A big shout out to our newest Patreon donors, Phil and Vera.

I got to chat with them this last week, and this was one of the ideas we came up with.

Thanks again, Phil and Vera and family.

Imagine you're sitting in a quiet room, and the only sound is the soft scratch of a quill on paper.

The walls are lined with shelves, and the shelves are packed with books, some big, some small, some covered in leather, and some tied with string.

You reach out, open a book, and you're holding a story from hundreds of years ago.

Now picture leaving your room and traveling far back in time, long before anyone had ever even seen a book. People are sharing stories,

but they don't have pages to turn. How did books come to be? Let's take a journey through

the history of books and bookmaking, and find out how stories traveled from mouths to pages

and from pages to the world.

Thousands of years ago, before books, people told stories out loud.

They sat around fires and shared legends, news, and lessons from one person to another.

This was called oral storytelling.

It was the only way to pass stories along, but sometimes things got forgotten or mixed up. Then around 5,000 years ago, people in a place called Mesopotamia, where Iraq is today, figured out a way to keep their words safe.

They pressed marks into soft clay tablets with a sharp stick.

These marks were called cuneiform. The clay tablets dried and got hard.

People could read them again and again. That was one of the first ways humans wrote things down.

Around the same time, people in Egypt started writing too, but they used a different kind of paper called papyrus.

Papyrus was made from a tall, reed-like plant that grew along the Nile River.

They sliced the stems into thin strips, laid them in layers, and hammered them together until they stuck.

When it dried, papyrus was smooth and easy to write on with ink. Egyptians wrote

with sharp rushes dipped in black ink made from soot and water. People wrote stories,

...