🧀 + 🐚 + ✝️ + 🩲 + 👓 = 📚

The always engaging Languagehat refers us to a discussion thread that traces the propagation of language and literature through historical shifts that shape the way we communicate and interpret the legacy of the incidents and accidents of publishing and publicising for Europe. While there is an element of the Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling (How the Leopard Got its Spots, and likely as potentially problematic), the narrative does not purport to be academically strenous and presents only theories and strings matters together nicely. Our trajectory to book format begins with cheese and dairy as an imperishable caloric store to help early humans survive cold, harsh winters with female sheep and cows more valuable than their male counterparts, whom would be slaughtered young so they wouldn’t need to be fed during the season of scarcity. This yielded a surfeit of vellum that could be used for writing material, necessarily bound as a hardback as the medium tended buckle if not kept flat.