Books -The Last Chapter ?.

The question of the Ancients versus the Moderns is largely forgotten now.The large temporal gap between the Ancient and Modern worlds with its low level of literacy,small literary output and book production seen as an anomaly in the overall story of progress.To me it suggests instead that books and literacy are not a given and in the right circumstances can disappear quite rapidly from a culture. Obviously technology such as the Gutenberg Press or modern digital technology which I will come to later can have an enormous facilitating effect on literacy.However by essentially handicraft methods the ancients were able to achieve a level of literary production which was only eventually surpassed by the invention of printing.The rote learning educational methods of the ancients with their emphasis on memory no doubt helped .Some texts such as Homer would no doubt have been memorized by scribes facilitating  a rapid rate of production.Once the Gutenberg Revolution was in full flight the surviving back catalog from the Ancient World was mass produced and distributed to the scholars of Europe encouraging an educational revolution promoting literacy for people such as the glove makers son William Shakespeare.From the 16th century onward the Moderns started to accumulate their own vast archive which eventually surpassed the Ancients in terms of quantity if not of quality.