Throughout this class, and especially while reading The Book, I realize how lucky we are as reader’s of today’s books. Reading through how books and the presentation of their content has changed has taught me how much of how we expect to read is actually new, and it makes me a bit sad to realize which practices have been lost in favor of ease of access and consumption.

Until the mid sixteenth century were shelved with inward facing spines, with their edges facing out, each distinguished by designs on their edges (Borsuk 81). What a lost art! Of course anyone could go into a book store and find books with sprayed edges making them look beautiful and rare, but those books would likely be few, or part of some special edition only sold for a set period of time. Books with distinct and decorated edges are not common enough today, if I were to flip all the books on my shelf backwards I’d only be looking at column of papers, risking a papercut anytime I wanted to pick one out. However, ss Borsuk describes, this change from out facing edges to out facing spines came out of necessity, “readers became collectors whose ever-expanding libraries served as displays of both intellect and wealth, that books were shelved with their spines outward to showcase their bindings…a feature of the codex we now take for granted.” (81). The progress of the book is the progress of the reader, instead of their fore-edges book spines become detailed in order to showcase information relevant to a reader who now owns a multitude of books, as the needs of the reader change, the book must change. The book evolves and becomes portable to, “show off one’s literacy and wealth,” the book changes and becomes a gift as “a symbol of great kinship,” and the book explodes into a catalyst of transformation to change readers, “by what [they] have read.” (82, 84).

The changes of the book has undergone have resulted in the book being amazing devices, being of reasonable weight and size for transportation featuring informative and pretty spines, and featuring plenty of room in their margins for annotations. But they are not perfect yet, they will undergo more changes and adaptions for the needs of readers now and readers of the next generations. In the future perhaps books will all be made from recycled paper, to support sustainability, or there might finally even be mass produced glow-in-the-dark books for readers who would like to read in the dark but not from an illuminated screen, only time and the desires of readers will tell how the book’s presentation of it’s content evolves.