to nourish the spirit at the same time as the body.
868
The Diamond Sutra is printed in China, the oldest surviving complete dated printed book.
c. 1000
To avoid parting with his collection of 117,000 books while traveling, the avid reader and Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, has them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetic order. IF THAT AINT KEEPING IT ALL THE WAY 1k?!
c. 1010
At a time when "serious" reading in Japan is exclusively restricted to men, Lady Murasaki writes the world's first novel, The Book Of Genji, to provide reading material for herself and other women of the Heian Court.
c. 1100
The Islamic theologian Muhammad al-Ghazali establishes a series of rules for reading the Koran. Rule number six is for weeping, since certain sections of the Holy Book must be read with sorrow in one's heart.
c. 1284
Eyeglasses are invented in Venice or Florence, saving the reading lives of those with poor sight.
c. 1333
The Painter Simone Martini places a book in the hands of the Virgin in his Annunciation. The Catholic Church, uncertain about the intellectual capabilities of women, debates whether the Mother of God can be recognized as reader.
c. 1455
Gutenberg invents the printing press, offering readers more and cheaper books . For the first time, readers can be certain of possessing identical copies of same text.
c. 1536
The humanist William Tyndale, believing that his fellow Englishmen should be allowed to read the Bible in their own language, translates the New Testament and most of the Old into English for the first time. For his efforts, he is strangled and then burned at the stake.
c. 1559
The Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquistion publishes the first Index of Forbidden Books. Revised for the last time in 1448, the final printing appear in 1966, including among the banned authors Graham Greene and Colette.
c. 1703
Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, in his Rules of Decorum in Christian Civility, thunders against idle people who read in bed.
1731
Benjamin Franklin founds the first subscription library in colonial America, democratizing access to books.
c. 1740
South Carolina passes a law prohibiting the teaching of salves to read, and several other states follow suit. A salve caught learning to read would be flogged; after a third offense, the first joint of forefinger would be cut off. The law was in effect until 1865.
c. 1752
Pope Benedict XIV, aware of the acquisitiveness of readers, proclaims a bull in which book thieves are excommunication.
c. 1781
Denis Diderot claims to have cured his wife, who was suffering from depression, by reading raunchy literature to her: " I have always spoken of novels as frivolous productions.," he observed, "but I have finally discovered that they are good for the vapors." The new science will be called bibliotherapy.
1814
Steam-powered presses make mass print possible. Books begin transforming from luxury object into industrial commodity.
1837
Louis Daguerre introduces photography, beginning the first true competition between text and image.
c. 1872
Moral campaigner Anthony Comstock founds the Society for the Suppression of Vice in New York and proclaims that one does not need to read a book first in order to ban it. At end of his life, he boasts of having destroyed 160 tons of "obscene" literature.
1928
Virginia Woolf publishes A Room of One's Own, reframing literacy as intellectual independence.
c. 1933
ON May 10, Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels encourages a vast crowd in Berlin to demonstrate their discrimination as readers and burn the books of "degenerate" writers: Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Karl Marx, Emile Zola, H.G. Wells, Marcel Proust.
1946
The first electronic general-purpose computer, ENIAC, hints that text will one day leave paper entirely.
c. 1935
Penguin publishes its first ten titles in the most popular paperback series ever, designed for readers who want to carry their reading material tucked away in a pocket.
c. 1953
Ray Bradbury publishes Fahrenheit 451, a novel set in a future where books are burned and readers who must memorize the texts to preserve them, becoming walking libraries.
c. 1970
American computer buff Ted Nelson coins the term "hypertext" to define the narrative made possible by the use of computers, which the reader can enter and move around in at will.
1971
Michael Hart creates Project Gutenberg, launching the age of free digital books.
c. 1985
According to UNESCO, 28% of the world's population cannot read.
1995
Amazon begins selling books online, reshaping how books are bought forever.
c. 1996
The collection of Library of Congress numbers more than 100 million items; 357,437 books are added in 1995 alone. Its initial funding in 1800 was $5,000.
2007
Amazon Kindle turns books into instantly downloadable objects, severing the ancient bond between reading and physical pages.
2022
AI language models become publicly accessible at scale, raising the oldest fear in reading’s history: that convenience may replace understanding.
