How Books Started

Books are the greatest of all things man as ever made or discovered. Everything we know and all the ideas that have coke to us since the beginning of the world can be found in books. Even the Bible and Koran which was written hundreds of years ago are still with us as books.

Books are very important because they teach the teach the things that people need to know. In schools, there are books about all the subjects that we study. We also learn about how people lived long ago. We know about the great people who invented things like aeroplane, car, computer and train. Some of them wrote how the did them in books.

The books we see and read today are not like those of long ago. Before paper was invented, people write about happenings around them on baked clay, slabs and boards. The people that first started writing on paper were the Egyptians. The wrote on a kind of paper made from tall grasses called papyrus. These grasses were made into long strips. After writing on the papyrus, the people rolled them up and kept them as books for reading.

But the Romans made the first books that look like the ones we have today. The books were written by hand on parchment which was made from the skins of animals. Writing books by hand was a very hard and slow job. So, not many books could be written. This method of writing was used for hundreds of years until a man called William Caxton invented the printing machine. From then on, many books could be made quickly, neatly and cheaply.