Check It Out
by LEA AHMED
It is the end of the year and everywhere we are hearing or seeing a review of the year past, and it seems like the perfect time to reflect on the Buda Library.
But instead of just a year, why not take a much broader perspective and look at the origin of libraries and why we feel the need to maintain them. It seems that man has always wanted to record his experiences and thoughts and save them to share with his fellow man and to pass on to his descendents. Once written, he needed a safe place to collect and store them. So about 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt, just such a place was begun. Just imagine a library where inscribed clay tablets were stored and asking the librarian to haul one out for you.
Then sometime later a clever fellow figured out you could write on papyrus leaves and then used the same leaves to make paper. Writing literature on scrolls made it easier to carry ideas out to the world. Libraries spread to the wider Middle East and as time went on, they expanded to Classical Greece and Ancient Rome.
By the 5th century B.C., the poets and philosophers like Euripides and Aristotle were writing texts that we now find in our own Buda Public Library.
Round scrolls were difficult to store and something flat and compact was needed. In the 1st century A.D., the Romans developed the flat format called codex. The inventions of paper from trees and later the printing press brought libraries into every community.
We now have our computers, but there is still nothing like visiting our local library and feeling the heft and warmth of a book. Support scrolls and codex now. Join the Friends of the Buda Library. [email protected].
