From clay tablets to the Gutenberg press, with Keith Houston

Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

1115. This week, we talk with Keith Houston about his book, "The Book." We look at how writing technology evolved from clay tablets and bamboo slips to papyrus and paper. He shares some surprising facts, including why books are rectangles, how museums try to deacidify books, and how printing was once political.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, and just a heads up that today's show was originally a bonus episode released back in July for people who support the show, The Grammar Pallusians.
0:15.9	If you want to help us keep bringing great interviews like this to your feed and help other people
0:21.3	fall in love with books and language become a grammar pelusian. Visit quick and dirty tips.com
0:27.5	slash bonus to learn more. And now on to the show.
0:32.8	Greetings, grammar pellusians. I am here today with Keith Houston. Ifston if you're um listen to the main episode we talked
0:38.3	all about his new book faced with tears of joy about emoji but he has this other great book
0:44.2	called the book that is about all about the technology of the physical form of the book and i thought
0:50.3	it would be so interesting to talk to him about that in our bonus segment today. Thank you so much for supporting the show.
0:56.0	We really appreciate you.
0:58.4	Keith is, Keith Houston is the author of another book also called Shady Characters,
1:02.8	and he runs the Shady Character's Blog, which is about interesting punctuation mark.
1:07.8	So he's always doing interesting things.
1:09.8	Keith Houston, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thank you. Yeah. So the book. Wow, a book about the book.
1:16.9	That is so cool. And it talks about the technology of the book. And so we have papyrus. We have
1:25.2	parchment and we have paper. So do you consider papyrus. We have parchment and we have paper. So do you consider papyrus to be sort of the first book technology?
1:35.3	I think so. I think that's a reasonable way to go about it. It's funny. When we talked about
1:42.3	emoji, we talked about how it's really difficult to nail down what an emoji is and when the first emoji came along.
1:48.5	It's kind of the same with books.
1:50.6	So I started out with the idea, I guess I worked backwards from the idea of a physical book, sort of like this one, the new paperback edition of the book.
1:59.3	And I wanted to see where that came from. And so
2:02.0	we think about books as being mostly made of paper, I guess. And then there was a time where
2:07.0	they were mostly made of parchment. And before that, there was a time when they were mostly
	...

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