Postman: books are living history (ooh!)

A book is all  history.  Everything about it takes one back in time - from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is the most comfortable form of address.  As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past.  In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only a world but a living world.  It is the present which is shadowy.

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