
“Waiting On” Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted at
Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. This week's pre-publication “can't-wait-to-read” selection is:
Paper: Paging Through History
by Mark Kurlansky
Synopsis from Goodreads:
From the New York Times best-selling author of
Cod and
Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today’s world.

Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art. It has created civilizations, fostering the fomenting of revolutions and the stabilizing of regimes. Witness history’s greatest press run, which produced 6.5 billion copies of
Máo zhuˇ xí yuˇ lu, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), or the fact that Leonardo da Vinci left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. Now, on the cusp of “going paperless”—and amid rampant speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society—we’ve come to a world-historic juncture to examine what paper means to civilization. Through tracing paper’s evolution, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay.
Paper will be the history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century and illuminates our times.
Publishing April 2016 by W. W. Norton & Company.
2 comments:
This author certainly has minimalist titles. I remember reading about SALT and thinking it would be interesting. PAPER sounds just as interesting.
This looks really interesting, I have never really thought about the history of paper. I hope you end up enjoying this!
here's my WoW!
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